Learning Space Design Precepts and Assumptions

Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time.

Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.

---

---

SCUP Link

SCUP–45 plenary speaker, SCUPer Mark Valenti of the Sextant Group, defines precepts and assumptions in the learning design process, in EDUCAUSE Review. This is a 2005 article:

A precept is a rule or principle prescribing a particular course of action or conduct. Design precepts describe the overall environment in which the learning space is being developed and help suggest the context in which the design team will formulate the project.

An assumption is something taken for granted or accepted as true without proof; a supposition. Planning or design assumptions provide direction to the design team and also act as a sounding board when hard decisions have to be made. Projects often encounter budget difficulties, programmatic changes midstream, and/or other events that can force the design team to reevaluate the project. Design assumptions provide the context for making those "value-engineering" decisions.

---

Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA - "Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats"
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA - "Smart Planning in an Era of Uncertainty"
• April 7, Houston, TX - "Sustaining Higher Education in an Age of Challenge"

Learning Space 3.0 When Real and Virtual Space Collide

A number of SCUPers have been doing solid work examining and predicting the interaction between physical and virtual space. None have been more outspoken and forward-thinking as SCUP-45 plenary speaker Mark S. Valenti of The Sextant Group. It's a good thing to be looking forward to his presentation in Minneapolis. You can get something of a sneak peek at the kinds of things he'll bring you up to date about by viewing this slide show from his presentation at the September 2008 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative meeting. (We especially like the image of an 1879 class at Ohio State University, where students are viewing glass slides projected by a kerosene-fired lantern.)

---

Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA - "Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats"
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA - "Smart Planning in an Era of Uncertainty"
• April 7, Houston, TX - "Sustaining Higher Education in an Age of Challenge"

2010 Horizon Report - What Tech Is Coming & When?

The annual Horizon Report examines trends in information technology adoption and makes predictions in 1-year, 2-3-years, and 4-5-years horizons of likely adoption and impact to higher education. If your planning in any way is affected by technology changes (and whose isn't?) then you will want to download the 2010 Horizon Report and at least scan it.

For example, about gesture-based computing (4-5-year horizon) the report has this to say:

For nearly forty years, the keyboard and mouse have been the primary means to interact with computers. The Nintendo Wii in 2006 and the Apple iPhone in 2007 signaled the beginning of widespread consumer interest in — and acceptance of — interfaces based on natural human gestures. Now, new devices are appearing on the market that take advantage of motions that are easy and intuitive to make, allowing us an unprecedented level of control over the devices around us. Cameras and sensors pick up the movements of our bodies without the need of remotes or handheld tracking tools. The full realization of the potential of gesture-based computing is still several years away, especially for education; but we are moving ever closer to a time when our gestures will speak for us, even to our machines.

---

Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

MACR

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/glaciers_sea_level_and_climate_change

MANAGING ONLINE EDUCATION: The 2009 WCET-Campus Computing Project Survey of Online Education (22 Oct 2009)

This survey contains more than can be summarized here, but you should go download the executive summary and possibly watch the archived webcast. The bottom line is that online education programs are marked by:

• Rising Enrollments,
• Unsure Profits,
• Organizational Transitions, and
• Higher Fees, and Tech Training for Faculty

The full abstract for the survey report is:

Enrollments are up and rising, profits are often uncertain, and organizational arrangements are in transition according to a new national survey of senior campus officials responsible for managing online and distance education programs conducted by WCET and The Campus Computing Project. Additionally, the new survey data suggest that students enrolled in online programs may pay higher fees than their on-campus counterparts, that many campuses have mandatory training on their faculty before sending them “into the web” to teach online courses, and that quality still looms as a large question for online education programs.

Three questions about enrollments indicate that campuses participating in the survey have experienced healthy gains in good economic times and bad – and that campus officials expect enrollments in their online programs to continue to rise in the coming years. Fully 94 percent of the survey respondents – typically the senior campus officer responsible for online or distance education programs – report enrollment gains in their online programs between 2006 and 2009; almost half (48 percent) report online enrollments rose by 15 percent or more during this period. Similarly, asked about past year numbers (fall 2008 vs. fall 2009), 95 percent report rising enrollment in their online programs; almost two-fifths (38 percent) report a one-year gain in online enrollments of 15 percent or better. Finally, when asked to project enrollments in their online programs over the next three years (2009-2011), 98 percent of the institutions participating in the survey affirm enrollment gains: almost half (47 percent) expect online enrollments grow by 15 percent or more over the next three years.

