Strategic IT Issues for Higher Education
Report on visit to US institutions
Organised by Management Frontiers Pty Ltd
10th - 21st July 2000
Alan McMeekin
Fifteen organisations and institutions were visited during this study
tour, over a period of nine working days. Attachment 1 defines the schedule
of activities. Organisations and their spokespersons were selected by
the tour organiser Management Frontiers Pty Ltd, for their knowledge and
experience in one of several key issues in IT that were perceived by the
organisers to be of strategic importance to higher education. Given the
diversity in the backgrounds and interests of the tour participants in
the study tour (see Attachment 2), spatial issues and the limited timeframe,
the choice of topic and the choice of organisations to visit, necessarily
required compromise. This report is structured around key themes that
were raised during one or more presentations and where appropriate, recommendations
are made.
1. On line learning
Several systems supporting online learning were demonstrated: Prometheus,
Blackboard and WebCT.
Prometheus, developed in-house at the George Washington University,
now has 2000 online subjects and 17000 users. The system is written
using Coldfusion, and has been in development for 4 years. Several other
universities have also adopted the product. The system appears to be
reasonably functional, but lacks key integration features such as LDAP
directory service and IMS compatibility. It is available for US$15000
pa licence fee.
Blackboard Inc home offices in Washington were visited. Blackboard
is highly functional and well accepted in the market place, with around
3,300 institutions using it. A new version (version 5) has been released,
including such advanced features as a course catalogue, a portal interface
and IMS compatibility, and APIs to integrate with other backend administrative
systems. An enterprise licence costs around US$50,000 p.a.
The WebCT product has developed from its beginnings in 1994 by a computer
scientist Murray Goldberg. It is now widely used by 1400 higher education
institutions worldwide and another 900 K1-12 schools. WebCT Pty Ltd was
visited at the campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC) and
members were addressed by Margaret Ellis, Director Technical Communications,
and Michelle Lamberson, Director Knowledge Management. The company is
experiencing rapid growth with 310 employees, compared to 75 employees
12 months prior. There is a team of 50 developers. The product has an
ambitious upgrade and development plan (a white paper is available at
about.webct.com/news/v3_roadmap.html).
WebCT is highly functional and compares very favourably with Blackboard
in functionality. Version two is most commonly used, with version 3
just released and version 4 expected in June 2001. Some key features
are missing now but expected in version 4 including support of LDAP
directory services and IMS interface standards. Version 4 will also
be re-written to be more modularised with APIs providing greater flexibility
to tailor the functionality. See white paper for more details.
WebCT is actively developing partnerships in a number of ways:
- An E Learning hub is available to promote the formation of communities
of interest
- Partnerships with providers of administrative systems (Peoplesoft,
and Banner SCT)
- Certification of training providers.
- There are partnerships with 10 textbook publishers who have web
based materials prepared in WebCT form that can be purchased by students.
This development is particularly interesting as it links with the
model of ePublishing being promoted by publishers like MIT Press.
Large scale institutional implementations of WebCT have occurred at Universities
of Georgia and Central Florida as the two best examples. Macquarie University
in Australia also has a full scale university wide program, managed by
Peter Love.
Recommendation 1: Monash undertakes a review of WebCT
and Blackboard with the view of adopting one of these as a primary platform
for the development of online subject materials and which will be integrated
into other systems operating at Monash.
Action: Director CeLTS, Executive Director ITS.
Jennifer Fajman form The University of Maryland overviewed their instructional
technology strategies:
- Web based services are designed to enhance learning, distance learning
is not the primary motive.
- WebCT has been adopted and is the only one supported although academic
staff can decide otherwise. They have been pleased with this choice
made 2 years ago. Students have benefited from the continuity offered
through adopting a single platform. Many publishers have electronic
materials based on WebCT. Where a decision is made to develop materials
locally, then a policy has been adopted to expend resources and effort
to ensure a high quality result is achieved.
- The Office of IT provides training and support to academic staff,
in technical issues and to a limited extent pedagogical issues. Staff
have been appointed as Campus Computing Associates to work in the
faculties and assist, but they aren't qualified instructional designers,
which are in very short supply. Project teams are established using
students to provide much of the labour. This approach has proved very
successful with the winning of an award for teaching excellence. Over
400 subjects were offered last semester.
- Teaching theatres (not lecture theatres) have been established to
support mixed online and face to face delivery modes. Each is equipped
with several workstations and each workstation is shared by 2 or 3
students working in a tutorial environment. This has proved to be
very successful.
