D. Save time(money) while improving programs (10 Things I Believe)

I used to believe that education functioned like a recipe: invest in this technology, use it in that way, and you probably get certain educational gains for some particular cost. For example, as a consultant, I'd suggest starting or expanding a distance learning program in order to reach more students at a reasonable cost per student.

Perhaps you think that way, too. Did you ever say, "I can't run a program and produce good results if you give me that tiny a budget!" or "Let's look at the average of what institutions like ours spend on X, so that we can figure out what to spend on X." Both statements rest on the assumption that higher education is at least vaguely like a recipe: if you want to produce a good angel cake, it takes a certain amount of flour, yeast, eggs and so on. Too little or too much of any one ingredient: equally wasteful.

But economist Howard Bowen did a major study (Bowen, 1980) showing that very similar institutions of higher education (similar governance, physical setting, and reputation) spent very different amounts of money per student, and spent each dollar in quite different ways. In other words, there is no 'recipe' (production function) that relates higher education spending with higher education results. So one distance learning program with a particular design and a particular reputation might have low costs per student while another with a similar design and reputation might have high costs per student. Revenues, of course, can vary unpredictably as well.

Having said that, traditional budgets can be misleading. They divide costs by organizational unit, hiding the true costs of educational activities. Each activity is supported by people from several departments and offices. Higher education budgets go mostly to pay for people's time. So the real costs of any given activity (a distance learning program, a large course, an institution's use of clickers) - the real costs of any such activity are driven by how the individuals involved each choose to ‘spend their time.’

I’ll never forget a workshop on cost modeling that we ran some years ago. A faculty member and several staff members were creating a simple spreadsheet that listed the time (money) it took them to implement help that faculty member use a new technology at their college. So the faculty member recorded how he had spent time, and whom he'd asked for help. Those ‘helpers’ also recorded how much time each of them had invested, and noted when they each had asked the instructor to do something.

By the time I listened in, all of them were in a state of shock. Each individual had known that their own roles had been time-consuming (i.e., expensive). But each had assumed that, when they had asked one of the others to do something, it didn’t take that other person much time. However, when they totaled the time each of them had spent, they realized for the first time that the total time (cost) had been staggering.

These kinds of spreadsheets are called activity-based cost models, because they total all the costs associated with doing a particular thing in a particular way. If you can model how something really gets done in your program, you can then use your model to help figure out how to do that thing better, with less stress, and at lower cost. Several of us wrote a book on how to create such models, the Flashlight Cost Analysis Handbook.

At this point, you may be thinking that the way to reduce costs of an activity is for staff to spend less time on that activity. That's a good way to drive away your best staff, if you inadvertently cut down those activities that are most motivating for them! The Handbook includes a wonderful case study by David Pope and Helen Anderson on improving (and cutting the costs of) undergraduate engineering laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania (Pope and Anderson, 2003). Instead of asking each faculty and staff member how much total time they spent on different aspects of running the laboratory, Pope and Anderson asked them to separate time that was fulfilling from time that was burdensome (e.g., training students how to use the laboratory equipment). Armed with those kinds of insights, the Penn team redesigned the engineering laboratories in a way that simultaneously improved learning and made teaching more satisfying, while reducing costs for staff time, equipment breakage, and space.

We've known for years that such cost modeling can produce important insights into how to reorganize work. But it has been so frustrating to see how rarely institutions actually look at their own work. Either times are good so no one cares about costs, or else times are bad so no one has time to do the study...

Nonetheless, what I now believe is:

1. Institutions often have no idea what specific programmatic uses of technology cost, because those costs are spread across different units and consist largely of how individuals spend their time;
2. if a program does study such costs, that study creates opportunities to make programs more effective and work more fulfilling, while also controlling costs.

PS One organization that has done a lot in this area is the National Center for Academic Transformation. Their Redesign Alliance has a couple workshops coming up this fall, focusing on redesigns of large enrollment courses in ways that can improve learning while reducing per-student costs.

Note on this series of blog posts: "Ten Things I (no longer) Believe about Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology" was introduced in this post. Past posts (and my evolving ideas for future posts) are summarized in this table.

Print References
Bowen, Howard R. (1980), The Costs of Higher Education: How Much Do Colleges and Universities Spend per Student and How Much Should They Spend? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Pope, D. & Anderson, H. (2003). Reducing the costs of laboratory instruction through the use of on-line laboratory instruction. In S. C. Ehrmann, & J. Milam (eds.), The Flashlight Cost Analysis Handbook: Modeling Resource Use in Teaching and Learning with Technology, Version 2.0. Takoma Park, MD: The TLT Group.