For more information, please download the accompanying PDF copy of the executive summary and the handout from the WCET Conference presentation on October 22nd. Also available below is the video webcast of the WCET conference presentation.

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009—Key Findings

ECAR studies are proprietary, but the executive summaries are often (as is this one) useful on their own. If you are at a subscribing institution (Check, you might be surprised.) then you may be able to download this entire report.

Like the clothes in their suitcases, the technologies students bring to campus change every year. Occasionally, the change can be dramatic. It’s hard to believe, but when the college seniors we surveyed for this year’s study began their education four years ago, netbooks, iPhones, and the Nintendo Wii had yet to hit the market. When they went home for the holidays during their freshman year, some returned with a brand new game called Guitar Hero for the PlayStation 2, and some may have been lucky enough to score a $250 4-GB iPod nano or an ultrathin digital camera. Today’s freshmen have mobile phones that hold more songs than that 4-GB nano, and they can use them to take digital photos and videos of the same quality as the $400 camera today’s seniors got for their high school graduation.

The same forces of change apply to what college students are doing with their technology. Their written language has adapted to the technology of text messages and 140-character “tweets,” and Andy Warhol’s famous prediction about everyone eventually having 15 minutes of fame is being proved by the proliferation of social networking and YouTube. In fact, the pervasive uploading of content to blogs, video sites, wikis, and personal Facebook and MySpace pages suggests that “15 megabytes of fame” may be a more appropriate prophecy.

The New Guys in Assessment Town: Companies

Pat Hutchings, writing in Change magazine, broadly explores the new world of for-profit consultants and technology teams.

[T]here’s a new kind of help on the way, from outside the institution. Of course many campuses have engaged external consultants to jumpstart the assessment process; that’s not new. And neither is the use of tests and instruments designed by others. What’s new is an influx of for-profit assessment providers offering tools and services that promise, variously, to make assessment easier, faster, less intrusive, more useful, and/or more cost effective.

Some of these firms were founded in the last two or three years and are just getting started. Others have a longer, already prosperous history of work in other aspects of education (like course management) and are now moving into the assessment niche. A few have their roots in other industries—like quality assurance in health care—and have recently added student assessment to the mix. Some are run by academics or former academics and some by people with a corporate background.

Learning Spaces, An EDUCAUSE e-Book

Space, whether physical or virtual, can have a significant impact on learning. If you are interested in better understanding the relationship between space design and learning, Learning Spaces, an EDUCAUSE e-book, provides a great place to start. It focuses on how learner expectations influence the development and use of space, the principles and activities that facilitate learning, and the role of technology from the perspective of those who create learning environments: faculty, learning technologists, librarians, and administrators. It represents an ongoing exploration as we bring together space, technology, and pedagogy to ensure learner success.

Changing Jobs in Difficult Financial Times

This concise set of processes is written as though for a CIO, but you can replace "CIO" with your new title, and "IT" with whatever your work will be, and it still provides solid advice:

It may sound rudimentary, but scrutinize the budget. A new CIO role requires a thorough review of the technology department budget. Reviewing the last three years of budgets and "actuals" against budget may produce insights into budgeting and spending habits. For example, as a new CIO at one institution, I found $80,000 in a part-time temporary employment budget line which had not been spent in the previous three years. We were able to repurpose those funds and provide a real impact for the institution. The budget and "actual" information can also highlight items where unspecified "contingency funds" are stored. These funds may be an unofficial contingency fund or they may be funds that have been forgotten over time. Identifying these funds and putting them to good use would be a welcome move in tough economic times.