- 400 general purpose classrooms have been equipped to a minimum standard
of technology, sharing resources placed on mobile computing carts.
It is noted that the Office of IT is responsible for AV/IT in classrooms.
A reference was made to the work done in streaming video services by
the Universities of Indiana, Washington and North Western. They also referred
to the "Uwired" project (www.washington.edu/uwired/) from the
University of Washington which brings together technology and people by
establishing a comprehensive technology training program for staff and
students.
Recommendation 2: The "U Wired" project be
investigated for its possible deployment at Monash.
Recommendation 3: The provisioning of teaching spaces
be reviewed to support mixed mode delivery.
Action: Director, Client Services, ITS.
Staff from the Chancellory at California State University mentioned
they are currently undertaking 8 case studies, looking at the educational
benefit of deploying forms of educational technology. The conclusions
drawn is that there seems to be no demonstrated, significant improvement
in learning outcomes, and that savings are possible only where there is
large scale usage which might occur if courseware were shared across campuses
and perhaps institutions. This lead to the discussion of their Centre
for Distributed Learning (CDL) whose charter is to employ specialist staff
to develop multimedia modules that can be incorporated into many courses,
rather than develop whole courses. This initiative has lead to the formation
of the Merlot Project (www.merlot.org)
to catalog resources, to offer peer review, and to recognise faculty for
their efforts in developing instructional materials. The metadata used
in this project is consistent with the IMS standard. It was noted that
the business model is based on partnerships, and not advertising. This
project is comparable with the Australian Learning and Teaching Exchange
program operating in Australia.
Recommendation 4: The Merlot project be noted and dialogue
commence concerning Monash's possible participation.
Action: Director, CeLTS.
2. On line delivery of services
Portals are becoming an important method of providing access to online
services for these reasons:
- To present personalised services to the individual
- To establish communication channels that enhance intra-university
relationships
- To foster efficiencies and economies of scale in the delivery of
services
- To promote a common branding style
- To potentially create new revenue streams (e.g. alumni, communities
of interest)
A portal operating at George Washington University now has 20,000 users.
It was developed inhouse by a team of 10 staff and casually employed students.
The view was expressed, with some justification, that this strategy provides
much greater control to protect the branding of the university and to
generate revenues, than an outsourced solution would.
The University of Maryland is working with the state public service
to use portals to provide citizens with online access to state services,
although UM itself does not have a portal of its own at this stage.
The visit to MIT Press (see Electronic Publishing below) also provided
insights into the potential use of portals in the publishing context
to bring together communities of interest.
The University of British Columbia has been an active member of an Educause
consortium called JSIG (www.ja.sig.org)
, which has developed a java based portal which will commence as a pilot
in September. It is hoped this application will help to break down the
silos and open opportunities to exploit systems and services which now
operate in relative isolation.
Recommendation 5: Further development of functionality
for the My.Monash portal continues and that more resources be linked to
this resource for educational, support and administrative purposes.
Action: Advisor to the DVC Academic and Planning, Portal project team.
3. Backoffice Administrative Systems
George Washington University overviewed their Banner administrative
systems during their implementation over the past 8 years. Although
they originally chose the Banner solution because of perceived benefits
in achieving systems integration, this has not been realised and they
are planning a datawarehouse solution to provide more integrated reporting,
as well as replacing their Finance system with Oracle Financials. They
have a team of around 50 people looking after their administrative systems
developments and production systems, most of whom were previously permanent
employees but are now employed by Banner under an outsouring arrangement,
which has proved to be very expensive. George Washington University
also intend to enhance their Portal system to provide administrative
services to students, faculty and employees. The absence of a directory
service is a barrier, but an LDAP service is being planned.
Recommendation 6: Note the role of a datawarehousing
solution to improve access to corporate data.
The Californian State University with 350,000 students across 23 campuses,
is the world's largest university. The Collaborative (or Common...
both terms were used) Management System is an integral part of their IT
strategy to improve administrative functions, and is the most expensive
and controversial of their IT strategies. They have selected the Peoplesoft
suite and will commence the first live running in September. It is intended
to run from a single data centre, and campuses will have a window of 7
years within which to migrate. The comment was made that the implementation
timeframe did not allow for sufficient opportunity to re-engineer its
procedures to a significant extent. This seems to be the common experience.
They have prepared a "Readiness Assessment" to assist campuses
plan their migration.
