Flexible Pedagogy, Flexible Practice

Elizabeth Burge, Chère Campbell Gibson, Terry Gibson

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781926836621
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Flexibility has become a watchword in modern education, but its implementation is by no means a straightforward matter. Flexible Pedagogy, Flexible Practice sheds light on the often taken-for-granted assumptions that inform daily practice and examines the institutional dynamics that help and hinder efforts toward flexibility. The collection in international in scope, drawing on the experience of specialists in distance education from North America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, and Japan. Contributors to the volume were asked to reflect candidly and critically on a series of questions, including: What precisely is flexible learning? Who or what is driving the flexibility agenda, and for whose benefit? And who or what is resisting it? What challenges must be overcome in order to achieve flexibility, and what are some of the compromises it can entail?

THREE



› SURVIVING THE SWAMPS OF EVERYDAY PRACTICE

Introduction

For these seven chapters, we asked very experienced practitioners to write narratively and reflectively, to tell us as much of their unvarnished experience and lessons learned as they dared without getting into trouble in their home institution!

Their results create, in effect, a primer for change agents attempting to create greater flexibility in higher education. Consider Darcy Hardy’s strategic persistence in following her principle of full collaboration with all stakeholders across a huge multi-campus system. Andrew Higgins and Mark Northover were ordered to implement, without visible failures, a top-down, imposed technology solution designed for greater flexibility. They had to rigorously prioritize tasks in order to ensure full compliance of existing systems with the new software and, just as difficult, to promote adoption of the software by faculty members. Further lessons for change agents lie in Andy Lane’s efforts to inform senior management exactly how much sustained flexibility to learning and teaching might be added with open educational resources. Accompany Kay MacKeogh and Seamus Fox on what proved to be their own rocky road toward more flexible access and success routes for students after the government of Ireland withdrew its funding of their university’s distance-education centre. Their “rocks” were buried in an all-too-familiar problem: the gap between the institutional “rhetoric of flexibility and accessibility” and the “deep-seated attachment” to very traditional live transmission of pre-digested content to students sitting in lecture theatres. Darien Rossiter searches for answers to her university’s current lack of sustained “user engagement with flexible learning” despite a record of many innovations implemented mostly by early adopters. She finds the answers in four major constraints that, in combination, make a covertly powerful mix of forces against enhanced flexibility.

Yoni Ryan’s astute and pithy observations are far ranging. They illuminate significant changes in societal values that underlie changes in education, expose the impacts of “false prophets” of technology adoption, and explore some of the consequences of today’s increasingly part-time academic workforce. She remains fully committed to the earlier drivers of flexible educational provision—those based (much more so than those today) on principles of equity, access, and robust support for all kinds of learners. Yoni sees no good reason to switch her allegiance to the current and dominating driver of online learning per se. Will her patience last while the technocrats rule? Might she see any signs of a public return to the earlier drivers of flexibility?

Do not be fooled by Non Scantlebury and Gill Needham’s skilful narration of their adventures in the politics of power. They expose covert and non-benign influences on their attempts to walk their talk about enhancing flexibilities in library services and being strong advocates for students. Their analysis of their opponents’ behaviour makes for very vivid imagery. But consider what forces lie beneath the surfaces of staff meetings and power plays. Discover how Non and Gill were able to stay focused on what really mattered in the long term, despite trying to manage intra-institutional rivalries.

Such brief notes on these chapters fail to do the authors justice. So read on!

8 › Before the Fall
Breaking Rules and Changing Minds

DARCY W. HARDY

“Hi, Dr. Hardy? This is John Doe from ABC University and I just read a story about the UT TeleCampus. We think it’s a great idea and we want to build one, and I wondered if you have a moment to tell us how.”

Ummm, okay.

This is the beginning of my story and the basis for this chapter. You see, the idea of someone contacting me to ask how to build a multi-campus collaborative distance-learning organization in “a moment” is typical. Most people, administrators included, have no idea what it takes to develop and nurture a unit such as the UT TeleCampus. Those who do understand have probably built one themselves. The TeleCampus is part of the University of Texas System (www.utsystem.edu), which includes nine academic universities and six health institutions, with a total of approximately 195,000 students. In our case, the concept of “system” refers to a grouping of institutions where an umbrella administrative unit has broad oversight of the system as a whole. While each campus has its own administrative infrastructure, the administration unit coordinates many system-wide functions, such as group health insurance, legal affairs, and facilities and construction planning. The UT TeleCampus is a centralized utility that was created in 1998 to help further the development of distance—and specifically online—education for the UT System as a whole. But this chapter is not about how the UT System is organized or even how the UT TeleCampus functions as an aggregator. It’s about the many challenges faced when flexibility is established for a system through a centralized virtual university project.