Learning and Technology — “In That Order”

We've had many SCUP Links from Malcolm Brown over the years. This is another good one, where he reports on some in depth discussions with thoughtful students about the use of technology in learning: 

Over the past several years, I have been impressed by how fruitful it can be to solicit students' ideas when making plans for technology in support of learning. Judging from those experiences, I thought it might be worthwhile to construct a New Horizons column from a "geographically distributed" focus-group session, inviting students from a variety of institutions to suggest what educators should be thinking about as we plan our learning environments for the next two to four years. With the help of colleagues, I was able to enlist the help of fourteen students, all of whom responded with thoughtful contributions, summarized here.

In sum, the sentiments most often articulated were: (1) too much or unfettered technology is bad and directly hinders learning; and (2) the use of technology should not come at the expense of personal interaction both in and outside the classroom.

Perhaps the most succinct formulation of these ideas was: "I believe the most important thing to keep in mind about learning and technology is that they should be considered in that order" (CV).

The Return of the Opportunity Manager

Richard Katz muses about the possible opportunities that we may be overlooking as we slash budgets: "Amid the gloom, I wonder if this might not be the ideal time for the IT community to assert its role as an opportunity developer. Rather than — or perhaps alongside — cutting the IT budget, shouldn't we be asking how information technology, along with process reengineering, can fundamentally change the way we do things? Can we not only reduce the IT consumption of campus power but also implement environmental systems to monitor and control building temperatures and other sources of energy consumption? Can we continue to create the incentives and the infrastructure to promote the effective consolidation of servers, storage, and other campus IT services? Can we deploy the analytical engines and develop the predictive models that will allow our colleagues to optimize classroom (and other resource) utilization and to engage in "what if" scenarios that help us understand the economics of hybridizing courses or other e-learning strategies? Can we organize and harvest information from our student and learning management systems to identify at-risk students and harness this information to improve retention rates? How might the exploitation of these and other IT-enabled opportunities change the financial complexion of our institutions? . . . Didn't someone say something about not wasting a crisis?"

EDUCAUSE Top Ten IT Issues, 2009

What a surprise, "Funding IT" is the top issue in campus technology in 2009: 

These are very trying economic times for higher education institutions. Diving endowments, hiring freezes, and budget cuts are the main topics of executive focus and discussion. Not surprisingly, the economic downturn overshadowed many of this year's top-ten issues, with the current focus on fiscal conservatism reflected in this year's #1 issue for IT leaders: Funding IT.

Funding IT will be a challenge for most higher education IT organizations as they grapple with fiercely competing budget priorities in the process of overall institutional budgets being reduced. But during these difficult economic times, IT will have the opportunity to show its worth to the institution by being able to create and/or enhance organizational effectiveness and efficiencies while realizing cost savings. These cost savings may be accomplished through a variety of methods and in a variety of areas.

Looking at IT Through a New Lens: Achieving Cost Savings in a Fiscally Challenging Time

Writing in EDUCAUSE Review, George F. Claffey, Jr. shares some concepts useful to all departments in these difficult times: 

While fiscally challenging times often prompt a retreat into “core strategic services,” we should view this crisis as an opportunity to reevaluate the position, strategies, and politics in play on our campuses. Often we find that we’re doing something merely because that’s how it’s always been done. This challenging economic situation gives us an opportunity to reevaluate what we are doing and how we are doing it, seeking greater efficiency and effectiveness in new solutions.

As we stare across the multiple tabs and hundreds of rows that make up the IT budget serving our students, faculty, and staff, we must realize that the answer cannot be found with basic cuts. We must look at how technology is used — or not used — on campus. To promote greater cost savings, we need to look through a new “lens.” Four broad categories can be evaluated to determine if IT resource alignment is appropriate and if savings can be achieved through change:

• Services and infrastructure: retirement and consolidation
• Personnel: capital, training, research and development
• Evaluation of alternate technologies
• Economies of scale

Seven Things You Should Know About Cloud Computing

EDUCAUSE has published another in its "Seven Things" series of explicatory briefs, Seven Things You Should Know About Cloud Computing. Each has been a valuable resource and an excellent way to quickly get up to speed on something you might need to know about. Cloud computing has an impact on IT planning, academic planning, and resource and budget planning: 

