Figure 1: A Parallel Implementation Process
Abstract
People often teach in the same ways as they've been taught. To harness the
power of technology for improving colleges and schools of education, it has
become increasingly clear that we need to integrate technology into our
teaching, research, and service activities. In this paper, we describe our
efforts to introduce the faculty members of the College of Education at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to uses of technology that they find
appropriate for their own teaching, research, administrative and service
activities. We also present a process by which educational institutions can
continue this process as technology continues to develop at a rapid rate.
Introduction
The challenge of technology for educational institutions has many components.
Colleges and schools of education typically trail the rest of their campuses in
obtaining technology. Large numbers of their faculty and students typically
are not particularly fond of technology, and in many cases, are actively
hostile. In addition, the rate of change of technology poses additional
difficulties. In the area of educational technologies, the only constant is
that things change. Previously people could plan for introducing change as if
it were a "one-shot" transition, with one-time capital expenses and training.
However, given the rapid rate of change, this approach is no longer valid. Let
us examine the change that has taken place in one particular instance, the
College of Education at the University of Illinois, and then try to generalize
from this specific case.
A starting state, 1985.
When we arrived at the University of Illinois in 1985, computers were being
used only by a few faculty members of the College. Some faculty members had
been involved with the Plato system from its early days, but only a couple
faculty members were still using Plato in 1985. The College had a
microcomputer instructional lab with Apple II and IBM AT computers, but these
were used in only a few courses and by only a few students. A couple of the
faculty members had microcomputers of their own that they used for word
processing, and some faculty members used the campus mainframe computers for
statistical data analyses. There was one Macintosh Plus computer and one
LaserWriter in the College interconnected with an Appletalk link. This was the
only Local Area Network in the building. In order to communicate with the rest
of the world, some faculty members had modems connected to their office phones.
The current state, 1995.
Currently almost all of the more than 100 faculty members in the College of
Education have a microcomputer in their office to use. Most of these are
interconnected to a building-wide network, which is in turn connected to a
campus-wide optical fiber network, which is a subnet of the Internet world-wide
network. Most of the faculty members use their computers for word processing,
and almost all use it for electronic mail. A substantial number use more
sophisticated network applications, such as netnews boards, information
servers, and file transfer. Most of the support staff members have computers
on their desks, and much of the information used by departments about their
students, faculty, budgeting, and many other administrative tasks are
"processed" via computers and the network that connects them. The College also
runs an information server that has been heavily used by people from all over
the world.
How did the College make such a major change from an almost total lack of use of technology toward a "college of education of tomorrow," in which computers and networking are integrated into everyday use? The change did not occur overnight, and was not a single step process. It required the cooperation of a number of diverse people. We'll document here both the positive and negative steps that occurred in this process. In this way, perhaps this transition will be easier for others who are interested in promoting similar processes of change.
The change
We will document the process of change, pointing to both successes and
failures, and we will identify what we found to be important factors for
integrating technology in this particular case. Then we will describe a
systematic organizational process that might be useful to other institutions in
dealing with the continuing challenges posed by the rapid rate of technological
innovation.
Apple Seedlings grant of computers and our initial network
In 1986 we received an "Apple Seedlings" grant of 6 Macintosh Plus computers
from Apple, awarded by a campus-wide committee based on a mini-proposal we
submitted. These computers were supplied as part of an agreement between the
University and Apple based on some bulk purchase of Apple computers
campus-wide. This initial support allowed us to experiment with some several
emerging of computers in education.
Our offices were on different floors of the Education Building, and the only laser printer in the building was on yet another floor, so we wanted to interconnect our new computers to share the printer. After some discussions with the Dean, the campus Telecommunications office came to the building with heavy duty drills to bore holes through the concrete floors of the building to create this limited building network. The process was time-consuming, expensive, and very disruptive because of the noise and dust. To expand such a network to all the hundreds of offices in the Education Building was not a pleasant thing to contemplate.
