Panelists’ Perspectives on the EDUCAUSE 2020 Top 10 IT Issues

Four members of the EDUCAUSE 2019–2020 Top 10 IT Issues Panel offer their perspectives on the EDUCAUSE 2020 Top 10 IT Issues.

Edward Aractingi
Chief Information Officer, Marshall University

F. Meena Lakhavani
Chief Information Officer and Vice Provost, Information Technology Services, State University of New York–Erie

Madhavi Marasinghe
Chief Information Officer, University of North Dakota

Ernie Perez
Director, Educational Technology, Digital Learning & Innovation, Boston University

These leaders focused on three of the 2020 Top 10 IT Issues:

• Digital Integrations (#4)
• Student-Centric Higher Education (#5)
• Higher Education Affordability (#8)

Perez: Digital Integrations (#4)

Ensuring system interoperability, scalability, and extensibility, as well as data integrity, security, standards, and governance, across multiple applications and platforms

At the end of January 2020, EDUCAUSE Review published "Top 10 IT Issues, 2020: The Drive to Digital Transformation Begins."¹ I would like to dive in a bit deeper on one issue and discuss educational technology integrations and how educational technologists can apply some of the top 10 IT issues to their everyday work.

When considering educational technologies for our colleges and universities, we must think about these tools holistically. They should (ideally) be able to connect easily with existing technologies that are already on campus. These digital integrations are done via established standards like Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), and they should bolt on to the Learning Management System (LMS), Student Information System (SIS), advising system, and/or other established campus systems. They should be able to support Single Sign-On (SSO) and other campus-wide security tools to ensure they are easy to use by both faculty and students. SSO is critical to maintaining a secure environment and allowing students to seamlessly use various tools without the need to sign in every time they move around the ecosystem of campus tools. All of these things fall under the next-generation digital learning environment (NGDLE) or ecosystem.

When tools are being evaluated, they must also be vetted by the campus information security office to ensure the privacy of student data. These reviews should follow established standards for interoperability and data security. In addition, educational technologists should perform a review of Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessibility and work closely with the office of the general counsel to assess contracts.

Going back to integrations, another key aspect is the ability to pull data out of these systems. What good is having great teaching and learning tools if you can't learn from them? In an ideal world, these integrations allow for a systematic way of extracting data out of them and depositing it into your own academic data warehouse, institutional data lake, or learning record store (LRS). Working with vendors to ensure that the data can be pulled via known standards, such as Caliper Analytics, is just as important as how the tools connect to campus systems.

As I recently stated in "6 Ed Tech Trends to Watch in 2020":  "Analytics are no longer nice to have but a must-have."² Learning analytics is commonly defined as the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts. Learning analytics is the holy grail to retain students and help them persist to graduation.

In "Teaching and Learning Perspectives on the EDUCAUSE 2020 Top 10 IT Issues," Rob Gibson points out that the constant influx of teaching and learning applications enabling the learning environment to support disparate modes of learning can provide an institution with a "competitive advantage."³ I argue that the competitive advantage comes from being able to see how students use these tools to learn and where they get "stuck" and from being able to make the data actionable so as to personalize and customize content.

However, to create learning analytics dashboards, you have to be able to use data from across the institution and from all the different teaching and learning applications. Without a standardized way of extracting data from these digital integrations, you will be adding a level of complexity to using the data. Or even worse, if you are not able to extract data from these systems, you cannot create the whole picture of how the learner is learning. If you are able to use all the data that exists about the learner in real time, you can have a greater understanding of the learning and the environments in which the learning occurs. That's the real competitive advantage.

Educational technologists should also consider how the data will be used. The Association of Institutional Research (AIR) recently published a "Statement of Ethical Principles" that included the following suggestions:

• Recognize the consequences of data usage on "people and situations."
• Make efforts to protect data from "misuse or use that could cause . . . harm."
• Act as "responsible data stewards."
• Provide "accurate and contextualized information" to prevent the misuse of data.

In conclusion, this year's Top 10 IT Issues are, as always, very applicable across the IT landscape in higher education. Educational technology professionals need to continue working across the campus with stakeholders and vendors to move the needle forward and to ensure that quality digital integrations are used throughout the teaching and learning technology and software portfolio at their institutions. They should continue to request and/or require vendors to adhere to interoperability standards. This will help surface actionable data to assist in creating great learning analytics dashboards to help faculty and learning experience designers (instructional designers) improve teaching and learning without compromising data security and ethical principles around data usage.

