Speeches

Bats, Owls, Vampires and Other Creatures of the Night

I am pleased to note that gathered in this room are some of America's best information technology experts. Today, I want to talk about the role of technology in making universities more student-centered.

I was deeply honored to be asked to give the Claire Maple Address for a couple of reasons. The first is the caliber of individuals here. The second is because Claire Maple was such a highly respected leader in the field of technology and a strong voice within higher education. I knew Claire Maple from a distance when I was a student at Iowa State in the 1960s, back when Bill Gates was a child and computers weighed more than a ton. Even as an undergraduate at Iowa State, I was aware of Maple's leadership in the field, and I was fortunate to be among the first cohort of individuals to take courses in computer science when that discipline was in its infancy. This plenary session is a wonderful tribute to a man who possessed a vast amount of knowledge and foresight, and who was able to inspire others to act upon that vision.

Today's Students

I know your program lists the title of my talk as "A President's View of the Future of Information Technology," but I have a subtitle as well -- one that I think more aptly fits what I wish to discuss with you today.

"Bats, Owls, Vampires and Other Creatures of the Night." Allow me to explain. Many of those we serve in higher education have habits similar to the aforementioned group. Universities are peculiar places -- not really a news flash for anyone in this room. For decades we have operated on a schedule that works really well for faculty and staff-- 8 a.m to 5 p.m. for the most part. But students are really creatures of the night. They avoid the early morning hours if they can. When they must take an 8 a.m. class, they often sleep through it.

At Penn State, where we have 41,000 students on our University Park campus, a large segment of students come to life as the day goes on.

Students do most of their productive work at night and, I suspect, they are a lot like the folks in this room. I have found that many IT professionals keep similar hours and get more creative as the evening wears on. For some of your staff, if they are around at 8 in the morning, it's probably because they have been there since the night before.

So if the ideal schedule for students, or IT professionals, is afternoon or evening, why do we persist in running the university on an 8 to 5 schedule? Why is every system in the university from admissions to student affairs to career services and counseling services set up for the convenience of faculty and staff?

Every year, I spend some time in the residence halls, rooming for an evening with incoming freshmen. It's part of the way I keep in touch with the students and it's a method for learning a lot about their lifestyles and expectations. I first began this ritual at Penn State about seven years ago. It was in that year that I discovered that student expectations for social activities increase as the clock moves closer to midnight. It was move-in day. At around midnight there were a dozen men gathered in my room. I had finished boring everyone with magic tricks when one of the guys said, "So what should we do now?"

These students were just getting started and wanted some entertainment, some fun, but there was not much to do at that hour except sleep. This provided for the kernel of an idea for Late Night Penn State, a program that keeps our student union open around the clock and provides late-night entertainment on the weekends. If we can recognize that the social life of students picks up after 10 p.m., why haven't we noticed that other aspects of their lives are also dramatically different?

The so-called "traditional" students of this generation have never known a world without personal computers, compact discs, fax machines, VCRs, or the Internet. They are extremely comfortable with technology and display a level of expertise that belies their age. I know that some of you in this room have encountered student with more knowledge about computers than some of your staff. The question of requiring students to bring a computer to campus is really moot now at most of our universities.

Today's students are also practiced in doing a number of things simultaneously, like listening to music ... while talking on the telephone ... while browsing the Internet ... while instant messaging friends ... while eating. Our methods of instruction and our services need to take into account this multitasking lifestyle.

The Federal Communications Commission estimates that nationwide, 61 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds carry cell phones. ^[1] You can't walk across a campus in America without seeing students pressing cell phones to their ears -- not necessarily imparting critical information, but merely telling the person on the other end that he or she is walking to class or the student union.

For those going to the library, they'll sit down at a computer terminal, log on to their favorite search engine and do their research. In a national survey of second-year students, 78 percent said they frequently searched the Web for course-related information, while only 26 percent said they went to the library to read or study.^[2] Some universities are renovating their libraries by moving book stacks and replacing them with computer labs and digital media centers. Circulation figures suggest that today's students prefer to get their information online. Why would someone ask the librarian when he or she could Ask Jeeves instead? Faculty members openly worry that the Internet is fostering a generation of students whose critical thinking skills are no longer being challenged because of the multitude of information at their fingertips. While the first popular Internet browser came out only a decade ago, it has already altered substantially the way students obtain "facts" and how we train scholarly minds.^[3]

The expectation levels of both faculty and students have dramatically risen as technology has changed the educational opportunities for everyone. Technology is a pervasive force in the lives of our students and we must continue to rethink our approach to teaching and learning to meet these elevated expectations of our students, many who increasingly will not be residents of our campuses or alternatively will be residents on campus but will spend more of their time learning from behind a wired or wireless device.