4. To help your bottom line, offer distance learning (10 things I no longer believe)

I used to believe that buying into technology for distance learning would help higher budgets by expanding revenues while simultaneously cutting costs (staff costs per student and also facilities spending per student).

Revenue: use distance learning to bring in new students, each paying tuition and/or driving additional state funds.

Cutting costs: The more students per faculty, the lower the cost of faculty per student, so tuition revenue per student comes closer to covering costs. That's simple math. I didn't like the idea of giant distance learning classes. So I urged that distance learning programs focus on attracting more students to under-enrolled courses and degree programs, increasing class sizes from, say, 5-10 students up to 15-20, cutting staff costs/student in half.

Many of us pointed out that distance learning could cut capital costs as well. The institution could serve more students without building and maintaining more classroom buildings, for example.

Similar arguments are made for potential economic gains from hybrid courses and degree programs: ones that reduce but do not eliminate use of classrooms.

Spend on technology in order to save money - it's obvious.

If skeptics doubted the argument, I could point to an example such as the Open University in the United Kingdom, a gigantic institution devoted purely to distance learning. The way it organizes courses and supports learners is entirely different from traditional institutions. The UK does a careful job rating instructional quality, and the OU's programs were rated comparable to those of other bachelor's degree programs. But its cost per student was only about 60% that of campus based institutions in the UK.

Buy technology and develop distance learning in order to make your budget healthier. Evaluative measure: total revenue; operating and capital costs per student. (That's what I used to believe.)

What have you seen? What did you believe, and what do you believe now?
1. Have you seen any examples of technology use saving money on the teaching/learning side of the house? distance learning? on campus? hybrid?
2. Are there any kinds of technology investment in teaching/learning that can predictably save money?

Please click the comment button below (Click the word "Comments" a bit to the right of "Posted by Steve_Ehrmann," below) and tell us what you've seen and what you think.

Later this week I'll summarize what I now believe about technology and how to control costs.

C. Distance (and campus) learning reconceived (10 things I believe)

My conception of ‘distance learning’ has changed over the last thirty years. My old vision, still held by many folks, was explained in the previous post. To explain why and how I’ve changed my mind, let me tell you about five programs I’ve seen over the years.

As you think about each story, consider that a large fraction of your “distance learning” students may well also take courses on your campus. They’re actually not ‘distant.’ But online learning offers them flexibility to have a part-time or full-time job to cover educational costs, to study when and where they want, to carry heavier loads, and to graduate sooner.

1. Bridging distance to include new students, and teachers: About twenty years ago, my friend Prof Nick Eastmond of Utah State taught an educational technology course to distant learners using audioconferencing. Nick invited me to be a guest lecturer for an upcoming session. “You want me to come to Logan?” I asked. “No, just call this phone number at the beginning of the class hour,” he responded, “and talk with my students about evaluation.” I was startled by what I found when I ‘arrived.’ If the students had all been in a room on campus, listening to my disembodied voice coming from a speaker, I probably would have felt distant. But the students, Nick, and I were just talking together on the phone. It was quite intimate. He invited a different expert from around the country to talk with his students by phone every week.

2. Reaching different kinds of students so all students can learn better: In the early 1990s, Leslie Harris was teaching a composition course at a small college. Students would read articles and then write an essay, summarizing evidence and arguing their own points of view about an issue. His students were reading about family and cultures. But they knew relatively little about families or cultures outside their own small world. In addition, the students shared too many beliefs and preferences. In short, there was little room for a real exchange of facts and views.

So, with a friend teaching a similar course at a dissimilar college, Leslie scheduled a series of online chats. At designated times each week, students from the two colleges would enter the same chat room in order to discuss a topic drawn from shared course readings. The students would also collectively contribute to a listserv discussion between the two classes. These conversations could easily grow impassioned. I recall one student writing in the chat room, “I am punching you in the nose!” That provided plenty of energy and direction to the essays students wrote later.

Although difficult to implement, the idea worked well enough that Harris organized several such pairs of composition courses in the early 1990s. Differences among students can be an asset when those differences can lead to productive dialogue, helping students become more self-aware. Bridging distance can help faculty increase such differences by design.

