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From Innovation to Common Practice Timothy Shortell In 1998, Brooklyn College was awarded a federal grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) to develop a distance learning program for the college's Core curriculum. The FIPSE grant helped BC to establish a program of innovative educational technology, led by small group of active faculty developers of online teaching practices. At the time, there was a great deal of interest in the kind of distance learning—defined as learning that occurred outside of the time and place boundaries of the typical college classroom—that might lead to entire courses (or whole degree programs) being available to students who never set foot on the college campus. Schiller (2000), in fact, predicted a bleak future for the university as a result of the boom in distance education. There was a sense of urgency to the project. The Virtual Core project (Higginbotham and Blamire 2001), though, was defined in a more open-ended manner. Developers were not required to develop a course site that would ever be used for a "fully virtual" course. Instead, what emerged from the project was a hybrid approach that we came to call "the Brooklyn model" in which some class time was replaced by online activities. This turns out to have been very fortunate. Before the FIPSE grant had run its course, Brooklyn College had lost interest in full-scale distance learning—as did many campuses—but not in the pedagogical innovations that were being discovered with online practices. Schiller (2000), it seems, guessed wrong about the threat of digital diploma mills. The main thrust of online teaching and learning these days is as a supplement to or extension of the classroom. The Virtual Core project made possible the formation of a faculty developer network. There were a dozen faculty developers in the project, but interest in educational technology was spreading rapidly on the campus. Those involved knew that the federal money would not be flowing to Brooklyn indefinitely, and even before the grant ended in 2002, we began to think about how to share the Brooklyn model with our colleagues. The solution at BC came in the form of another faculty development project, this one funded by the university. (Brooklyn College is a part of the City University of New York.) The Online Pedagogy Project (OPP) is designed to disseminate a variety of online teaching practices that encourage active learning—to share the fruits of the labor of the FIPSE project. The OPP employs a mentoring model to grow the faculty developer network (Powell 2003). Getting from there to here, if you will, was not easy. On the face of it, it seemed as though only another large grant would enable us to repeat the success of the Virtual Core project. Grant money for basic course site development was increasingly harder to find. More importantly, such a project would only extent the number of faculty developing online resources by a handful at a time. There had to be a better way. This is the puzzle that I would like to reflect on because our experience raised several key issues that are of interest and relevance to other colleges and universities. Ours is a particular instance of a larger problem: the spread of innovation within an organization. Let me begin with a brief narrative of the two projects, from my perspective as a participant. Then I would like to enumerate some of the issues raised by our experiences and reflect a bit on what I think are the most attractive alternatives.
The Virtual Core Project The goals of the FIPSE grant included: The course sites created in the project vary widely in terms of design and sophistication. Some are much better at enacting the third goal than others. The second goal remains elusive, though not for lack of effort. None the less, the project was very successful. It remains a source of pride—deservedly so—for the campus. The project began in 1998 with the recruitment of faculty developers. We were enticed by the prospect of generous released time—and this would turn out to be a very significant issue, perhaps the most important one. There were two semesters of development of a course site for use in the college's Core curriculum, followed by three semesters of teaching with the course site. (I developed a site for the social science Core course, People, Power & Politics[Shortell 2001].) For participation in the project, faculty developers were given one course (3 hours) of released time per year. The group of developers were led by one of the co-directors of the project, Professor John Blamire in the Biology Department—whose enthusiasm for educational technology earned him the nickname of "John the Evangelist" (Fodor 2002)—who was the campus leader in the use of computer-mediated instruction. We had monthly meetings as a full group to discuss campus issues, mostly having to do with campus support of online teaching, and online pedagogy. Professor Blamire was an energetic leader who kept the group on task, for the most part. The faculty developers also met in smaller groups on a bi-weekly basis to share the details of the course sites as they were being developed. The idea was for these smaller groups to be a setting for the sharing of expertise and of materials. Since one of the goals of the project was to interconnect the courses in the Core curriculum, ongoing discussion of faculty developers whose sites might be linked was a sound idea. The college administration supported the project. Developers were given priority with regard to desktop computing—hardware upgrades, software, technical support, etc.—and the usual enrollment targets were suspended for the "virtual Core" classes for the life of the grant. We were allowed to teach smaller sections during the three deployment semesters. This, it turns out, was another key issue. At the end of the project, the web-based sections were continued, though usually with the same number of students as other sections. These courses were permitted to follow the Brooklyn model in which some class time—generally one-third to one-half—is replaced by online activities.
The Online Pedagogy Project The OPP commenced in the Spring semester of 2003. The first iteration of the project involves four faculty serving as mentors to a group of developers. The mentors are all veterans of the FIPSE project. Eleven developers constitute the "class of '03-'04." Next year, it is hoped that some of these developers will agree to be mentors so that the network of faculty is able to grow ever more rapidly. I joined the project as a faculty developer. (I am developing a module on globalization [Shortell 2003].) The goals of the OPP include: The scope of the faculty projects is smaller. Instead of an entire course site, we are asked to produce an online module. There is even greater emphasis on shareability. Because of the source of funding, the timeline for development is shorter; modules must be used by students following one semester of development. Developers met monthly, during the first semester of the project, to discuss design issues and support. We shared our work and offered each other constructive criticism. The developers are at various levels of experience with web-based teaching, as well as possessing varying sets of technical skills, so this sharing of practices and materials is essential to the success of the project. The line between mentor and developer is blurred as a result. Since I have as much programming expertise as anyone in the project, I have been tapped as a resource for developing scripts to build interactivity into the modules. (My sites make use of a good deal of self-assessment activities, and these are driven by many different kinds of scripts, written in Perl, PHP, Javascript and Java.)