In fact, demographically, almost 75 percent of undergraduates are considered "nontraditional" because of their age, enrollment status or the fact that they are not supported by their parents.^[4] Almost half of all college students in the United States today -- some 6.5 million -- are over the age of 25, and that number is expected to increase to 7.1 million by 2010.^[5] Yet many parts of our University operate as if we are serving only 18- to 22-year-olds who live within the confines of our campuses. The reality is that this year, 2.2 million students are expected to enroll in distance learning courses, up from 710,000 in 1998, an annual growth rate of 33 percent.^[6]

We must ask ourselves: "Are we planning adequately for their needs?"

The CIO as Partner and Educator

As recently as 10 to15 years ago, our information technology leaders were the Rodney Dangerfields of the university -- looking for some respect. In some cases, you employed guerrilla tactics to accomplish your initiatives.

Today, you no longer need to place administrators in a headlock to gain their attention. You have our attention. In fact, the latest Educause survey shows that the issues most identified by IT professionals in higher education are the same issues I frequently hear bemoaned by presidents across the country when talking about information technology. Staffing concerns, distance education, funding, faculty development, and strategic planning are now a dominant part of a university president's daily dialogue.

You are a critical component of the education and research enterprise. You are educators and facilitators of the teaching and learning process.

Becoming More Student-Centered

As a university president, I want the university to be more student-centered, and I see information technology as a very important tool for achieving this vision. By student-centered I mean a community that supports and inspires learners of all kinds. We must be committed to strengthening the educational and social experience of our students and meeting the needs of all learners, wherever they are, whatever they need, whenever they need it. This includes those students who remain awake long after others have gone to bed.

University administrators don't like to think of students as "customers" -- we tend to reject the business analogy despite the general public's consumer-oriented bent. But students and their parents want to know what they're getting for their money and they expect better services for rapidly increasing tuition dollars.

Students today are seeking an untethered environment that allows them to remain mobile. They want a 24/7 university with no barriers. The fact that most university offices close at 5 p.m. is a source of great frustration for students, who are used to having the world at their fingertips through the Internet. The real message here is that universities need to understand their customers better.

We must be more flexible and take advantage of emerging technologies to adapt our services and restructure our institutions to be more student-centered. I once read a comment by a highway patrolman talking about higher speed limits who said, "At 100 mph you're not driving a car, you're aiming it." With technology, it seems to be the same.

We have already made substantial progress in the area of student services. Many of us are leveraging technology to perform most transactions within the university. Everything from registration to student records to class lists to graduation audits can be found online, and admissions and academic advising have gone online, giving students the "anytime, anywhere" access they seek.

A bonus of this change has been increased efficiency and cost savings. Transactions that once required human intervention can now be self-initiated by students at their convenience. However, harvesting the savings from these restructured processes is difficult, since most of these costs were formerly distributed across a number of units. And are we certain that our online services are on par with the assistance we provided in face-to-face exchanges with our students?

Some institutions are lagging in the e-services arena when compared to the business world, where students are used to easily and securely accessing information and completing transactions online. In the latest Campus Computing Project survey, Kenneth Green reported that "considering the wide array of electronic commerce and electronic service options routinely available to students and faculty in the consumer and corporate sectors, it's clear that the campus community is perhaps two years behind in its e-service offerings."

The unintended message that we are sending to our students is that we are slow to change, inflexible, inefficient, and out of date. Instituting e-services must be done as part of a broader campus IT strategy that accentuates the customer relationship we have with our students. We need to ask ourselves if our services are really student-centered, or have they simply arisen as a result of the needs of administrative offices? Are these services merely an add-on to other university processes or do they connect students more fully to the learning community?

Being a student-centered university will mean different things to various segments of your university community. For faculty members, it might mean embracing the use of technology as a creative tool for interactive and collaborative learning. For staff, it might mean a restructuring of services so they enhance the student experience. For students, it means becoming more responsible for their own educational experience and initiating many of the interactions and transactions that were previously passive occurrences.

For IT professionals, it means working side-by-side with faculty and staff to design courses that make teaching and learning more interactive. It also will mean customizing your institution's system so that it can be tailored to meet individual student needs. Obviously, there are a number of architecture and integration challenges for IT professionals to overcome. In all of this change, security will be a key concern as students demand and gain access to online resources and information.

The Value of Student Input

Putting students first requires that we talk with them to find out if we are really serving their needs. At Penn State, we ask 1,000 randomly selected students to take part in a Web-based survey that takes about 10 minutes to complete. We also receive feedback at our computing help desks around campus, as well as log the questions that are being asked. It gives us a good indication of the problems and frustrations that our students may be experiencing, some of it due to our own processes and systems.