Later the same day, the group met with staff of California State University,
Los Angeles campus who were closely involved in the development of the
Peoplesoft Students system. Their comments confirm the expectation that
it is a highly functional system, but also is a very new system with
many "creases" to iron out. A number of members of our party
have committed to Peoplesoft solutions, and the experiences of our hosts
were eagerly sought.
4. IT Policy Issues
The visit to the University of British Columbia was memorable in that
it is a very good example of an organisation that has been seriously
disadvantaged due to inappropriate IT funding policies. Following the
recent adoption of a new university strategic plan an operational plan
for IT has been prepared which identifies a number of key strategic
developments which need to occur, but which are floundering for lack
of funding. This situation has arisen because, unlike the Library which
is funded centrally, IT services rely on a "full-overhead-loaded
cost recovery ancillary funding model" where users can choose which
services they are willing to pay for. This policy also requires the
IT Services section to compete with the open market to supply services.
Fragmentation and underdevelopment of IT infrastructure has been a direct
consequence of this policy which has been in place since the data centre
days of the 1970s.
Recommendation 7: Note implications for inappropriate
chargeback regimes for IT services.
A number of organisations mentioned the importance of the IMS (Instructional
Management System) standards that are being developed by a consortium
of universities and organisations in the US which will address standards
for the interoperability of university teaching, learning and administrative
systems. Monash has not kept up to date with these developments, which
will have important implications for our own systems as the University
becomes more connected with external parties.
Recommendation 8: The Director Applications Services
ITS be asked to keep informed of developments in the IMS standard.
Deborah Hurley of the Harvard Information Infrastructure project described
its four key pillars to be:
- Governance of the Internet and how the Internet affects governments
- Economics of information
- Security of information systems
- E Commerce
She spoke about the requirement for training and awareness of privacy
and codes of conduct, and the tension between the need to interact and
the desire to withdraw. She recommended that an institution wishing to
adopt an effective privacy policy could nominate the OECD Privacy Policy
as it is operating effectively in Europe and many other parts of the world.
The site www.epic.org is possibly the
best source for resources about privacy.
On the issue of information policy, Ms Hurley stated that she believed
that no American university has developed an effective information policy.
Recommendation 9: Monash should work towards the development
of a Privacy policy in conjunction with other access policies.
Action: University Solicitor's Office and Executive
Director, ITS.
5. IT Strategic planning
The George Washington University (with 20,000 students) has developed
an IT strategic plan as a matter of urgency to address major deficiencies
in the IT infrastructure. David Swartz, CIO overviewed aspects of this
plan and the "Millenium" project funded to US$126m. This is
in addition to normal annual allocation of US$42m and staff of 246 people!
He spoke about the following issues:
- Centralisation of servers, to reduce the cost of support
- The development of standards for PC applications, platforms, network
operating system, network switches, servers, security, and usage policies
and procedures)
- Datawarehouse
- Capital management plan and life cycle replacement
- Demands for network bandwidth
- Security threats across the Internet and privacy issues
- A distributed support model as pioneered at the University of California,
Davis and University of Indiana, and a virtual help desk
- Portals
- ERP systems
- Recruitment/retention of IT staff
The Californian State University has undertaken a comprehensive strategic
planning exercise, beginning with the university plan known as "the
Cornerstones" project. In parallel with the Cornerstones project
a Technology Global Strategy was established and approved by the Board
of Trustees in March 1996. Calstate is the world's largest university
with 350,000 students attending 23 campuses throughout the state of California.
These initiatives were taken by the Chancellor's Office and are intended
to establish a consistent implementation of IT across a diverse and devolved
set of campuses. In particular the technology strategy addressed intra-campus
infrastructure, inter-campus networking, administrative systems and funding.
IBM provided consulting services for a period of a year, and worked with
the community to develop a set of 11 "firstwave" initiatives
and an overall goal for IT at Calstate, (www.calstate.edu/its).
I have referenced some of these "waves" elsewhere in the report.
Members of the visiting party were impressed by the apparent comprehensive
approach undertaken for the Calstate system.
Following our meeting with staff of the Chancellor's Office, we also
visited one of the campuses (Los Angeles) and met the campus CIO, responsible
for IT at the campus level The view at this level was somewhat different
and more pragmatic. There is obvious tension between the desire to use
IT in ways for strategic effectiveness and operational efficiencies
when considered in the context of such a large diverse organisation.
Nevertheless, the benefits of the overarching University strategy are
apparent in such areas as defining a base standard for access, training
and support.
Another issue of considerable interest is the Annual Campus Technology
Survey that has been developed to measure progress for the primary initiatives
of the Technology Global Strategy. See (www.calstate.edu/tier3/infortech/campussurvey.pdf).