Cloud computing is the delivery of scalable IT resources over the Internet, as opposed to hosting and operating those resources locally, such as on a college or university network. Those resources can include applications and services, as well as the infrastructure on which they operate. By deploying IT infrastructure and services over the network, an organization can purchase these resources on an as-needed basis and avoid the capital costs of software and hardware. With cloud computing, IT capacity can be adjusted quickly and easily to accommodate changes in demand. Cloud computing also allows IT providers to make IT costs transparent and thus match consumption of IT services to those who pay for such services. Operating in a cloud environment requires IT leaders and staff to develop different skills, such as managing contracts, overseeing integration between in-house and outsourced services, and mastering a different model of IT budgets.

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education

Anya Kamenetz, writing in Fast Company magazine, examines the confluence of Web 2.0 and the Open Education movement in light of some entrepreneurs who think they can transform the business of higher education: 

Is a college education really like a string quartet? Back in 1966, that was the assertion of economists William Bowen, later president of Princeton, and William Baumol. In a seminal study, Bowen and Baumol used the analogy to show why universities can't easily improve efficiency. 

If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can't cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then -- before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world's largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world's largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.

Ten Things I No Longer Believe About Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology

For more than this decade, the TLT Group has been at the forefront in experimenting with and learning from technology tools to transform teaching and learning. Steve Erhmann recently began a series of essays soliciting responses to which he will reply, about the ten things that - after so many years of paying attention - he no longer believes about teaching and learning with technology. "The first five weeks deal with five specific rewards for investing in technology (visibility and the resources it can attract, better learning, larger enrollment, cost savings, and time savings). Let's start with what I once believed about buying hot new technology in order to attract resources by making your program more visible."

Designing Choreographies for the "New Economy of Attention"

This is a dense resource that will require some . . . attention . . . but well worth the read:

"This experiment reinforced our assumption that the successful implementation of communication channels should always be embedded in the physical organization of space. Choreographing attention is physical as much as it is cerebral. Digital backchannels have to be designed into space, not in spite of it."

Read on:
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/2/000049.html

Online Learning Produces Better Results Than Face-to-Face?

This US Department of Education report, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning, can be download for free (93 pages). According to Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed, in the higher education part of the analysis, online learning was unequivocally better than face-to-face, and "blended learning" produced even better results.

Download it here:
http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

The Power of Waste: Managing Technology for Abundance, Not Scarcity

Did you ever wonder, when you were told to spend saving storage space by finding and deleting old files, whether it was worth your time? (It isn't.)

"When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world."

This is a thought-provoking piece from Wired magazine and well worth the time to read it.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-07/mf_freer

How Technology Will Reshape Academe After the Economic Crisis II

This is a (free) archived EDUCAUSE webinar:

"[F]uture generations of learners will no doubt look back at the global economic crisis of 2008-09 and reflect on which institutions were agile enough to bring the wisdom of its scholars together with the acumen of its technology leadership and the ingenuity and determination of the universities leadership team to make a difference. This webinar . . . explore[d] a range of technological-informed 'opportunities' from the pragmatics of shared services models to 'transformational' arcs of activities in internationalization and open education resources."

Check it out here:
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/HowTechnologyWillReshapeAcadem/170013

The Kindle Factor

An early Kindle adopter, who is also using the Kindle to save students text book money and integrating into his pedagogy, lays out some of the things he's learned, and some of the considerations those who want to move in that direction need to think about.

"One of the benefits of the Kindle is that learners can replace expensive textbooks with digital books in a format read by the Kindle. For example, for a Knowledge Organizations course I will lead in the Fall, one hardcover textbook, Organizations as Knowledge Systems (2004, Tsoukas, H. & Mylonopoulos, Eds.) currently costs $89.95 at retail, $71.97 from Amazon.com, and $63.96 in its Kindle version. That’s a 28.9% savings over the retail cost of the book. Another textbook, Theory U (2009, Scharmer, C. O.), in paper, currently costs $28.95 at retail, $26.05 from Amazon, and $15.92 in its Kindle version.

The sum of those savings would be $39.02, or a 32.9% savings over retail for both books."

Read the full article here:
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/06/15/crowell