But one of our best methods for collecting user information is through an advisory committee made up of student leaders that meets three or four times a semester. This committee, lured by pizza and soft drinks, represents student leaders from across the University, who come together with a handful of our technology staff to engage in roundtable discussions on topics like our recently launched student portal, Web mail, computer lab upgrades, or other new projects we may be considering.

Obviously the information exchange is a powerful tool for planning. But another benefit of this committee has been discovering issues that may not have been on the radar screen. We were able to alter the design of our computer labs after students told us that the physical set-up hindered their ability to work collaboratively with others. We now take that into consideration when configuring lab spaces.

While I challenge you to obtain student input, I also caution you to remain in charge of the decision-making process. The information you receive will be valuable to planning and purchasing equipment, but I would never suggest a student committee be created to tell you how to spend your limited funds. Those decisions are obviously best left to the people who understand issues of scale and the needs of the entire user community.

Yet, too often we create solutions that are more costly and complicated than necessary. More than 30 years ago, NASA decided astronauts needed a ballpoint pen that would write in the zero-gravity conditions of space. After more than $1 million in development costs, the pen was successfully produced. The Russians, on the other hand, solved the same problem by having their cosmonauts use a pencil.

I'm certainly not suggesting that we stop investing in technology. But we are all painfully aware of technology decisions that overran budgets and underwhelmed expectations. We need to make sure the changes we propose fit our needs now and in the future. This puts a heavy burden on those in this room to accurately measure demand for network services and be able to predict future demand.

Two Forces Collide

One extraordinarily important trend in higher education that I have not yet touched on is the convergence of distance education and resident instruction, which creates some exciting prospects for educators. We are finally breaking away from the bedrock assumption that true learning must take place in the classroom, at a fixed time, in a fixed location.

Learning can occur online or in campus classrooms or through a combination of these two approaches -- and this is where I see the greatest untapped potential to serve students better and create a society of lifelong learners. We can expect to see students living on campus while taking online courses. There will be more flexibility in scheduling. For example, a course could involve a weekend in residence at the beginning and end of the course, with online learning sandwiched in between.

I am not one who believes that modern information technologies will displace the primacy of resident instruction in institutions such as ours, but I believe that the current rigid distinctions between distance education, commuter, and residential students will be increasingly blurred.

This and other golden opportunities, of course, bring with them many unresolved challenges for institutions, among them the need for an infrastructure that can support such change. So at Penn State, we have instituted a new budget model for funding upgrades to our telecommunications infrastructure. This model consists of several parts, including a student fee, an annual allocation from our central funding stream, and a surcharge for every unit on campus based on the number of employees within that unit, as well as additional fees for units that require more sophisticated equipment. We are now embarking on our second year of operating under this model, which is providing us with a sustainable source of funds for critical components of our infrastructure.

But not only do we have to worry about the infrastructure on our campuses, we also have to continue to work toward building a solid national and international infrastructure through organizations such as the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development.

In addition, institutions also should have a plan to deal with emerging technologies. The issue of emerging technologies brings with it a high-degree of risk for our already cash-strapped universities, but the payout could be tremendous. While many people are good at spotting emerging technologies, they are not equally as good at predicting all of the future uses.

At Penn State, we have done this by creating a formal group of technologists whose main task is to explore emerging technologies aggressively for applicability to the university community. We seek the help of students and senior faculty, for whom the consequences of failure are relatively low, to test these new technologies in new settings and in different ways.

One important note in relation to exploring emerging technologies: you and the leaders of your institution must have the capacity to catch the next wave, but you will also encounter resistance from various segments of your university community. Do not let this deter you. As Robert Kennedy noted, "One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time."

Finding the Resources

I must admit I feel somewhat awkward urging you to push your institutions to explore new avenues when I know that funding for IT initiatives is often in short supply. We are all facing tough choices about where to put our resources. At some universities, in fiscally tight times, a new IT proposal would be looked upon about as favorably as a gift of Enron stock.

As I already mentioned, I am from an institution that requires students to pay an information technology fee. This fee used to be solely a computer fee, but we have broadened it to include libraries and academic computing, broadly defined. We have not been bashful about increasing the fee every year. As our costs go up, we are passing them on. We have had no complaints from students about this fee. They see it as a cost of doing business. They complain bitterly about tuition, which is also on the rise, but not about the information technology fee.

My advice is that quality is remembered long after price is forgotten. Today's students demand better services and we've got to step up to the plate and deliver. Don't be shy about investing in information technology particularly as it benefits faculty and students. To run a modern university, IT must be funded.

What Will the Future Hold?

I want to close by saying that we have been given a powerful tool that can enhance teaching and learning, and make our institutions more student-centered. As the IT leaders within your institutions, you must help bring coherence to this increasingly complex issue. The skills and knowledge you possess are critical. With your help, universities can find new ways to provide new services that will focus on student learning and improve the academic experience.