Skip to Navigation
University of Pittsburgh
Print This Page Print this pages

September 25, 2003

Student needs drive IT decisions, SIS study finds

As higher education institutions invest huge sums for information technology (IT), executives should be wary of an over-emphasis on student needs, which threatens to undercut the traditional role of faculty in academics, a Pitt expert says.

“Today, executives place students well ahead of faculty and staff in their adoption of IT,” according to José-Marie Griffiths, the Doreen E. Boyce chair and professor of library science, information science and telecommunications at Pitt’s School of Information Sciences. “The risk is whether the potential of those IT investments can be fully realized without significant and proactive faculty engagement. My concern from an academic perspective is that we put together academic programs very deliberately, and if students are the ones pushing what technology we have, there’s a little piece missing there. Without integrating IT into key academic activities, students’ IT use will likely be marginal rather than central to their academic endeavors.”

Griffiths, who was named recently to the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, was discussing newly published findings from her survey research study, “Information Technology Success and Best Practices in Higher Education.”

The survey of more than 400 higher education executives — roughly divided equally among presidents/chancellors, chief academic officers, chief financial officers and chief information/technology officers — representing 195 institutions in North America was conducted by Pitt’s Sara Fine Institute for Interpersonal Behavior and Technology, of which Griffiths is the director, with support from the Collegis Leadership Alliance.

Griffiths says her study tried to hone in on what drives IT-related agendas, how important executives perceive IT to be in achieving institutional goals, how IT is organized and how successful IT programs are defined.
The major findings of the survey are:
• Students are the primary driving force for the institutional IT agenda.
• Information technology is considered important to the achievement of institutional strategic goals, although measuring its success thus far has been elusive.
• Financial support of IT resources development is essential to institutional growth and improved reputation, executives believe.
• Higher education executives want their institution to be “earlier adopters” of IT than they are currently.
• Information security and privacy, and lack of coherent IT planning processes are key concerns of executives.
• There is significant outside involvement in IT activities, including a heavy reliance on outside vendors.

Among the implications of the findings on future directions are: refocusing IT toward the core academic mission; creating greater returns on IT investments; increasing inter-institutional cooperation and collaboration, and moving toward “anywhere, anytime” teaching, learning, research and scholarship.

“I was not at all surprised that the IT agenda is student-driven,” Griffiths says. “But I was surprised at how much of it was driven by a competition for [recruiting] students, at all types of institutions, not just large research institutions.”

That push, she says, has led institutional leaders to press for improved network and Internet connectivity, on and off campus, including increasing support of mobile computing and wireless connectivity; upgraded facilities such as multi-media labs, “smart” classrooms and web-based integrated information access; more emphasis on distance learning and course management systems, and increased user support through 24/7 help desks and virtual library reference services.

“Institutions should be looking more not at technology per se, but how it’s used,” Griffiths says. “Where does the institution want to go, and how does information technology play a role in that [quest]?”

The survey shows a high level of interest in measuring IT success. “But we’re not seeing a lot of it being done. CIOs (chief information officers) are measuring what they need internally and what they need to meet students’ needs, but not necessarily the kinds of things that feed into strategic plans. As a self-contained thing they’re dong fine, but as a connection to institutional planning, we need to now see technological resources, just as we see human resources and financial resources, and we’re not quite there.”

While there is almost universal acknowledgment by executives of the importance of information technology to the successful operation of their institutions, especially for recruitment and retention of students, IT success measurements largely center on budgetary control, infrastructure reliability and campus user satisfaction, she says, measurements that have their limitations for best practices.

“The traditional notion of IT improving productivity continues to prevail among academic executives, although more specific details of the nature and extent of such improvements are rarely elaborated,” Griffiths points out. “A concern here is that IT is often not implemented to the fullest extent possible, or it is implemented in an environment that does not have the capacity or readiness to yield the potential productivity enhancements.”

In addition to the acceptance, now commonplace in academia, that IT infrastructure has to be upgraded and ongoing investments in IT technologies are critical, “it is just now sinking in that we can build specific technologies, with discipline-specific applications, that are not just general purpose,” Griffiths says.

“Faculty have been moving all along to develop their knowledge of basic technology, and now are beginning to feel more comfortable at extending its uses to purposes that suit very specific needs. Best practices are those that involve faculty and students early on — if they get the right kinds of faculty as early adopters, that is, faculty who are respected by colleagues and have some level of influence.”

The problem is faculty are pressed for time, while, generally, there is a lack of recognition and reward for their attempts to be IT innovators and early adopters. Additionally, faculty are expected to do most of their own computing, and that means formatting documents and displays and other tasks that in the past were support-staff functions.

“In the context of technology use, I also think there’s a tremendous amount of knowledge to be gained from the cross-fertilization of faculty, from their discussing what they’re doing.”

The sciences, the arts, the humanities all have massive data bases of information. “So the content and how it’s structured are different, but with collaborative technology, you find that the data from satellites monitoring the patterns of a hurricane, for example, and having musicians around the country perform in a virtual setting, use a lot of the same underlying technology.”

Griffiths maintains that studying the way people learn will aid institutions in finding ways to maximize the uses of information technology.

“Students these days work in a totally different way,” she says. “To see them doing their homework, with multiple screens up, while chatting with their friends, maybe about homework, or maybe about getting a date, and listening to something on the CD player, all these multiple sensory inputs, and yet managing to do it. I mean they really are multi-tasking.”

Understanding the choices people make about when to use the virtual environment and when to meet face to face could help an institution to better manage limited resources.

“Technology is giving us more communication options. If we could understand when it is better to be co-located virtually, we could make decisions in a more refined way where better to place our resources. We might get the most bang for the buck; I don’t think anybody really knows what kind of impact that might have in the long run, partly because we don’t know what bang for the buck we’re getting now. We know ‘money in, services out,’ but how do we break that down? Very few institutions are looking at that, and we’re going to have to do that, because I don’t think parents and students can continue to invest at the pace we’ve been going.”
—Peter Hart

Filed under: Feature,Volume 36 Issue 3

Leave a Reply