3. Slowing down the conversation in order to improve learning: During that same period, Karen Smith tried a new technique in foreign language learning at the University of Arizona. About forty students in Spanish IV spent some course time using a computer discussion board instead of going to a language laboratory. They wrote to each other in Spanish about many topics, including some issues they chose for themselves (e.g., planning a class party; advising a fellow student who was depressed). Initially these students used the bulletin board by going to a computer lab at scheduled class times. Soon they realized that they could add entries whenever they had access to a computer and a modem. Their contributions to the online conversation were graded on their fluency, not their grammar.

Meanwhile, many other students were assigned to use word processing to write in Spanish instead. And a third large group continued to use the language laboratory. In other respects, all three groups were taught in the same way.

Outcomes of Karen’s experiment: I visited the course that semester, and it was the most enthusiastic group of students I’ve ever met, before or since. Several said, “This is the first time I’ve actually used Spanish!” Second, they liked the deliberate pace of conversation. They pointed out that face-to-face exchange allows little time for silent thought. However, when using the discussion board, these students had plenty of time to interpret what had just been ‘said,’ and then to thoughtfully compose their replies. Third, they could focus on what to say in Spanish without being distracted by worries about pronunciation.

Amazingly, oral examination revealed these students had learned to converse in Spanish better than students who had trained in the language laboratory. The ‘discussion board’ students had become already adept at thinking in Spanish so that was no problem for them during the oral exam; instead they could focus on pronunciation and speed, and they did well. Karen concluded that these students were attracted to invest more time and energy on the course, which would also help explain their superior performance.

Even for undergraduates, joining any discipline is akin to learning a second language and culture. It’s about learning to communicate with a community, learning its language and adopting its values. How do you teach your students to ‘speak’ math, political science, or art? How do they learn to talk together as they do the work of the discipline? Is face-to-face always ideal? Or, sometimes, would a slower tempo and a little distance help them learn new conversational skills? Could you use those technologies to give each student different conversational partners, such as more advanced students or experts? Do participants in such conversations also need specialized tools? For example, should a participant be able to call up a painting, X-ray, or clip of news footage, and then point to elements of that image or video as they discuss it?

4. Global diversity can be a defining strength for a program: My first three stories were from decades past – their lessons do not depend on glitzy new technology. My fourth story is from today, but it’s still not high tech: five leading institutions on four continents collaborate in offering an executive MBA in global management. The US partner in “OneMBA” is the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Students enroll at one of the five institutions and come to campus monthly for meetings of half their courses. Meanwhile, the other half of the curriculum is taught online, each course led by a faculty team from the participating universities. Students from the five institutions work together in virtual teams. In addition, four times during their program, OneMBA students gather to learn and do research together. Significantly, when they meet in the US, they do not come to Chapel Hill; instead, they work together in Washington DC. The world is the laboratory for the students and faculty in OneMBA. By bridging time and space, they’ve created a program that could never have been offered on campus.

5. Including new learners and more diverse resources while saving money: Several institutions have recently developed laboratory equipment that can be used by undergraduates from a distance. Students can plan and carry out their experiments over the Web, and then download their data for analysis. They are running real, physical experiments, not simulations. Zhejiang University in China has pioneered the use of such online laboratories for distance learning in engineering.

MIT’s iLabs software enables institutions to network their online laboratory equipment together, supporting a multi-institution constellation of laboratories with shared tools for scheduling equipment use, storing student data, and other logistics.

However, iLabs has implications beyond reaching ‘distant learners.’ When using a traditional undergraduate laboratory, twenty or thirty students might share ten experimental stations, equipment used intensively for the hour or two of the laboratory session and then lying idle most of the week. That idle, costly, aging equipment has been one reason why undergraduate laboratories are so rare. In contrast, with iLabs, only one experimental station may be needed for a large group because students can take turns using that station, day and night. In fact, a single iLab may have so much capacity that students from other institutions can use the equipment as well. In fact, students in Africa have been using MIT laboratory, and vice versa, at hours when the host institution makes little use of its own equipment.

MIT’s reorganization of the concept of laboratory learning has implications:
• for access (learners half way around the world; learners on campus doing research at night),
• for the character and quality of education (with iLabs as with the web, the more institutions create iLabs, the greater the variety of laboratory equipment available to all participating institutions), and
• for costs (each station and its laboratory space can be used far more cost-effectively because they are used 24x7; even if institutions share the costs of expensive laboratory equipment, paying part of the cost is less than paying the full cost).

Summing up this essay: the terms “distance learning” and “online learning” suggest to many people that a) all the students are far away, b) the goal is to offer courses that are ‘comparable’ with campus-bound offerings.