How Faculty Networks Spread Innovation This brief narrative of faculty development at Brooklyn College raises some important issues about the diffusion of teaching innovations on college campuses. Since most institutions struggle, to some extent, with budgetary limitations, the success of BC's programs is a positive sign; the development of online pedagogy does not require millions of dollars of institutional support; it is not a practice reserved for elite private colleges and universities. This is not to say that no funding is required, however. It seems highly unlikely that a campus could do much with online teaching and learning without some resource commitments from its administration. Many campuses have more or less solved the problem of getting a decent computer on the desk of all faculty, and the development of web-based teaching practices does not, by and large, require a lot of high-end hardware. Most of the money for technology will probably be spent on software. The largest expense, though, is going to be faculty time. The chief lesson of the BC experience is that faculty expect and demand compensation for teaching innovation when it comes to instructional technology. The need for released time is two-fold. First, it is practical: for novice designers, especially, the development of online course sites will take a great deal of time. Various surveys of faculty at Brooklyn College indicate both widespread interest in online pedagogy and the firm belief that it cannot happen without released time. Second, released time is seen as a just compensation for the extra work in developing and using online materials. In other words, it is viewed as a kind of reward. The status that can accrue from being a campus leader is, it seems, not enough for most faculty. One of the reasons that this belief is so strong, I suspect, is that it became clear early on in the development of online materials that their use would tend to increase teaching time rather than decrease it. This is, of course, one of the reasons that web-based teaching is effective. There is often more interaction between faculty and students. Faculty need support to develop and use new materials. A campus will have to invest in support resources. But this also raises another issue. The kind of support needed is complex. On the one hand, many faculty developers need basic technical support, such as help using software, transferring files to a server, debugging tools, and so forth. Many faculty are uncomfortable receiving this kind of support from part-time staff or students. No one, after all, likes to feel inadequate, and the speed with which the desktop computer and networks transformed campuses has left some faculty feeling that these are things they should know how to do, but don't. Peer support is much more effective for faculty developers. Faculty time, of course, is expensive. This is a dilemma. Developing online teaching materials is not simply a matter of receiving technical advice. Indeed, the most important kind of support involves pedagogy. This is support that will have to come from a different source. The folks with the technical know-how tend to be people who've never taught. They can tell faculty developers how to get a software program to do X, but not whether or not doing X makes any sense. I have learned through experience—I've been teaching with web sites since 1995—that often enough the first X you think of does not make sense, or rather, does not end up making the most sense. In other words, this is a process in which experimentation is essential. Innovative pedagogy comes about through experimentation. It won't happen if there is not a fertile environment to support it. At Brooklyn College, we've been able to foster this by faculty networks because this is the natural site for collegial conversations about teaching. The issue is to get the conversations going between developers with more experience and those with less. Another important issue is the pace of diffusion. The cost of training every individual faculty member (with generous released time, etc.) is prohibitive. The spread of innovation must be cascading if it is to occur at all. Effective programs will be those that make the diffusion multiplicative rather than additive. In the OPP, the recruitment of developers as future mentors is the key to the lasting success of the project. One factor that can threaten the spread of innovation is the growth of alternatives to this kind of peer-based faculty development. The success of the marketing of course management systems as an alternative to build-your-own course site development poses a serious risk, in my view. The pressure on administrators to be able to point to concrete indicators of the use of technology ("over 400 courses with web sites," "more than 300 faculty teaching with the web"—these are the sorts of claims that get peppered into many external reports) makes the course managment system a tempting solution. But, it is not necessarily a route to innovation. More often, it results in lots of similar looking and functioning sites that have a tendency to fall into disuse. The most common complaint that I've heard from colleagues using these applications is that they make it easy to do certain things, but difficult or impossible to do others; they leave many faculty feeling overly limited. Brooklyn College has a course management system on campus, but it is not the platform of choice for the campus innovators. The FIPSE project enabled us to demonstrate that our do-it-yourself alternative was too valuable to eliminate entirely. The OPP ensures that these gains will remain. These two projects have also been very successful in establishing a sense of collegial cooperation rather than competition. As a result, developers show a remarkable willingness to share their materials. It is hard to see how innovation can spread on a campus without this component. It doesn't seem likely to occur without a sense of the common enterprise.
Works Cited Fodor, Joe. 2002. Techno-campus: How Computers Are Changing the Subjects at Brooklyn College. Brooklyn College Magazine. 16(1):8-13. Higginbotham, Barbra, and John Blamire. 2001. The Virtual Core: A Brooklyn College Faculty Development Project. http://www.fipse.aed.org/grantshow.cfm?grantNumber=P116B980318 Downloaded January 3, 2004. Powell, Wayne. 2003. The Online Pedagogy Project. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/geology/powell/OPP/ Downloaded on January 3, 2004. Schiller, Dan. 2000. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shortell, Timothy. 2001. Inequality in Contemporary American Society. Online course site for People, Power & Politics. http://www.shortell.org/courses/cs3 -----. 2003. Brooklyn and the World: A Globalization Module. http://www.shortell.org/courses/cs3/globalization.html |