One of the greatest responsibilities of a member organization like EDUCAUSE is to listen to the members of the community and work to ensure that the work we do is on target — that we are helping our members address their most pressing needs and making progress with their most promising opportunities. To do this well, we need to be a learning organization — and a listening organization.
In August 2017, we convened three expert panels with leaders and stakeholders from the EDUCAUSE community to share insights about some particularly consequential topics facing higher education information technology.
Professional Learning
Members of the community look to EDUCAUSE to help them acquire both the skills needed to advance in their careers and the specialized knowledge required to navigate the ever-changing landscape of information technology. The first day's panel recognized the strength of our current programs while pushing us to aim higher. Increasingly, colleges and universities look to EDUCAUSE to support the professional learning needs of teams as well as individuals. Members want training and development that targets day-to-day management challenges such as recruiting staff, mentoring young professionals, and enabling conflict resolution, as well as guidance on leading change and building effective working relationships with leaders across the institution. The advice we heard was remarkable both in its consistency on some points — such as the enduring value of face-to-face meetings — and in its enthusiasm about the possibilities of online learning opportunities tailored to specific interest groups within our community.
The EDUCAUSE professional development portfolio has evolved over the years, and today we find ourselves at a wonderful transition point as we look to "reimagine professional learning," one of our three strategic priorities. We recently hired a senior director of professional learning, Meaghan Duff, just in time to participate in this vibrant discussion about changes we can make in this critical area. She will lead our multi-year effort to enhance significantly the content and user experience of EDUCAUSE professional learning, including our conferences, online events, and Institute programs. We're making investments in personnel to add delivery capacity and in technology to support scaling and personalize learning pathways that can be customized to members' development needs and career aspirations. In addition, we plan to introduce changes to make professional development opportunities available to more individuals.
Next-Generation Digital Environments
In 2015, EDUCAUSE launched an important conversation about next generation digital learning environments — a topic that has received a great deal of national attention in spite of what may well be the most ungainly acronym ever, NGDLE. This original report looked beyond the traditional LMS to imagine what the next-generation digital ecosystem might look like, concluding that no single application is likely to deliver a comprehensive solution. Instead, the report recommended a "Lego" approach, with the following principal functional domains: interoperability; personalization; analytics, advising, and learning assessment; collaboration; and accessibility and universal design.
In July 2017, I wrote about this continuing conversation, and shortly after that we gathered an expert panel to take up this topic with a new lens. For this panel, we broadened the discussion of NGDLEs by losing a letter. Acknowledging that information technology is increasingly a central part of everything that colleges and universities do, not just teaching and learning, we took as our subject NGDEs: next-generation digital environments. To frame our discussions, we said that NGDEs undergird the digitization of higher education by generating data and applying analytics to those data and by enabling institutional constituents to use and adapt the environments to meet their individual needs and preferences. By providing tailored analysis based on data in a real-time manner, NGDEs have the potential for far-reaching impact.
As the NGDE expert panel turned its attention to recommendations for EDUCAUSE, there was acknowledgement of the need to clearly describe and catalyze the work that higher education needs to undertake. The panel suggested that EDUCAUSE form a task force to help direct the NDGE work in order to (1) develop a clear definition and a compelling call to action for higher education, (2) initiate that call to action through collaboration with other associations and stakeholders to help higher education realize the urgency, benefits, and extensive implications of NGDEs, (3) develop opportunities for alignment between vendors and institutions, and (4) collect, develop, and promote resources to support institutional work.
DEI: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Education and information technology are often credited as being "democratizing" forces, enabling individuals from any background to participate fully in aspects of life that have historically favored people based on class, gender, race, religion, ability, status, and other factors. However, diversity among the higher education IT workforce lags behind national figures, according to recent ECAR research. Many higher education IT leaders are working to address problems and opportunities relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus, and our third expert panel spent the day talking about what EDUCAUSE can do to make a difference in this area. In some ways, this topic was the most difficult to discuss, involving issues such as conscious and implicit bias and taking a hard look at ways our IT organizations may be less welcoming than we think they are. While the conversations can be challenging, we heard quite clearly that our members look to us to share resources and practices to advance DEI in higher education information technology. The panel's many suggestions for weaving DEI content and learning opportunities seamlessly through EDUCAUSE channels — including EDUCAUSE Review, Institutes, conferences, research, and benchmarking — have already begun to inform 2018 offerings. A follow-on member task force will more deeply explore options and recommendations for steps we can take to increase the diversity of our community.
Moving Forward
All three expert panels sparked engaging and rich discussions. The best indication of their success was not the answers they revealed but the conversations they started. For those of us at EDUCAUSE, these opportunities to listen deeply to representatives of our community are energizing, grounding, and foundational to our work in building programs and finding solutions that will benefit all members.
John O'Brien is President and CEO of EDUCAUSE.
© 2017 John O'Brien. The text of this work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License.