But these stories all contradict that stereotype. They each improve upon what was previously possible when campus students were either in a classroom, or studying alone, and using only campus resources.

Second, in each case, the improvements in content, access (who can learn), and methods all resulted from the same technology-supported strategy. Eastmond’s use of audioconferencing enabled experts to bring in updated content, access for distant or busy learners, and tighter community, for example. Smith’s use of online discussion made education more accessible and also powered a far better, more engaging approach to learning Spanish.

Third, all but one of the stories involved hybrid strategy: distance and time were used to improve learning, but those elements were complemented with some kind of face-to-face interaction, sometimes nontraditional (e.g., OneMBA faculty and students doing field research together).

Your institution probably offers at least some online learning courses. It is certainly using technology in some ways to enrich education on campus. I suggest bringing those two efforts closer together. Faculty and support services should work together, using available technology, to help improve courses and programs in all three of these dimensions, simultaneously:
• What: How can we update and improve course content, even just a little?
• Who: How can we help even just a few additional people learn (including people whose differences might be assets for our program)? and
• How can each of these people learn a little more effectively than before?

Be pragmatic. When designing a program or improving a course, start with where you need to start (e.g. we want to serve this group of learners, or we want to make this change in content, or we want to make teaching and learning more effective). But then immediately consider how to use technology so that one change can achieve not only your initial aim but also net gains in the other two dimensions as well.

Things I hope you’ll comment about, below; to the right of 'posted by Steve Ehrmann,' click the word "Comments":
1. Does your institution already have any courses or academic programs whose technology-enabled design improves “what, who, and how” simultaneously?
2. If you're a leader at your institution, what kinds of changes in support services could make such a comprehensive approach work? What roles can evaluative feedback play in guiding such academic improvement so that it does succeed in all three dimensions?

PS If you like this series of posts, 'Ten Things I (no longer) Believe About Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology' and think others should be debating their value and implications, please spread the word. If you got the word by Twitter, please retweet. Thanks!

3. Teach distant learners as much like f2f as possible (10 things I no longer believe)

Here's what I once believed about distance learning (e.g., telecourses, online learning):

Who learns: Distance learning was for isolated students who lived many miles from campus. Each student worked alone, connected by a slender technological bridge to (some of) the intellectual riches housed on that particular campus.

Teaching methods: The roots of distance teaching lay in old technologies:

• the book (distance learning began when a teacher first said to a student, ‘go away, read this book, think about it, come back, and we’ll talk) and
  
• the auditorium (‘go sit in the twentieth row and take notes while I talk’).

Because those presentational teaching methods were OK on campus, they were also OK for distance learning, we believed. Yes, computer courseware and online discussion provided some enrichment. But distant students learned mostly by reading text, watching lectures (on a screen), and doing homework, just as resident students mostly did. Perhaps that's why hundreds of studies could detect no statistically significant difference in student test scores. It's what students do that mostly determines what students learn. And, if you strip away the appearances, 'distant learners' and 'campus learners' were doing much the same thing. Threat to quality? Nonetheless, some people argued, these new students were isolated from each other, deprived of the faculty member’s personalized attention and unable to use the campus’s most prized resources (its library, laboratories, playing fields, and dormitory bull sessions, for example). Distance learning would necessarily be at best a little inferior, at worst a fraudulent education tempting needy students to take the easy way to an empty credential. Evaluation criteria for this use of technology:

1. Outcomes comparable to those from courses taught on campus?
   
2. Net gains in numbers of students enrolling and graduating?
   
3. Net economic gains? (additional tuition and fees paid by these extra learners; lower costs of teaching students off campus).

About this series of posts: One at a time, we’re discussing ten things I once believed about transforming teaching and learning with technology. The first five beliefs are strategies for using technology: 1. to attract resources, 2. to improve learning outcomes, 3. to increase the number of students enrolling and graduating (this post), 4. to increase revenue while cutting costs, and 5. to make work easier. I post one old belief every Monday. On Wednesday or Thursday of that week, I post what I now believe instead. Later this week, I’ll suggest that the label “distance learning” (or ‘online learning’ when used as a synonym) has become dangerously misleading: most of the students aren't distant. And trying to give them the same kind of education that the campus has provided wastes an exciting opportunity. To see a table that summarizes all ten old and new beliefs, with links to the posts that have appeared so far, see http://bit.ly/ten-things-table.