Lakhavani: Student-Centric Higher Education (#5)

Creating a student-services ecosystem to support the entire student life cycle, from prospecting to enrollment, learning, job placement, alumni engagement, and continuing education

If I have an opportunity to create a student-centric higher education ecosystem, I will be considering the student's higher education experience holistically—specifically, from the perspective of today's and tomorrow's students, who expect the utmost flexibility. This includes location flexibility: students want to be able to move from one institution to another, whether institutions are in another city, or another state, or even another country. They want to be able to pick up academic work from where they left off, with minimal educational interruptions. Currently, this level of agility requires a tremendous amount of planning, collaboration, and policy work.

I'd like to start dreaming about how we can achieve this level of agility and encourage exploration of our creativity. The following are some of elements we can contemplate for the development of a flexible and portable institutional system for student-centric higher education:

• Portable Student Records: a portable institutional system used to recognize students' records and transfer them appropriately and efficiently based on the admission criteria set forth by the receiving institution. This system will allow students the flexibility to continue their education from wherever they are without losing time. It will enable students to focus on academics rather than administrative logistics. It will also allow students to explore and enjoy life experiences while continuing their academic journey.
• Portable Student Academic Credentials: a portable institutional system used to create a repository of academic credentials for those students interested in transferring between institutions. The term credential could encompass educational certificates, degrees, certifications, and government-issued licenses. This system will allow students to have all their academic credentials in one place rather than distributed over the institutions they have attended in the past. It will empower students to focus on learning rather than getting bogged down with administrative details.
• Portable Personalized Learning: a portable institutional system used to create a personalized learning portfolio that can be moved with a student from institution to institution. This system will allow students to continue to receive targeted, high-quality instruction without going through an array of assessments at each institution. It will create a repository of students' personalized learning profiles and will track students' individualized or personalized educational experiences. A customized experience—in which students guide their learning, go at their own pace, and in some cases, make their own decisions about what to learn—is something the next generation of students will expect.
• Portable Adaptive Learning: a portable institutional system used to remediate struggling students or challenge gifted ones. Adaptive learning tools analyze a student's performance and modify teaching methods and the curriculum based on that data. This system will allow students to receive targeted learning assistance from anywhere and will create a repository of students' adaptive learning profiles and associated information.
• Portable Academic Portfolio: a portable institutional system used to show evidence of learning progress and academic accomplishment, including awards, honors, activities, internships, and jobs. This system will create a repository of students' academic portfolios to be made available when students transfer from institution to institution.

These elements of a portable institutional system for student-centric higher education have the potential to increase student satisfaction and retention, as well as lifelong learning. They also provide an opportunity to improve responsiveness to students' needs at an institutional level. Our current higher education system can be made more efficient by automating tasks now being performed manually by administrators and faculty. Doing so will allow administrators and faculty to focus on providing the value-added services desired by today's and tomorrow's students.

Marasinghe: Student-Centric Higher Education (#5)

Creating a student-services ecosystem to support the entire student life cycle, from prospecting to enrollment, learning, job placement, alumni engagement, and continuing education

While the EDUCAUSE 2020 Top 10 IT Issues carried forward some familiar issues from previous years, the new issues that made the list include developing a student-centric approach to college/university strategic plans, with an emphasis on using data-informed decision-making and fostering an integrated technology approach to provide a better learner experience. Issue #5 further emphasizes the need for higher education institutions to create an ecosystem that supports the entire student life cycle, from prospective student to alum and beyond.

Postsecondary education is undergoing a transformation in how we work with our students. Demographics are changing, students' needs are growing more complex, the use of technology is increasing exponentially, and in all areas, the general public is questioning the value of a college education. Institutions have traditionally taken a teacher-centric and curriculum-based approach. But external constituent groups are forcing us to rethink how we serve lifelong learners. It is no longer possible to serve learners with the traditional format, methods, and modalities. We need to adapt to the changing forces of the twenty-first century to better help our learners by redefining our focus to a more student-centric approach.

