1. Ken Udas – “Not IT, not Business Processes, but Organizational Culture”

Craig, Hello. Thank you for this interesting and thoughtful posting.

To kick things off I would like to gather your thoughts on the notion of “Open Source Teaching” that was introduced in James Dalziel’s posting Learning Design and Open Source Teaching, which marries OSS in terms of the “learning code” that underlies learning design and OER in terms on the content that is part of the learning design.

I ask this because of your treatment of “programme differentiators,”

These “customer” facing functions are what will allow one HEI to differentiate itself from the others, and the development of a powerful, distinct brand. Some of these functions include:

1. Course design and some aspects of course development

2. Teaching, tutoring, facilitation of student learning

3. Marketing and Communication

It is for the effective delivery of these two first functions why involvement in the FLOSS communities will matter so much for HEIs. For a large, traditional university with a well-established full-time faculty interested in teaching, much like the UWI is, it would make very little sense to outsource course design or teaching, tutoring, or facilitation of student learning, since:…

coupled with the impact of customization that you value in FLOSS, and the economic benefits of FLOSS that you note in your posting. Are you applying the principles of FLOSS to course design, development, and teaching? Are you or your colleagues at UWI involved with using and developing open educational resources or with Learning Design as defined by James Dalziel? Thanks. Ken

2. Craig Perue - June 18th, 2007 at 9:14 pm

Ken, thanks for the feedback. I do believe that a teacher’s ability to create effective learning designs will be a critical differentiator in a future where Wayne Mackintosh and the other folks at WikiEducator and all those involved in Open Education Resource movements have succeeded in making high quality learning objects common and available to all. Here I am using learning design in the broad sense (as opposed to the narrow technical meaning that James Dalziel explained previously) – simply put – it is how you arrange learning objects and activities (which might include collaborative learning) to achieve specific learning goals, and although I have never thought about it as the “code” of teaching, I think the analogy works. In that analogy, teachers become the equivalent of software architects and engineers deciding the most effective and efficient ways to combine learning objects to meet the needs of their students. In the same way that software architecture positions are more resistant to outsourcing than programming jobs, I expect teachers who develop deep understanding of learning and teaching, and especially of how their students learn most effectively and efficiently, will continue to thrive. However this analogy should not be taken too far – learning design is not intimately bound up with computers and the internet. The lesson plans that our elementary to secondary school (or K-12 for the USA) teachers have created and documented for decades are learning designs, as are the sequences of learning objects and learning activities that our faculty members have created in OurVLE.

Since there are already electronic communities of practice where lesson plans are shared with open-source like licenses I suppose one could say that open source teaching has already begun. Here at the Mona campus, the Dean of our largest faculty agreed that all faculty members should have access to all the faculty’s course websites on OurVLE, which in effect means that they would all be able to see all the learning designs, and importantly, how effective each was. This kind of openness is a good start, but I would be hesitant to say that we practice open-source teaching for two reasons. First, as others have pointed out, open-source is very much about issues of ownership and licensing, and while we have begun considering these issues I do not believe that the UWI’s intellectual property policies as they relate to learning designs or learning objects meet the philosophical requirements of ‘open source’ (as defined by the Open Source Institute) or even ‘free’. The second reason is that we do not practice, on a wide-scale, for learning design or learning object development the kinds of collaboration and innovation that characterize open-source software development, although this may simply be a question of the maturity of the practice and not of its existence. It may also be because we have not implemented the kinds of tools that enable these kinds of collaboration, and am eager to look at some of tools mentioned in previous posts that will help, especially since the issues of open-source teaching across the University’s four campuses have been extensively discussed recently (though not under that name) as part of an executive review of our eLearning policies and practices. We have also recently established a relationship with MIT’s OpenCourseWare project in which we mirror OCW, and I expect this to stimulate discussions within departments about use of and contribution to Open Educational Resources, but I think that these issues are only just beginning to rise to top priority for the majority of our faculty members. I think faculty interest and involvement with learning design as Dalziel defined it is even further down on the priority list. One of the reasons I think we needed to adopt FLOSS early was precisely because it takes a while for the organization to absorb new concepts such as FLOSS and OER and change the business model and organizational culture appropriately.

I would also love to hear suggestions about business models that will support Universities that participate in open source teaching.