Recommendation 10: IT Strategic Plans from both universities
be reviewed for relevance to Monash.
Action: Director, Planning and Quality Assurance, ITS.
6. University Decision Making
A "University System Simulator", known as "Virtual U"
was demonstrated to the group by one of its designers Jesse Ausubel
of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. However the principal designer is
William Massy, well know for his financial management and planning tools
for higher education.
A fact sheet described the software program as a :
powerful, convenient, and user-friendly software product that models
the complexities of managing an institution of higher learning….
It is a sophisticated simulation engine that models five broad areas:
resource allocation and finance; academic operations; enrolment management;
physical plant activities; and performance indicators.
The presentation was impressive. There was a great deal of flexibility
and functionality provided within the model, which allows the user to
make decisions and to model their effect, and to learn from the consequences.
Budget analysis was reported to be the strongest part of the simulation
at this time, but there are plans to incorporate other features to address
emerging needs such as distance education. High quality computer graphics
and simulations are deployed; not surprising since the developers were
authors of professional computer games. However, the role play is not
as intuitive as it might be, and the best results would be achieved if
a facilitator were available to help "players" get started and
become oriented to the simulation. A copy of the program was provided
on CD and details can be found on the website www.virtual-u.org
.
Recommendation 11: Staff Development section of Student
and Staff Services review the program to evaluate its suitability to be
used in management training of university staff, and if so to institute
a suitable program.
7. Electronic Publishing
Professor Urbanowski, MIT Press described the role of publishers to be
primarily associated with :
- The acquisition of content
- Rights management, and
- Delivery to customers
Various models of publishing scholarly journals were discussed, with
the observation that there is a need to adopt innovative business models
if the service is to be self funding.
MIT Press have been experimenting with various forms of ePublishing over
the last 5 years. It has been their experience that all forms of ePublishing
have failed to generate sufficient revenues for the ventures to stand
on their own, and therefore have been deemed to be failures. Major obstacles
to pure ePublishing has been provided by :
- authors who aren't sure whether their efforts will be recognised
and rewarded through promotion and tenure, and
- customers who appear reluctant to pay for access to electronic
versions
However, Professor Urbanowski described a successful model where electronic
versions are published and able to be viewed for free, but charges are
levied for a printed or downloaded version. Sales have reportedly doubled
in these cases.
Professor Urbanowski described another innovative hybrid model being
trialed where a "package" of journals will be provided in
two forms: in electronic format only at a base price, but also in electronic
form together with a printed form, at a higher price.
Another model involves establishing a community of interest via a portal,
where customers belonging to a particular target segment are provided
with a comprehensive and expanding set of electronic services that can
be packaged and priced in different ways. A trial site is being established
targeting people with an interest in brain and cognitive sciences, called
COGnet. The service is now on sale, with 10,000 subscribers for the
base service being charged US$60 pa, more for a premium service and
US$1,500 pa for a site licence. It is estimated that 150 libraries,
generating US$250,000, will need to subscribe for the service to be
self funding. Further details can be found at mitpress.mit.edu. It was
reported that the University of Columbia has a similar service addressing
International Relations, and is known as BIOMEDnet. It was noted that
the issue of branding is becoming increasingly important.
Recommendation 12: That the University Librarian, Chair
of the Electronic Publishing Working Party, be advised of these issues.
On 9th May, Stanford University created its first internet company called
e-Skolar which is a very innovative product that provides powerful search
capabilities on medical references to assist primary care doctors in their
diagnosis of symptoms. Following an analysis of a survey completed by
primary care doctors, it has been found that the majority of unanswered
questions about patients' symptoms can be answered by referencing less
than 20 medical resources. The e-Skolar product has been designed using
advanced publishing technologies, search engines and data bases to search
medical resources and to produce a response within 8 seconds. It relies
on publishers of medical references to provide electronic copies of their
medical journals in SGML format, and the doctor using the service must
operate under a valid access licence. Publishers are becoming more accepting
of this relationship, but one can expect there to be some tension since
the publisher's brand image is subsumed within the e-Skolar product. The
business model is based on an annual subscription (currently US$240 pa)
and is committed to exclude advertising. Negotiations are underway with
Yale University to extend the product to nursing, and there is potential
to adapt the product to other professions. The Faculty of Medicine may
be interested in reviewing the e-Skolar product for possible use within
their courses.
Recommendation 13: The Dean Faculty of Medicine be
advised of the e-Skolar product.