About that same time, the campus had completed a rewiring of the telephone network, adding at each telephone jack a second jack (called a "B" jack) to make it easier to construct building-wide data networks. Each of these "B-jacks" was wired to a telephone wiring closet, but went no further. In meeting with the Telecommunications Office on campus, we initiated discussions about how to use these "B-jacks" instead of having to wire a physical network infrastructure from scratch. At that time, we discovered that even if this B-jack network were not in place, we could have used some of the unused wires built into standard phone lines.
With our small initial network in place, we were able to explore a new local area network electronic mail program called Intermail. We also explored a file sharing system called TOPS, which allowed the exchange of messages between Macs and MS-DOS computers. Based on these initial explorations, we decided that there were uses of computers (word processing, email, graphics) that would be compelling for our faculty members and that the software was relatively "user-friendly" so that extensive training was not required.
College Technology Advisory Committee
To develop a coordinated approach to the introduction of technology in the
College of Education, our Dean created a College Technology Advisory Committee.
This Committee developed a set of priorities concerning faculty, staff, and
student needs.
To begin to address student needs, the Committee prepared a proposal to a campus-wide committee that was distributing funds collected by a newly instituted campus-wide computer fee. The proposal was funded, and allowed the College Technology Advisory Committee to update an existing College-wide instructional microcomputer lab. It also allowed the placement of microcomputers in each Department for graduate student use. Additionally, it provided resources for acquiring instructional software. And it allowed the College to hire a graduate student to serve as a computer trainer for students, staff and faculty.
College of Education of Tomorrow matching grant
After some experience with using computers and applications for instructional
uses, we developed with our Dean a plan for providing microcomputers for our
College faculty members. At this time, the University had arranged several
"bulk" purchases for other units, based on a "matching" grant concept. In the
previous purchases, the unit (department or college) contributed a part of the
purchase price, the university as a whole contributed a part, and the vendor
(in this case, Apple Computer) contributed a part of the purchase price of the
computers. This allowed the College to stretch its limited resources to
provide computers to almost all of our faculty members.
In this project, which we called the College of Education of Tomorrow, we were able to negotiate a matching grant of 78 computers, five LaserWriter printers, and 5 networked dot-matrix printers. The computers were distributed to faculty members and the printers were placed throughout the College for shared use through a local area network. The College bought 78 copies of Microsoft Word, which at that time came bundled with SuperPaint. The College also bought a site license to InterMail (which has since been acquired by Microsoft, and is now known as Microsoft Mail).
The College hired several hourly graduate assistants as temporary help to set up the computers and to install the software. The computers were connected to the "b-jacks" in each room, and the campus Telecommunications service organization connected the b-jack wiring into a local area network. The University's Computer Services Organization helped plan and implement our building-wide network.
By and large, the network worked well when first installed. However some of the nodes of the network performed sporadically, and we discovered a systemic problem when working with different organizations to maintain a network. The Telecommunications person checking a problematic node would check the hardware, say it was fine, and claim that the problem was a software problem. Then several days later the Computer Service person would check the software, say it was fine, and blame the hardware. With split responsibilities, there was a tendency for each party to blame the other. Since that time, the campus has integrated both functions (telecommunications and computer services) into a single office (Computing and Communication Services Organization), which has helped to reduce this problem, at least from our point of view. Until that happened, we insisted that the two organizations send people out in pairs so that they could track down a network problem at the same time, so that arguments about whose domain was to blame could be resolved immediately, rather than dragging out for weeks.
We conducted training sessions on the use of the word processing and electronic mail applications, but most faculty members were able to use them with little or no training. "Local experts" in each department or unit sprang up from the faculty, staff, or graduate students, and these were able to address the minor problems when they occurred. The College allocated funds to hire two graduate students, one who served as a network manager and one as a software librarian, and these two also served as technical resources when the local departmental expertise was insufficient.
