Twenty Years: EDUCAUSE and Higher Education IT

While the R&E design of internet identity enabled scaling privacy, the subsequent developments in the marketplace failed to adopt those capabilities and in fact exploited them for commercial purposes. New forces (e.g., GDPR, the recent Facebook, Google, and soon Amazon scandals of privacy abuses) will slowly rebalance privacy on the network.
—KEN KLINGENSTEIN

The traditional IT organization will be completely absorbed into the business areas of the institution, with "pure IT" activities such as networking and telecommunications residing with infrastructure support groups. Technology will continue to advance, allowing easier integration of small, bite-sized services that together provide ancillary business functions outside our core ERP services, which will cloud-hosted and vendor-supported. The best career opportunities will be for those with strong technical skills but also the competencies that guide the business in the best use of technology to add value.
—TIMOTHY CHESTER

Higher education is going through a transition. We saw it hit a fever point in 2012 with the rise of the "massive open online courses" (or MOOCs), and a rubicon was crossed. While that fever has abated from a panic/crisis situation, the underlying impact on information technology and the more traditional way universities operate is still happening and accelerating — though perhaps not as loudly with all the sound and fury of the MOOC crisis. Higher education must adapt to changing student needs, new technology tools, competitors, funding pressures from competition, and government withdrawal from supporting it. In the 2020s, those universities that don't find ways to adapt, improvise, and overcome the challenges will, like the snows of yesteryear, be gone from this earth.
—BRIAN D. VOSS

Cultures take a long time to digest change. The next twenty years will be spent redefining education in the context of the modalities offered to us by the new tools, both physical and virtual, that the digital world affords us. We have not yet fully realized the potential of Claude Shannon's vision of a digital information society for cultural reasons, not technological ones. Repositioning our institutions and decision-making structures around the implications of this shift will pose major challenges to industrial-based educational systems (as well as almost all other governmental, societal, and cultural organizations) at all levels.
—TOM HAYMES

We must look back and notice just how much change has occurred in higher education (and IT specifically) in the past twenty years and understand that this rate of change not only will be maintained but will accelerate. We must continue to look for ways to adapt our thinking to changes in the landscape — technological, political, and pedagogical. What we must learn from the past is that change is going to happen, and fighting it can be done for only a short period before it overcomes us. Will we learn these lessons of our past? Will we be able to not only catch our breath from the pace of change but also set our keels deep for even rougher waters ahead? This is a question for us all to ponder. I hope the answer is yes, we will learn and we will be part of change, not part of trying to hold back the tide.
—BRIAN D. VOSS

Higher education institutions will be slow to cede our local independence to the formidable economic shift to digital scale on many common services. An economically driven market shakeout will thin the number of institutions by at least one-third by 2030, if not sooner. Internal intransigence that blocks innovation/adaptation will prove fatal for some institutions.
—BRAD WHEELER

The French have a saying: Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. ("The more things change, the more they remain the same.") Yes, every day the world of higher ed IT looks different from the day before. Yet many of the underlying objectives, methods, and principles embedded in the enterprise of applying technology to teaching, learning, and research remain the same. Understanding the evolution of technology in higher education is an invaluable asset to those change agents whose vision is focused squarely on the future. At the very least, knowledge of the past can help them avoid the mistakes made by their predecessors.
—MARTY RINGLE

Knowledge, in its many forms, is omnipresent. We are globally connected. We are mobile. We are easily accessible. We have voices that can be heard far and wide. Yet the academy has been slow to accept a model in which technology serves as a conduit to support learning. We still question the benefits of online learning, we discourage students from bringing mobile devices to class, we require our students to invest in outdated print resources, and we test on knowledge that is obsolete. As educators, as stewards of knowledge, we need to take advantage of the inherent qualities that technology affords us. Our past should not define our future.
—SUSAN E. METROS

The past was marked by increasing debt, decreasing funding, and a sense of historical baggage — the "that is not the tradition of Whatsamatter U." Higher education has also been made the scapegoat (education in general, actually) by well-funded special interests. We must find ways around these issues going forward.
—JIM PHELPS

The main lesson I draw from the past is that the initial implementation of technology is experienced as "all good." But it does not take long for the dark side to emerge. The lesson from this for the future is that the sooner we reflect on the potential dark side from a new technology, the better we will be able to design and deploy that new technology. We must also temper our tendency to think that technology is anything more than a tool. Finally, just because we can design it and deploy it and use it does not automatically mean we should do any of that.
—JOHN C. CAVANAUGH

Issues related to leadership and management of organizations have a long history. An organization's ability to successfully adapt to unpredictable and rapid technological change is more about its organizational culture than the size of staff or budget. IT leaders need to become more knowledgeable about the challenges facing higher education in general to better shape their organizational development.
—DAVID SMALLEN

The establishment of organizations like EDUCAUSE gave voice to and fostered community among those whose work plays an increasingly fundamental role in support for, enablement of, and innovation in the core research and academic missions of our institutions. As we move into the future, both known and unknown, we should not lose sight of those important foundations. That is the source of the strength of EDUCAUSE and the institutions it serves.
—BOB FLYNN

