13. Make great leaps forward in technology infrastructure (??)

I once would have agreed that the big job for any chief technology officer is to assess the adequacy of major systems: the foundation on which the faculty teach and the students learn. If it's possible to do the job better now, replace the old systems. If there are important things that people can't yet do, provide new technology to help them do those things. Obviously, if you're going to make such changes, you should be ambitious, right?  Your faculty and students deserve the best, most modern, and exciting tools that your institution can reasonably afford. And, if you make a splash in the process or get big discounts from vendors introducing a new line, so much the better.

The important thing is to get things done, and get them done quickly. Consultation, especially too much consultation, will bog you down, and then nothing will happen. So check with a few tech-savvy friends among the faculty and staff, buy the new technology, and then announce what you've done. In the end, hopefully, they'll thank you for it.

That kind of strategy used to make sense to me.

However one impact of this process, at too many institutions, has been festering resentment by many faculty and staff, who feel repeatedly betrayed. The skills and materials that relied on the old technology-- much of that was rendered useless with each leap forward. Suddenly there was new, often unreliable, expensive, mysterious Technology to learn. Once again the experts had to become novices. And, when faculty members ask the institution to support technologies Y or Z, they are told, "Sorry, but we already bought technology X. Use that instead."

Even worse, the previous leap forward in infrastructure -- the advance made a few years back -- was supposed to promote a certain kind of educational improvement.  However, some of those betrayed faculty now simply drop off the bandwagon rather than retool yet again.  Others are now distracted by the demands of the new technology and the need to rework those parts of their courses that had been supported by the old infrastructure - instructions, assignments, assessments. And, of course, the new leap forward may be justified by a new educational priority which implicitly displaces the old one.  

I've been writing this series of blog posts because of the important improvements in teaching and learning that technology makes possible. But the sad truth is that many such TLT improvements have been derailed by rapture of the technology. Thoughtless changes in infrastructure can disrupt the very improvements that they are supposed to support.

Is this an accurate description of how technology infrastructure has been built at your institution?  Have you seen infrastructure changes that disrupt the educational improvements they were supposed to support?  If your institution has been able to make steady educational progress while periodically updating its infrastructure, how was this done? Please share your experiences below. If this series of blog posts have been good food for thought, please tell your colleagues.

"So far as I know, no one else has ever done this."

I can remember when I was in my 20s, writing my first grant proposal. I was writing to the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). Somehow I knew that it was important to be able to write in my proposal, “So far as I know, no one else has ever done this before.”

1. Writing “so far as I know” was important, because I didn’t want anyone to be able to say my magical sentence was false. And, in fact, writing ‘so far as I know’ helped me justify not doing any search for existing practice. Because, if I looked hard enough, I might discover that my idea wasn’t unique.
   
2. It was important to write, “No one else has ever done this before,” because that’s what funders value, I assumed: uniqueness, newness, innovation. If someone else is doing this, I shouldn’t be wasting my time with a proposal.

My proposal was turned down.

A year later, I’d crossed to the other side of the desk, to become a FIPSE program officer, and soon realized how silly my assumptions had been. In fact, my claim might even have been a reason that my proposal had been turned down.

1. An idea that is truly unique is probably responding to a problem or opportunity that no one else has ever faced. Few foundations are interested in supporting such tiny problems or opportunities.
2. Someone who is as isolated as I was (or, worse, as isolated as I was pretending to be), has no opportunity to learn from the achievements and mistakes of others.
3. Someone that isolated is also unlikely to find it easy to disseminate the results of their work. Dissemination generally is part of what funders consider to be the payoff to their gifts or investments: wider impact and visibility for their work. That was certainly true for FIPSE.

So, the paragraph I came to look for as a funder was, "We're one of a number of pioneers in this area. Here' s what we've learned from the achievements and problems of others. Here's how we're connected with them. Here's what we want to do. And here's how those connections will help us share our experience with those pioneers, and with others who will want to adapt what we do with your money."

Four pieces of advice on writing persuasive grant proposals

I spent 19 years reviewing grant proposals for the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and Annenberg/CPB at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Here are four pieces of advice about writing proposals to grant competitions (internal or external) where the goal is to improve learning and where the competition is intense.

First and most important, grant proposal is an exercise in teaching at a distance. The desired learning outcome of your distance teaching is for two reviewers to meet, a day or two after they’ve each read the proposal, perhaps shortly before their review panel meets to discuss your proposal.

One panelist says to the other, “I don’t remember this proposal. What’s it about?” Panelist #2 replies, “Oh this is a good one. It’s about X and here’s why I think we should support it.” Panelist #2’s comments are no more than 60 seconds long, typically.

So what should panelist #2 remember to say about your proposal, a day or two after reading a stack of proposals of which yours was just one? That’s your challenge: teach these reviewers a few memorable things about your proposal, things that are important enough to excite the reader. If the reviewer thinks to herself, "I could borrow a couple of those ideas!" so much the better. Don't hide the good stuff.

Second, avoid passive verbs. Don’t be shy about saying “I” or “we.” It helps you use your own experience to a) explain why this is important, b) help educate the reader about whether and how much to trust your skill and insight (because you’re exposing more of your self and your experience.) Proposal reviewing is a confidence game.

Third avoid the current jargon, especially if the grant competition has an explicit goal– if everyone uses the same jargon, all the proposals sound alike.

Put those three things together, and you have the beginnings of a proposal that can persuade reviewers that you’ll be good at educating the world about what you’ve achieved with their money.

That's the fourth, and final, point. Whether far-reaching impact is an explicit goal or not, funders generally like it when other people can learn from the experience they’re paying you to gain. If you’re good at explaining (across disciplines and institutions) what you’ve learned, and being credible in the process, you’re a more valuable person/institution to fund.

Good luck, and please let us know if we can help with your proposal: evaluation planning? help you disseminate to other institutions? help plan faculty development? If you'd like to chat about grants, especially those having to do with improving teaching and learning with technology, please e-mail us at info@tltgroup.org.

PS Here's a chapter from the Flashlight Evaluation Handbook on how (not) to evaluate grant-funded technology projects.