The key for involving faculty members was the presence of "compelling uses." Initially, the most common compelling use was word processing, which faculty members used for their research, teaching, and service. Some faculty members used the computers to prepare instructional materials for their classes and for conferences and colloquia, using "desk-top presentation" software. Others used microcomputer-based statistics and data analysis programs for their research. After the building-wide network was in place, electronic mail became the next most commonly used application, especially when the Dean and some of the Department heads began using email heavily. In particular, our current Dean, David Pearson, started sending most of his memos via email. He also sent them via campus mail in print form, but of course there was a delay of a day or more before those were received. So in terms of speed of information exchange, there was a major advantage for those who regularly used email.
Initially this Education Building local area network had no connection to the outside world, a lack that several faculty members felt strongly. In some cases, these faculty members acquired their own modems, which they used through their campus telephone lines. To avoid the need to acquire hundreds of modems, the College Technology Committee purchased a "netmodem," which was installed on the network and connected to a single phone line. This could be used by anyone on the network (but only by one person at a time), and served as a temporary solution while we addressed more systematically the issue of connecting our LAN to the rest of the world.
Computers for staff members
Once there were computers on the faculty members' desks, there was considerable
pressure on the departments and the units in the College to acquire computers
for staff members and to connect them to the network. Much to our surprise,
most of this pressure came from the staff members themselves, who "felt left
out" and experienced concern that they were less able to work with faculty
members on clerical and other administrative tasks. Initially the rationale
was that staff members would be able to work on word processor documents
created by faculty members, and to assist in the editing of papers. Once the
staff members had been equipped, they discovered other compelling uses,
including spreadsheets and database uses. Several departments and units
decided to adopt a common database software so that they could use shared
database files. The College's Graduate Programs Office also explored ways to
use their microcomputers to access campus-wide student information.
Connection to wide-area networks
While we were constructing our building LAN, the campus was building a
university-wide optical fiber LAN, called UIUCNET. With help from the Network
Design Office of the University's Computer and Communications Services Office,
we implemented a gateway so that our building network became a subnet of the
campus-wide net, which in turn was a subnet of the broader Internet. At the
same time, with the advice of the Network Design Office, we improved the
performance of the building network, and planned a way for incrementally
upgrading connections to our building network for those faculty and staff that
needed higher bandwidth connections.
Access to the world-wide Internet gave new motivation to the use of email, as faculty, staff and students began to use the network to interact with colleagues and friends within the College of Education, across the campus, and at other institutions around the world. Many College faculty members found that remote access to the University Library was valuable. Other faculty and students used the network to transfer files to and from campus mainframes for data analysis. Still others used the network to access the large collections of text, graphics, and program files accessible through "anonymous file transfer." Access to remote databases was used by some, especially as easier-to-use "client-server" front-end programs became available. For example, a person in the campus Computer Service Organization developed a "front-end" to the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition), which some College members found valuable. More recently, faculty, staff and students have found access to distributed information servers (Gopher and the World-Wide Web) important, especially the on-line "phone books" to help them contact others elsewhere.
A Parallel Implementation Process for dealing with continuous change
Once there were a substantial number of computers in place, we soon encountered
a problem especially troublesome for such rapidly developing technologies as
computers and communications. It is not enough to get faculty, staff and
students to use computers, software and networks in their work. All of these
change rapidly, and so there is an additional challenge to keep up with the
changes, to introduce appropriate changes in hardware and software along with
the resources needed to support these changes. Instead of a fixed set of goals
in a "multi-year plan," we adopted a "parallel implementation process."
In the College of Education, our implementation of this process was strongly influenced by a version of this organizational process developed at the University level, under the leadership of Associate Chancellor Richard Wilson. The University has an "Educational Technology Board" that grants computers, peripherals, and software to faculty members who propose innovative uses of technology in education. A given faculty member might be granted one or two computer systems to try out some cutting edge use of technology in education.
The University also has a "Computer Fund Committee" that grants funds to expand on those pilot projects that have proven successful, to provide "demonstration projects" that broaden the impact of those projects to more students and faculty. These demonstration projects are also evaluated at the end of the period of their support, to determine whether broader expansion of these projects was warranted.
The demonstration projects that have proven effective are then "institutionalized," and grow through support from their departments, colleges, or other appropriate unit.