Our past is a truly unique sense of purpose and community that will also be our foundation in the future. When we are stuck intellectually, we seek guidance and help from our colleagues. We don't hesitate to reach out to people at other institutions to ask how they are doing something and to learn from our shared wisdom. Many of us are also part of systems, organizations, or consortiums (including EDUCAUSE) that help us to collaborate even more closely and openly. No matter what technology may come next, I am confident our strength as a sharing and open culture will guide us on how to make the technology work for higher education.
—MEGGAN LEVITT

The past should always teach us humility. Many visions of our glorious future have emerged since the beginnings of the digital revolution going back seventy years or more. Technology has often limited the realizations of these visions in the short term, but almost all of the technological hurdles have been overcome in the longer term. What is often missing in those visions is the capacity of human societies to change. That factor has fundamentally dictated the kind of present we now experience. We should not lose sight of this as we look forward to the next twenty years. The possibilities opened by digital technology are exploding at an exponential rate. However, the capacity of our societal institutions to keep up with that rate acts as a brake on change. As a result, technological proliferation is stunted, redirected, and transformed in unexpected ways as we adapt tools to suit our preconceptions of what "technology" means. Humans have been doing this for millennia, but never before at this rate. It remains to be seen how we adapt.
—TOM HAYMES

Always have a plan/vision, and review that plan annually, because five years out is a moving target in technology. Also, implement and own your new technology decisions. Leverage and build on what exists while not being scared to restart — with a plan . . .
—GEOFF CIRULLO

As a graduate student more than forty years ago, I taught a course on the ethics of technology to a group of (mostly) IBM software engineers. I went to great lengths to emphasize that the thrill of inventing new technologies needed to be tempered by an understanding of how those technologies might alter society and impact individuals. The engineers were intensely appreciative of the course and spoke frequently about the parallels between their work and the development of nuclear arms technology three decades before. They felt the weight of their responsibility to use their knowledge and skills to make the world a better place. Now, as we embark on the practical implementation of artificial intelligence (and tools like IBM's Watson), the need to be mindful of the ethical implications of what we do — especially in education — is greater than ever. Let's not screw it up.
—MARTY RINGLE

More than ever, higher education institutions need to attract and maintain the brightest minds in the field. We cannot afford to be relegated to "consumers" of various technologies that we must somehow adapt to the teaching and learning mission. We must seek to actively and forcefully impact the directions in which areas such as LMSs, VR, and mobile learning are moving. A governmental effort to support and enhance innovation in the educational IT area would be very welcome. Far too few ideas and products that originate from the higher ed environment get developed into commercial products and successes. If we want the right tools to support the best-possible learning in the future, we need more influence and control and support for bright, creative minds to develop these tools, rather than waiting until a private company sees a way to profit from developing them.
—JACOB E. LARSEN

Our biggest challenge is to maintain the role of intermediaries between secondary education and the business sector, through digital transformation, integrating IT into the core of the business model.
—LLUÍS ALFONS ARIÑO

I remain concerned that campus senior leaders — presidents, their cabinets, and their governing boards — are not yet fully grasping what is happening around us and what will be in store for us. I fear that like dinosaurs, many will continue to eat and live in the moment and not adapt to changing conditions. Simply put, most campus leaders do not grasp the transformation under way, do not understand that it is IT-centric and IT-driven, and continue to view IT as some sort of luxury or extravagance rather than as a fundamental component of their future success (and survival). EDUCAUSE must go beyond gathering the IT clergy together and must reach outside of this audience to better engage those organizations that perform similar functions for the rest of institutional leadership. The message must get out to these leaders, and EDUCAUSE must play a bigger and stronger role in getting that message out.
—BRIAN D. VOSS

One thing we know about IT, including higher ed IT, is that it will change. We must prepare not only our technology environments for this change, but also our people. It is tremendously important that we continue professional development for our staff, teach our future leaders how to lead in a new environment, challenge our own thinking so that we do not resist change, and embrace the good to support our institutions and further education and learning for generations to come.
—SUE WORKMAN

I have been fortunate, in a career spanning over forty years in higher education, to witness the senior leadership posts in our profession be elevated from second-class campus citizenship to the highest level of academic policymaking. Many have worked hard for that visibility and now enjoy the stressful burdens of the continuing limelight as challenge after challenge confronts the higher ed IT world.
—MIKE ROBERTS

Years ago I was introduced to a quote by Eric Hoffer that has been as durable as it has become endearing: "In times of change learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." To the extent we have become learners in higher education, I believe the future looks bright. Innovation expands opportunity, unless you are wed to the past. I have long been moved by Karl Fisch's video "What If?" After listing a variety of what proved to be ignorant statements about various forms of emerging technologies, Fisch concludes: "What if . . . we'd listened?" I wonder if something I have said that argued for a limitation as to what would be possible will someday be included in Fisch's presentation. My hope is we can be learners always, challenging ourselves to think differently about the systems we currently help to define, design, implement, maintain, improve, and retire.
—ERIC DENNA