Learners no longer are interested in, or have the patience for, using multiple, unintegrated software applications. They demand a holistic approach to learning, seeing their progress, and achieving their goals. Because of the financial impact of a college/university experience that does not promote on-time graduation, learners will not stand for a haphazard educational IT system. In addition, learners want to know how this holistic IT approach will lead them to finding a meaningful job in their field of study. For us to keep learners involved in maintaining connections with their alma maters and continuing their lifelong education, we must think about how we communicate with students, how education and services are delivered, and how we engage with students throughout their lifetimes.

A prevalent issue that most institutions face is the reliance on legacy technology systems. These systems are not fully integrated to provide education and services more efficiently to meet the needs of our students. While maintaining these systems requires a considerable amount of effort, replacing the systems with newer technology requires substantial funding, vision, and commitment. The change will be a major lift and will be difficult for technical and functional users. But we must make the change. Given the evolving nature of how higher education is delivered, every institution must assess priorities and realign resources to create a student-centric ecosystem.

Today's technology-savvy learners expect education and services to be available anywhere, at any time, and in their preferred modality. In this way, higher education technologies are no different from consumer technologies. Our learners expect technology to be integrated with voice activation and with artificially intelligent assistants to help them navigate through class schedules and to-do lists and to send reminders or nudges to help them succeed. They expect help to be timely, relevant, and personalized. Even though learners will use a plethora of software systems throughout their lifetimes, the disintegrated systems do not provide a holistic view of the student. While the learning management system can provide a glimpse into how a student is performing in class, that alone is not a good indicator of student success or how well the student is prepared for gainful employment.

Combining and analyzing data from student advising software, customer relations management solutions, student information systems, and other student-facing success platforms can provide a holistic view of student engagement. The slicing and dicing of data allows institutions to get a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by the institution, as well as by individual learners. Unfortunately, legacy systems remain, and technology solutions have not been integrated to maximize the use of data. Institutional departments continue to operate in silos, and decisions continue to be made at a micro level. By making an effort to move toward newer technologies and working together toward a single goal of student success, those of us in higher education will be better equipped to provide timely and personalized support to help learners meet their needs.

Creating a student-centric ecosystem requires better-integrated technology and decisions based on data. It requires partnerships reaching across the institution and working toward the same goal. It requires thinking differently and creating opportunities to innovate. It requires collaboration, not just within the institution but across institutions, partnering with vendors, industries, and city and state governments. It requires a commitment to change, in both culture and technology. Moving to a student-centric ecosystem is not easy. But the benefits reaped from reconfiguring how we serve our learners can be rewarding not only to students but also to the institution.

Aractingi: Higher Education Affordability (#8)

Aligning IT organizations‚ priorities, and resources with institutional priorities and resources to achieve a sustainable future

Affordability is a serious issue facing higher education. Getting a college or university degree is becoming more important today than at any other time in history. In fact, 95 percent of jobs created since the end of the US recession in 2009 were filled by people with at least some higher education. Furthermore, in 2015, bachelor degree recipients' median earnings were 67 percent higher than those of high school graduates.⁴

However, going to college has become exceedingly expensive. Tuition and fees increased 63 percent between 2006 and 2016. College cost is not just tuition and fees, of course; tuition and fees constitute only 39 percent of the total budget for in-state students living on campus at public four-year institutions.⁵

Consequently, low-income students are suffering from tremendous financial burden to attend and stay in college. This strongly impacts their chances of graduation and success. Of the 86,000 students who participated in the #RealCollege Survey, 45 percent reported they had been food-insecure in the past thirty days and 56 percent said they had been housing-insecure in the previous year.⁶ Higher education leaders are acknowledging these grave affordability concerns and are prioritizing initiatives to strategically fight hunger, housing insecurity, and other affordability issues facing their students. 

Why is higher education more expensive than ever? The balance between the rising cost of conducting campus business and the sustainability and affordability of its services to students is complex. To maintain quality education, institutions are offering higher wages to attract qualified professors and staff. Infrastructure projects are growing, and campuses are expanding to stay competitive and meet students' needs.