3. richardwyles - June 18th, 2007 at 10:26 pm

Hi Craig, Great read thank-you. With the separate campuses at Cave Hill, Mona and St Augustine you may be interested in the Moodle Networks work we’ve been doing. It’s standard in Moodle 1.8 and allows for a single-sign-on framework down to the individual course and student level. You can also create a Moodle Hub with common resources available for other networked Moodles. All the best, Richard

4. Craig Perue - June 19th, 2007 at 4:32 am

Hi Richard. Moodle Networks is definitely going to be a huge boon to further collaboration and innovation across our campuses. I am also excited about what you have done with Eduforge since I am very interested in providing the kinds of tools that allow staff members to collaborate on learning objects and learning designs with the kind of sophistication available to software developers using SourceForge. I am especially interested in providing some kind of version control facility, so that staff can develop multiple versions of a learning object starting from a common base object, without too much confusion. Whereas, as you pointed, out forking the development of Moodle would have been counter-productive in your situation, I want to encourage faculty members to think critically about their students’ needs, their own teaching philosophy and then fork the development of the learning objects appropriately. As Wayne Mackintosh has written, education is always contextual. Given your long experience with Eduforge, what do you think?

5. Ken Udas - June 20th, 2007 at 5:10 pm

Craig, Thank you for the very thoughtful reply. First, I want to mention that Penn State (my home institution) is not engaged in “open source learning” at the institutional level. That said, a group of us is developing a white paper to start addressing such issues within the Penn State context, which should be very interesting. At some point the effort might merit a posting.

You mentioned in an earlier comment you mentioned a bold and exciting position of one of your Deans as follows:

Here at the Mona campus, the Dean of our largest faculty agreed that all faculty members should have access to all the faculty’s course websites on OurVLE, which in effect means that they would all be able to see all the learning designs, and importantly, how effective each was.

I am very interested in learning about faculty reaction to your Dean’s position on opening content. Were the faculty receptive to the idea, did the Dean prepare the faculty, how are you implementing this effort, and do you think it is a first step in opening content more broadly (outside of the faculty)? How are you measuring effectiveness?

I think that many of us who work in Universities could learn from your experience. Cheers, Ken

6. Craig Perue - June 26th, 2007 at 3:33 pm

The suggestion to make the content viewable by all faculty members was made by another faculty member who was interested in learning from the online teaching and learning that was already occurring in the faculty. While I wholeheartedly supported the suggestion I think it helped that the suggestion did not originate with the IT staff. The Dean canvassed his academic heads of department and the faculty members using OurVLE and so far as I know the decision was democratically made and embraced by faculty members. That the faculty members using OurVLE at the time were the more adventurous and open staff members no doubt helped in the initial success of this policy. The decision was communicated by the usual faculty mechanisms, and it has more or less become a standard way of how we operate. The academic heads of department have smoothly managed the few objections that have been raised. Semesterly emails about our policy regarding OurVLE operations are sent to faculty and support staff so that the policy message is continuously reinforced.

In response to your question about whether I think this move is a first step in opening content more broadly, I would say that openness within the institution allows us to begin thinking about opening the content to an even wider audience. Limited openness gives faculty members and the management team time to realize some of the implications of openness, adapt and begin thinking about the implications of even greater openness. However, whether that wider openness will ever e realized will depend on a lot of other factors such as what other tertiary institutions are doing, how or whether this wider opening will benefit the institution and the individual faculty members, and the other usual questions about a viable business model. In other words, I think that it remains to be seen when open source learning-teaching will be realized.

7. Ken Udas - June 28th, 2007 at 4:52 am

Craig, Thank you. It sounds as if part of your institution’s successful entry into internal organizational change is due to faculty leadership from the beginning of your efforts and ongoing communication. I think that it could be a great service to the larger education community for you and some of your colleagues at UWI to record your activities and make your story available to learn from.

Once again Craig, thank you for your contributions. Ken

8. Pat Masson - July 4th, 2007 at 8:42 pm

Craig,

Very interesting read. I think many of the points you raise regarding benefits to smaller institutions are spot on. However, while I wholeheartedly agree FLOSS provides the means for implementing a broad array of systems and services, especially in resource restricted institutions, many who argue against the use of FLOSS site the same as the very reason to use commercial offerings, emphasizing contracted support supplements the limited resources on campus.

While there are many examples of service providers who will gladly enter into a support contract to support open source applications, the arguments seem to persist. Considering the above, what really struck me was your comment, “I am very happy that I do not have to worry about my clients rejecting an open-source application because of a stigma attached. Except for the more tech-savvy clients who want to know that the applications they are using are open-source, few clients raise the issue of the license type.” Am I correct in assuming your clients do not raise issues regarding, “total cost of ownership,” “long term support,” “quality,” “added staff,” etc.?

In my post, I posed this very culture as the ideal: a faculty and administrative body who derives functional requirements/needs based on their business processes and leaves the technical requirements to the IT department.

Please share you secret, how did you achieve such a paradise?