While this is not a case study on the building of the UT TeleCampus, most of what will be covered is a result of that effort to move multiple campuses into a flexible-learning environment. I will tell you some stories about how administrators’ perceptions can be more influential than reality on a flexible-learning project, how massaging egos can bring about buy-in for a new movement, and how alarming it can be to find out how little many people care about the nuts and bolts of collaboration. I also try to relate how gratifying it is when “Aha!” moments become a daily circumstance, when everyone starts to “get it,” and I suggest ways to sustain the momentum and keep the idea of flexibility moving forward. And, finally, I discuss the part that economics and politics play in building these types of flexible-learning (i.e., online) systems and how they can influence the role of these systems once established. Think of it as a walk down memory lane during a time in the 1990s when online education was new, funding was flush, and everyone was excited about how this new delivery mode could increase the flexibility of the institutions—even if they didn’t realize it themselves at the time. And then fast forward to 2009, when online education has indeed forced more flexibility but funding is now an issue across the board. As we often say in our office, “Everyone loves what we do but no one wants to pay for it.” Intrigued? Read on—I’m just getting started.

IN THE BEGINNING

Twelve years ago, I didn’t think that creating a multi-campus “virtual university” had anything to do with promoting flexibility in our institutions. To me, this concept of flexibility was (and continues to be) all about access. But not access in a way that just means making something available—it’s more about a deliberate attempt to think about students’ circumstances, about how, when, and why they learn. It’s about truly taking educational opportunities to a level that implies that the institution is willing to do whatever it takes to make these opportunities available to students. I also had no idea how challenging it would be to work with so many institutions at once—and I was completely naïve about various university processes. I felt from the start that because this was a good thing to do, everything would just fall into place and all of our campuses would sing my praises for heading up the initiative. This was the first of many errors in my thinking.

Faculty, for one, responded quite differently than I expected. Those of us who were developing the UT TeleCampus (the vice chancellor, various staff, and me) thought that the faculty would embrace the opportunity to develop and teach courses online. What could be wrong with being able to extend the reach of your courses, provide a more flexible learning environment, and even provide flexibility for yourself? Apparently, a lot. I remember my boss at the time, Vice Chancellor Mario Gonzalez, catching considerable criticism from faculty members across the UT System as he tried to explain the concept of the virtual university. They were certain that the system’s administration offices were simply trying to cut costs by putting thousands of students in each online course and at the same time getting rid of the faculty and their salaries, or significantly reducing their numbers. We were shocked! There was very little trust in the whole idea of a UT TeleCampus, partly because of fear of the unknown and partly because we in TeleCampus were from UT System administration offices and were perceived as carrying agendas of unfunded mandates for others in the UT System. You know the old saying, “We’re from System, and we’re here to help.” I’m not sure our colleagues believed that at first.

So what did we do? The first thing was to get a handle on, or fully analyze, our place in the process. By that I mean we recognized, accepted, and actually embraced the idea that we were going to be a service entity, and we decided from the beginning that we would provide the best services possible. That mantra continues to be a driving force in the UT TeleCampus and in my opinion—which counts, since I’m the author of this chapter—it is one of the primary reasons for our success and possibly the reason why others who did not embrace this concept failed. We help our institutions to look good. That is our goal. I tell presidents and provosts, deans, and faculty members the same thing. The TeleCampus is designed to make the faculty look good by helping them to develop and deliver high-quality courses, and to make the institution look good by ensuring that the courses and programs are meeting the expectations of our state’s higher-education governing board as well as regional and discipline-specific accreditation associations. If you think about it, my assurance to a chief academic officer that what his or her institution offers online through a centralized unit is of high quality and meets accreditation standards can be a pretty powerful promise.

But acceptance did not come overnight. There were meetings with faculty senates and the system-wide faculty council, discussions among executive officers on the campuses, and conversations with distance-education staff on the various campuses. There were turf issues where one campus was overly concerned that another campus would steal its students if the other campus offered courses online that the first campus did not, or that if they both offered the course or program online, one campus might draw in potential students from another campus. There was fear of losing jobs. Many reasons could be cited for the resistance we encountered in those early years, but I think the biggest reason was fear of the unknown and the perception that this new form of delivering instruction was growing exponentially right before their traditional eyes. Scary stuff indeed.

