Tuesday, February 27, 2001

Author Says Colleges Must Reallocate Money to Academic Technology By FLORENCE OLSEN In a new book, A.W. Bates says that colleges will have to reallocate money from other accounts to pay for essential academic-technology projects. And that's easier said than done, adds Mr. Bates, who is the director of distance education and technology in the Continuing Studies Division at the University of British Columbia. "Knowing what to do is one thing," says the author. "Actually doing it is quite another." Mr. Bates directs a cost-benefit study of online teaching for the Canadian National Center for Excellence in Telelearning. He is a former professor of educational-media research at the British Open University. His newest book is Managing Technology Change: Strategies for College and University Leaders (Jossey-Bass Inc., 2000). Q: Some proponents of information technology say their aim is to broaden access to higher education, enhance its quality, and lower the cost of teaching and learning. Which of these aims might be the most difficult to achieve? A: Reducing costs is the hardest part, at least initially. It's like retooling an industry. You have to do things differently, and there are high costs in doing that. The second reason is the amount of time that faculty have to spend learning how to use the new technology. It has to be done, but it means that people aren't doing other things like research and standing in front of a class teaching. Q: Course-management systems, then, really haven't automated course production to the level yet where faculty members can just focus on the content? A: Quite the opposite. What they've done is drag a lot of faculty into activities that they're not trained for and that take them away from their research and teaching. It's misleading of companies like WebCT and Blackboard to advertise, Get your course up in 15 minutes. Sure you can get it up in 15 minutes, but after that you can spend the rest of your life trying to get it right. Q: Will there be a time when academic programs can save money by using information technology? A: I think so. But again, it won't be as great as we think, because the technology keeps changing. Organizations will get better at managing this. The real problem at the moment is that most faculty don't have enough technical support. A few institutions, like the University of Central Florida, have managed to move [technology for teaching] into the mainstream by making it relatively easy. Professors can see the benefits of working in a different way, which is encouraging, and it hasn't led to huge extra costs for the university. One area that interests me is the indirect impact of learning technologies on cost savings. Although we have a very large campus at the University of British Columbia, we have a limitation now on how many new buildings we can put up. If you cut down from three lectures a week to one lecture a week, and you do this systematically, then you might be able to reduce considerably the use of classroom space and car-parking space. But very often it would mean going outside the academic budget and into other budgets. We need a lot more research into the consequences of that. I'm sure we're not very different from most big research universities. Nearly half of our teaching budget involves indirect costs -- heating, lighting, classrooms, the library, and so on. We don't know what the indirect costs are for online teaching. There are infrastructure costs, but a lot of the costs we see listed as necessary indirect costs for classroom teaching don't apply to online teaching. The other problem with [reallocation] in a university is that you can't do it in a top-down way. So a lot of what we're trying to do is get [people to buy in to the idea, particularly faculty members]. We feel in a way we've done that now. Over the last 12 months, we've had a lot of consultation, we've had faculty workshops on learning technologies, on where those fit into their overall teaching plans. Q: Where will institutions find the money to cover academic-technology costs? A: We need to increase the baseline funding of universities by probably 1 or 2 percent per year if we want to sustain information technology within teaching. No matter how hard the institution tries to reallocate, most institutions don't have the flexibility to find 1 or 2 percent of their regular budget. In Canada, where we've had lots of cuts to higher education, the biggest problem is finding enough professors to put in front of the students. And it doesn't go down well to say we want money for support staff. Q: Can universities that choose to use information technology in teaching generate new revenues that offset the cost of the technology? A: If institutions are willing. Again, it will only work for some institutions in some areas. But there are major opportunities for going global, for instance, with teaching in niche markets. If your institution has the best researchers in a certain area, and you can compete on a global basis, then, yes. You can offer courses that probably wouldn't be cost-effective [if they were offered only] within your own state. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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