9. Craig Perue - July 6th, 2007 at 8:34 am

Thanks for great questions. I hope my answers do them justice.

However, while I wholeheartedly agree FLOSS provides the means for implementing a broad array of systems and services, especially in resource restricted institutions, many who argue against the use of FLOSS site the same as the very reason to use commercial offerings, emphasizing contracted support supplements the limited resources on campus.

I think both arguments are valid in different contexts. In choosing between any number of products regardless of license types, I urge IT organizations (and their clients in appropriate situations) to look at “total cost of ownership,” “long term support,” “quality,” “added staff,” and how these software acquisitions would fit into the larger IT portfolio. In some markets contracted support for some products, whether FLOSS or proprietary, may be cheaper than hiring and training your own support staff. In that case the sensible thing to do is to contract the support. Even in such situations though, it may be to the organization’s advantage to choose a FLOSS rather than a proprietary product to avoid vendor lock-in for support.

In the Caribbean paying for contracted support usually means paying for international airfares and telephone bills because of the scarcity of appropriate local technology support staff. It also means paying fees for consultants that live in higher cost cities, and thus charge higher wages, than local staff would. All this makes for a very strong business case for hiring and training our own technology support staff who develop deep organizational smarts and contribute to our own capacity to innovate using FLOSS.

In my post, I posed this very culture as the ideal: a faculty and administrative body who derives functional requirements/needs based on their business processes and leaves the technical requirements to the IT department.

Please share you secret, how did you achieve such a paradise?

First, I was very fortunate to get the opportunity to build an IT Unit from scratch within the larger IT department. In that respect I was more fortunate than some CIOs who find themselves dropped into hostile organizational cultures which they must try to change both within the IT department and outside in the functional departments. Having the rare opportunity to build an IT Unit from scratch, I decided very early on to take the long view and try to develop a very specific type of IT organizational culture by:

It is critical to have systems and employees that project appropriate values and attitudes in all the interfaces or touchpoints with clients, so that an appropriate culture of partnership and interaction develops. At the start of my tenure in the IT department here, my goal in working with our clients was to build their trust in:

Most clients I have met believe that a half good solution implemented today is better than the best solution that never gets deployed. On the other hand, I have seen clients develop immense resistance to a software implementation projects because, with the best intentions in the world but the wrong approach, IT staff preached to the clients that this newest project was critical to taking the clients out of the dark ages, reforming their business processes, and saving the organization from perdition. This approach is usually unproductive for two major reasons:

I guess what I am saying is one has to work really hard to become a trusted advisor, by showing the clients respect, gaining their trust and working really hard to keep it.

Regards, Craig.

10. Patrick Masson - July 6th, 2007 at 10:46 am

Craig,

Thanks so much for the considered and detailed response–you have me thinking churning–I don’t know where to start.

I am particularly struck by

“I urge IT organizations (and their clients in appropriate situations) to look… …how these software acquisitions would fit into the larger IT portfolio.”

I wonder how many IT Departments have an accurate inventory of the scope of services and the number of systems (including their dependencies) they support (and even the operational costs associated with these)? When I entered my current position, I was struck by how unaware both the IT department and the campus (business units) were, of not only what was in production/development, but also how current systems and services were technically integrated with one another and functionally integrated within business processes. Without this understanding (portfolio management: http://www.cio.com/article/31864/Portfolio_Management_Done_Right/4 ), it seems logical, decision making, project readiness and prioritization will not be qualified and the risk of project failure increases.

Here at Delhi, I began the “inventory process” (building an IT portfolio) using an operational budget. Looking back at annual expenses from the past two years (that’s as far back as the records went!) allowed us to define groups of services (help desk, training, etc.) and list the systems (email, archiving, phones, etc. Further, and more detailed analysis (e.g. one time costs vs. repeating) provided greater detail into the services and systems but also their inter-dependencies. In the en, not only did we have an operational budget, but it was itemized based on the now defined IT Business Units.

What methods did you use to understand and develop your IT portfolio (even distance learning), especially considering the previous deployment of WebCT, where, after considerable time and effort, you where informed that the University simply could not afford that many licenses? Was that a reference point through which you demonstrated the need to better understand, perhaps not only your IT portfolio, but institutional goals and business processes as well (understanding the hesitance to preach or criticize)? It seems like a failed deployment of WebCT (for non-technical reasons), would be a good starting point to understand not only the IT portfolio, but also departments’ and even institutional objectives (i.e. why wasn’t there an understanding of the associated costs for a successful online learning program by the institution?) I just hope that kind of “learning experience” isn’t always needed!