Each year, projects are pursued in parallel in each of these three stages in the implementation of an innovation: many new projects are tried on a small scale, some pilot projects that have been tried and proven successful are implemented in larger demonstration projects, and a few successful demonstration projects are integrated on a large scale into the appropriate organization. This process is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: A Parallel Implementation Process
We adopted this Parallel Implementation Process in the College of Education, so that we not only integrated appropriate uses of technology into our work, but also so that we continued this process to accommodate changes over time. Otherwise, an exciting "College of Education of Tomorrow" would soon become a "College of Education of Yesterday." This remains a major challenge for us in our efforts, and this process helps us structure our efforts.
Integration of technology into teaching
Another major challenge that we continue to grapple with is the integration of
appropriate technologies across the wide range of courses that are taught in
the College of Education. For many years, a small number of our faculty
members have successfully used technology in their teaching. But the challenge
has been to find ways to use it to improve our teaching more broadly. Although
we cannot claim to have overcome this challenge, we have developed a promising
approach, which is a conceptual framework that we call "teaching
teleapprenticeships" (Levin, Waugh, Brown, & Clift, 1994).
With the support of a grant from the National Science Foundation, we have been exploring a variety of ways in which computers and networks can be integrated into the full range of courses that our students take, from the very first courses they take as freshmen, to the teaching methods courses they take, through their student teaching, in their initial years of teaching, and finally to their inservice training as more experienced teachers.
With some of these groups, students use existing computer labs (the Education microcomputer lab, other "public access" sites provided university-wide, or dormitory computer labs). For our student teachers, we have been able to acquire lap-top computers for them to use during their student teaching, to help bridge the gap between the university and the K-12 settings. Other students have acquired their own microcomputers that they use to interact in these teaching teleapprenticeship frameworks.
We are in the middle of a three year research grant to implement and evaluate the teaching teleapprenticeship frameworks, and so far we have found a number of successful models (as well as several unsuccessful ones). We plan to continue this exploration, to gradually implement the successful frameworks in the courses for which they are appropriate, working with the faculty members and students to provide support for the initial implementations.
Change as a Continuing Process
The key lesson to learn from this case study is that integrating technology in
education is a continuing process, not a one-shot transition. State-of-the-art
computers today are obsolete tomorrow; training that is valuable today has a
relatively short "half-life" of usefulness. Decisions are difficult because
there have been and will continue to be many "dead-end" developments, such that
major investments in equipment and training that are very promising today may
be seen as totally misguided tomorrow.
To reduce the risk while at the same time continuing to move forward, the Parallel Implementation Process described here allows many small scale experiments with the latest technology to be conduced by faculty willing to take the risk, and then the process provides for more resources to expand the subset of experiments that have demonstrated success. This process of exploring many new technologies on a small scale and implementing on a larger scale those that prove useful needs to continue year after year - otherwise a "college of education of tomorrow" quickly becomes a "college of education of yesterday", where the faculty and students are limited by obsolete equipment, software, and training. When the only constant is change, educational institutions need to institute a process for dealing with this continuing change. The Parallel Implementation Process has worked well in the particular case described here, and may prove useful for other educational institutions as well.
Summary
In our efforts over the past six years to integrate appropriate uses of
technology into the College of Education at the University of Illinois, we have
found the following factors to be critically important:
Reference
Levin, J., Waugh, M., Brown, D., & Clift, R. (1994). Teaching Teleapprenticeships:
A new organizational framework for improving teacher education using electronic
networks. Journal of Machine-Mediated Learning, 4(2 & 3), 149-161.
Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work supported by
the National Science Foundation
under Grant No. RED-9253423. The Government has certain rights in this
material. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed
in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the
views of the National Science Foundation. We would also like to thank Apple
Computer, Inc. for grants of equipment and Dean Nancy Cole and Dean David
Pearson for their leadership in the process described here. Associate
Chancellor Richard Wilson has provided the inspiration for the Parallel
Implementation Process, through his development of a similar process at the
university-wide level at the University of Illinois.