The Director, Digital Library project at Berkley overviewed the developments
on two fronts, publishing electronically works from their own collection
and archives, and secondly providing access to works already published
by external parties. For their own collection, they have been working
with the Digital Library Foundation to develop standards for digital libraries
which enable the resources to be properly managed as well as being accessed.
There are three main thrusts, interoperability, scalability, and digital
preservation and archiving. It is interesting to note that they have developed
standards outside of the evolving IMS standard that is emerging as being
central to the electronic delivery of higher education services.
For materials already published, 9 campuses within the University of
California have been successful in bidding for a State grant of US$7.8m
to develop a Californian Digital Library. These funds will be used to
licence digital versions of existing journal subscriptions and so build
the digital library. Portals are being developed to integrate library
resources, library systems, and communities of interest. Issues to be
considered include the variations in user interfaces supplied by each
publisher, and the need for comprehensive search engines. The Bearcat
Project is being developed to hide the complexity of different systems.
See sunsite2.berkley.edu:40008.
Major issues for the future were stated to be:
- standards for digital library objects
- network bandwidth
- digital preservation and archiving
- public access system standards
- funding and self sufficient business models for e publishing
- HR issues and the IT skills shortage
- The aging librarian demographics
Recommendation 14: For noting by the University Librarian.
8. Infrastructure Issues
The site visit to Verisign provided an overview of security issues
in general, and in particular the products and services provided by
the company to safeguard transactions. The three basic elements address
how to authorise users (i.e. who they are, should they have access,
what can they do), how to effect payments (i.e. credit checks, completeness
of transaction), and how to validate what has happened (i.e. when, proof
of transaction, witnesses). These issues are critical for business to
business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) forms of e-commerce.
To address these three elements of a public key infrastructure (PKI)
architecture, Verisign offer a number of products and services, including
digital certificates, certificate extensions, encryption protocols,
digital signatures, certificate authority policy and domains and certificate
chains.
They have adopted a franchised business model with an Australian presence
known as eSign, and can provide a "trust utility" where they
provide an online checkpoint between the transacting parties (B2B and
B2C) for online transactions as they occur.
Monash has been experimenting with digital certificates and digital
signatures for some months now, however, there are a number of procedural
issues that need to be addressed. These relate to the distribution of
certificates to large numbers of staff and students, and how to deal
with a mobile student population who will need to use multiple and different
workstations on a daily basis. Smartcards have an important role to
play in proof of identity (passwords offer a check with something you
know, smartcards check with something you have, and biometrics check
with something about your physical being). The University of Pittsburgh
is deploying digital certificates, and smartcard systems. The University
of Texas is also deploying certificates in conjunction with a credentialling
system for laptops and wireless network roaming. There will be lessons
to be learnt from these project outcomes.
Recommendation 15: Monash should keep abreast of development
in security issues.
Action: Executive Director, ITS.
LDAP directory services were also mentioned by several institutions
as an important initiative to improve access to IT systems.
Recommendation 16: Monash should be congratulated for
the advanced stage of its successful implementation of directory services
infrastructure.
The Director of Networks Systems and Services at George Washington University
described several aspects of IT infrastructure within their "Millenium"
project that were designed to "bring George Washington up to speed"
in IT infrastructure. They have installed fibre to the desktop via 11
hubsites connecting a very geographically diverse CBD campus, and making
central network management possible.
He also spoke about the need to provide greater bandwidth in anticipation
of the next "killer application". George Washington had experienced
a 4 times increase in Internet traffic over the last 12 months. The demand
for MP3 music files had created huge demands on network capacity in American
universities. Future video based applications will also make quantum shifts
in demand. He identified 7 key futures networking issues as being:
- Faster/ cheaper systems
- Better cheaper video
- Faster/better wireless
- Personal communications devices
- High speed home connections
- Voice gateway from IP phone to PBX
- Video streaming
Recommendation 17: Monash should build infrastructure
capacity in anticipation of future bandwidth hungry applications.
9. IT HR Issues
Many of the organisations visited have experienced major disruptions
of IT development projects due to the loss of core staff who had been
poached with the attraction of higher pay rates. Virtually one entire
team of Peoplesoft implementers left within a short period of time. One
gains the impression that there is a more intense shortage of IT skills
in the US than here in Melbourne. But the author suspects that we are
merely lagging their experiences by a period of a year or so.
Recommendation 18: Monash should continually review
its strategies to ensure it can recruit and retain IT staff with the required
skill sets.
Action: Executive Director ITS, Divisional Director
Staff and Student Affairs.
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