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.