For me, the key was to find the most skeptical but influential people on each campus and build relationships with them. It’s really all about relationships. Once established, they open the door for honest and respectful discussions. They build trust. Truth be told, some of these skeptical and influential people found me instead of me finding them because they wanted to get to the bottom of what we were trying to do—they didn’t want to wait for a meeting; they wanted to know right then. Sometimes the conversations were tense and challenging, but in the long run, I not only won over most of those skeptics, I went on to have great friendships with them. I can look back at those beginnings and say with all sincerity that building those relationships has had a major influence on the success of the TeleCampus.

One of my favourite books is The Power of Nice—How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness, by Linda Thaler and Robin Koval. I happened to catch Thaler and Koval talking about the book on the Nightline television program several years ago. They caught my attention because everything they were saying was exactly how I attempt to live my life, both personally and professionally. Although the title of the book references the business world, the “Power of Nice Principles” (there are six) can be applied to education, any workplace, or life in general quite easily. With chapters entitled “Tell the Truth” and “Shut Up and Listen,” you learn quickly that by being honest with colleagues, by acknowledging their own level of understanding and expertise in addition to your own, and by actually listening to their ideas instead of formulating what you plan to say next while they are still talking, you massage their egos in a way that is sincere. I don’t use the idea of massaging egos in a negative way. What I have learned, however, is that everyone needs positive strokes. When you are attempting to do something revolutionary (which is how I view what we did in building the TeleCampus in the late 1990s) and you don’t provide those strokes, or you don’t appreciate the thoughts expressed by those you plan to serve, you’ll end up going nowhere before you ever get started. I highly recommend the book (it’s a short read) for anyone planning to jump into a lion’s den.

Another major driver to our initial success was our relationship with the UT System Board of Regents, particularly Regent Tony Sanchez. We met regularly with the board back then, so the members understood well what we were doing, and having a regent who was excited about distance and online education at such an early stage was truly an advantage. Combine that with having an innovative chancellor like William Cunningham and things happen. We could have had all the great ideas in the world about how to move the initiative forward and become change agents, but without having access to people with power, we wouldn’t have been successful.

The bottom line is that the establishment of strong relationships helped to break through the barrier of mistrust we were bound to experience, and they helped to change the minds of many a skeptic. And when some of those relationships are with influential administrators, they can open doors across an entire campus—or a system, for that matter.

“COLLABORATE? ARE YOU KIDDING?”

One of the reasons behind the establishment of the UT TeleCampus was to facilitate collaboration among our campuses. Our first program, in 1999, was highly collaborative—an MBA that involved eight schools of business at eight institutions. I know what you’re thinking. Yes, looking back, we probably were crazy, but at the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. And in the long run, it worked well to get a lot of people on board quickly and to jump-start the online initiative.

The challenges were many. We needed the schools to agree upon a curriculum, agree upon who would develop and deliver what courses, agree to accept each other’s courses as their own, and agree to offer the degree even though the student would take only two courses from the home institution. And if that wasn’t enough, we had to figure out how to allow these students to take courses from multiple institutions without being admitted in a traditional manner so they could avoid applying for admission to each campus separately, paying application fees, and so on. Oh, and let’s just throw in the fact that the UT System institutions do not share a common student information system, nor do they all use the same brand (e.g., PeopleSoft, Banner, etc.). Moving them to a flexible-learning environment all at once was not going to be easy, but once we decided to develop the program, there was no turning back.

Like most university systems, the institutions in our system were not used to collaborating on many things in 1997. All of our campuses are standalone institutions, with UT Austin being our flagship research campus. The remaining eight academic campuses are not satellite versions of UT Austin; they each have their own mission and direction. And most of them are located several hours from each other, so the idea of working on projects, much less academic programs, in a collaborative fashion was foreign to most faculty. But we were determined to bring this new model forward and help our campuses to work together.

It should be noted that UT Austin was not one of the eight campuses involved in the collaborative MBA. Remember that online education was brand new and did not have the reputation for quality that it has today. The dean of the business school at that time probably had legitimate concerns about how it would look for his business school to be involved in a collaborative program like this. He was paid to worry about the business school, not to worry about a UT System initiative. I don’t think it’s a secret that flagship institutions will generally push back on collaboration if they do not consider the potential collaborators to be peer institutions.

So how did we get the eight participating schools of business to agree to this whole collaboration thing in the first place? Easy: it was cash. Chancellor Cunningham, who, as I’ve mentioned, was v...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: Why Look at Flexibility?
• One › Clarifying the Concept
• Two › Identifying Driving and Restraining Forces
• Three › Surviving the Swamps of Everyday Practice
• Four › Admitting Compromises
• Five › Voicing Contrarian Opinions
• Conclusion: The Challenge of Weaving Principles with Practice
• Index