I am also very impressed to hear of your, what might be called “institutional values.” I was wondering if you could give some examples of specific instances where these principles came into play, either with existing faculty/administration/IT staff (those who pre-dated your arrival) or with regard to a project? Did the issues with the WebCT deployment trigger a reassessment of the IT department’s culture and operations? Or if the culture was in place prior to or during the deployment of WebCT, what advise could you give for those who would like to implement the same culture, but avoid the first outcome?

And finally, the values described sound very much like the principles of the Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html ). While agile methods are usually associated with software development, how do you feel they might apply to the general field of IT project management and the various practices mentioned: COBIT, ITIL, PMBOK?

Craig, thanks again, I could go on and on-lots of neat stuff–you really have me thinking.

Patrick

11. Craig Perue - July 6th, 2007 at 2:01 pm

Thanks for more useful questions Pat.

What methods did you use to understand and develop your IT portfolio (even distance learning), especially considering the previous deployment of WebCT, where, after considerable time and effort, you where informed that the University simply could not afford that many licenses?

At the outset I used strategic analysis and planning methods such as SWOT analysis, forecasting, and the Balanced Scorecard but it was Service Level Management as defined in ITIL v.2 together with the Management Guidelines of PO3 (Define Technological Direction) in COBIT that were most helpful. Seeing the organization as the Executive Management team, faculty members, students and non-technology staff saw us – as a bunch of services (and costs) was important – so we created a Service Catalogue for dialogue with our clients, with a lot of ancillary data for internal management use (such as associated human resources, profitability etc.). Corresponding to the Service Catalogue, the Architectural standards would usually be the basis for beginning discussions about specific technologies with IT staff.

Was that a reference point through which you demonstrated the need to better understand, perhaps not only your IT portfolio, but institutional goals and business processes as well (understanding the hesitance to preach or criticize)?

Yes, it certainly was a major reference point. I think a lot of IT organizations have been battling with IT-business alignment in recent years. The buzz around IT governance and enterprise architecture, and the emerging prominence of frameworks such as ValIT and TOGAF, and new journals such as Microsoft’s The Architecture Journal attest to this. In the early days I did make a presentation to the IT Management team in which I suggested that we needed to do some soul-searching just as you have stated. I was gratified when I found an acronym I had coined to describe our core business processes (TLAR – for Teaching, Learning, Assessment and Research) started showing up in various discussions across the campus.

I am also very impressed to hear of your, what might be called “institutional values.” I was wondering if you could give some examples of specific instances where these principles came into play, either with existing faculty/administration/IT staff (those who pre-dated your arrival) or with regard to a project?

The deployment of OurVLE itself is probably the most visible example I can think of on this campus, where the right approach in deployment was critical. There was an immense amount of initial resistance from both IT staff and from faculty to the deployment of OurVLE for several reasons including:

The only way I saw to overcome this resistance was by building trust with potential clients. In particular I told faculty members that I could not guarantee that OurVLE would be prettier than any of the proprietary alternatives, but I would guarantee that it would be easier to use. I would not guarantee that it would provide all the features of the alternatives, but it would provide all those they were used to using. I would not guarantee that it would always work, but I would guarantee that I would always be honest with them about its status. And perhaps most importantly we did not tell anyone that if they did not adopt it, that their non-adoption meant they were backward. Quite the contrary, we emphasized that at the start we only expected the adventurous first adopters to jump in, and that we knew that others would come onboard once the system had been proved. Of course, increasingly more and more staff wanted to be “with it” and enthusiastically adopted. I think it helped that we did have major technical issues, especially with the chat module in the first year, and because we were very open with faculty members and students about it, and they saw that we were committed to working with them to get around the obstacles, they became very loyal clients, and evangelized our services all the more.

Did the issues with the WebCT deployment trigger a reassessment of the IT department’s culture and operations? Or if the culture was in place prior to or during the deployment of WebCT, what advise could you give for those who would like to implement the same culture, but avoid the first outcome?

I don’t know that it is entirely possible to avoid the first outcome, since once you are using proprietary software you may be at the mercy of your vendor regarding license fees. However, one can significantly reduce the risk by having good data and using that data in a structured planning and managing framework such as is described in the PMBOK. Unfortunately, as you have pointed out this data is not always readily available.

And finally, the values described sound very much like the principles of the Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html ). While agile methods are usually associated with software development, how do you feel they might apply to the general field of IT project management and the various practices mentioned: COBIT, ITIL, PMBOK?

In 2003-2004 I was very much a fan of the Agile Methods movement which may explain the similarities. But as a manager within a large institution, it is important to emphasize that work must be aligned with the larger formally defined institutional strategy and executed within the parameters defined by the overall control framework. At least two of the practices associated with agile methods are relevant to the provision of a wide range of IT services.

Regards, Craig.