In addition, in the current technology environment, new investments are crucially needed to face today's challenges. Security services are a prime example. Not surprisingly, security is again at the top of the EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT Issues, and institutions are, rightfully, paying a great deal of attention to cybersecurity risks. Because of the increased threats of targeted attacks and the complex hacking attempts for phishing and compromising user accounts, IT departments are investing in expensive security appliances, tools, services, and personnel to protect their campuses and students such as application firewalls, internet filtering, introduction detection/prevention systems, log management software, and awareness training.

Another increase is the cost of infrastructure simply due to growth: in bandwidth utilization, in the number of ports needed when constructing new buildings or labs, in connected hardware units including mobile, gaming, and smart devices, and in the expansion of usage of cloud services. Finally, since funding for most public institutions, as well as private donations, are only decreasing, most institutions, both public and private, have relied on tuition increases to sustain their fiscal balance.

What is the role of IT leaders in addressing affordability? As CIOs are becoming more integrative (Issue #10, The Integrative CIO) and strategic, they should be supporting their institutions when facing challenges. Technology leaders have the opportunity to play a critical role in supporting their institutions' mission of reducing the cost of education and in helping business units do more with less.

When confronted with the rising cost of technology, most finance-savvy leaders, including CFOs and CIOs, look at reducing cost through consolidating, outsourcing, reducing waste, sunsetting services, and targeting the containment of the incremental increases in various contracts like ERPs and LMSs. But there is more IT leaders can do. They can also use their innovations to implement creative ideas that will enable their institutions to make higher education more affordable. Through projects such as meal-sharing, technology device rotation, lending programs, and smart scholarship matching systems, IT leaders can directly help students in supporting their needs.

Many incoming students struggle to find information about what scholarships are available for them and what they're eligible for. Software and services that auto-match students based on their profiles and that communicate with them about what they may be eligible for not only eliminate a lot of paperwork but also encourage donors to continue their scholarship, since they know that students are benefitting.

As noted above, food-insecurity is one of the major issues facing college students. But there are ways to alleviate the issue. Food pantries are common on many campuses, and facilitating donations through websites is the simplest means to support food pantries. Work between the IT department , the student affairs office, and the office of food services could lead to a meal-sharing app that would facilitate students' donations of unused meals to be given to other students. The meals can be added to campus ID accounts, allowing students to protect their confidentiality. Another common program is using no- or low-cost open textbooks.⁷

Also, while most students have access to computer devices, many still use only public computer labs because they can't afford to buy their own or to replace a failed or broken device. IT departments can offer a checkout model allowing students to take a laptop or tablet and use it for their homework from their dorm room or while traveling. Cellular mobile hotspots are also helpful to students when visiting their families in places where they may not have access to broadband.

Affordability—and any other institutional issues like reputation, branding, growth, retention, and success—are IT issues. CIOs and IT leaders should align their IT organizations‚ priorities, and resources with institutional priorities and what matter the most to their institutions.

Notes

1. Susan Grajek and the 2019–2020 EDUCAUSE IT Issues Panel, "Top 10 IT Issues, 2020: The Drive to Digital Transformation Begins," EDUCAUSE Review Special Report (January 27, 2020). ↩
2. Quoted in Rhea Kelly, "6 Ed Tech Trends to Watch in 2020," Campus Technology, February 13, 2020. ↩
3. Malcolm Brown, Rob Gibson, Linda Jorn, and Phil Ventimiglia, "Teaching and Learning Perspectives on the EDUCAUSE 2020 Top 10 IT Issues," EDUCAUSE Review Special Report (January 27, 2020). ↩
4. Center on Education and the Workforce, Georgetown University, America's Divided Recovery: College Haves and Have-Nots (2016); College Board, "College Education Linked to Higher Pay, Job Security, Healthier Behaviors and More Civic Involvement," January 9, 2017. ↩
5. Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, "College Tuition and Fees Increase 63 Percent since January 2006," The Economics Daily, August 30, 2016; Trends in College Pricing 2019 (College Board, November 2019). ↩
6. Sara Goldrick-Rab, Christine Baker-Smith, Vanessa Coca, Elizabeth Looker, and Tiffani Williams, College and University Basic Needs Insecurity: A National #RealCollege Survey Report [https://hope4college.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/HOPE_realcollege_National_report_digital.pdf] (April 2019). ↩
7. "Faculty Look to Help Cut Textbook Costs for Students," Marshall University Communications, January 13, 2020. ↩

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