Digital-Age Innovation in Higher Education

A Do-It-Yourself Approach

Gary Natriello

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000390872
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Inclusive Education

Digital-Age Innovation in Higher Education recounts the creation, development, and growth of an innovation unit within a major university. This single case study follows the development of the EdLab at the Gottesman Libraries of Teachers College, Columbia University, which was charged with developing new services and products at a time when digital technologies were markedly beginning to impact the sector. The major steps taken – recruiting staff in key skill areas, developing projects, collaborating across organizational lines, securing resources, delivering new services, and more – are covered in detail, illustrating the opportunities and challenges presented by innovation mandates in long-established organizations with stable operations and traditional academic values and practices.

1
Wind Resistance

Why is it So Hard to Change Higher Education?

In this chapter I set the context for the events that led to my role in the library at Teachers College and the development of a do-it-yourself approach to innovation by highlighting the situation for U.S. institutions of higher education as the twentieth century came to a close. My perspective on this was shaped by my experience as a faculty member whose own research did not encompass post-secondary education, so it was largely the result of general exposure and reading in the area and through participation in college governance committees where issues of particular interest arose from time to time. Beginning in 1997, my role as chair of the Task Force on the Future of the Library led me to pay close attention to the controversies surrounding the changing nature and role of academic libraries. I note these matters to signal that my coverage of higher education here is rooted in my own perspective and not intended to capture or in any way represent the substantial accumulated literature in higher education as a field of study.

The twentieth century saw substantial change in all sectors, driven by a variety of forces, including technical advances, economic turmoil, political upheaval, global wars, immigration, the growing role of women and minorities in society generally and the rise of the knowledge economy (Drucker, 1994). Within the U.S. education sector there had been growth in secondary school enrollments as the build-out of the public education system concluded with the expectation that everyone would need to complete high school to be prepared to participate in the economy. This was followed and accompanied by growth in post-secondary enrollments that reshaped the landscape for institutions of higher education. An entirely new set of forces were brewing as the century closed and these carried uncertain implications for higher education, including for Teachers College, Columbia University, an institution born out of major changes at the close of the nineteenth century and the site of the present case (Cremin, Shannon, & Townsend, 1954).

Pressure to Change

For at least the last quarter century the higher education sector has been the subject of a range of calls for fundamental change (Kerr, 1987; Moore, 1998). For those outside the sector, the need for change seems to be quite clear. There is no end of critiques and recommendations. For those, such as myself, working in the sector, the calls for change are more distant and seemingly indistinct. For those on the faculty, again such as myself, who have been trained since graduate school to tune out the noise in the organization and its environment and focus on a research agenda to build a career and survive, the calls for fundamental change are virtually unheard. It is impossible to overstate the degree to which faculty, particularly established faculty at elite research institutions, are able to isolate themselves from calls for change. To some extent this is the result of a single-minded focus on research necessary to succeed, but it also reflects the accumulated experience of years of pressures for change that have had no discernable impact on the lives of faculty. Moreover, there seem to be a growing number of administrators to worry about organizational arrangements and the changes that might be needed (Ginsberg, 2011).

The calls for change in higher education have come from different quarters, cited a number of different reasons, identified a variety of problems, and taken multiple forms. A major thrust of calls for change in education overall and colleges and universities no less has involved the emphasis on the importance of meeting the needs of the economy. During periods of economic stress or eras of renewed competition with other nations, the U.S. education system is typically implicated as both a source of the problem and as a major part of the solution. Calls for reform to prepare students more effectively for jobs are a staple of the critics of higher education (Hora, Benbow, & Oleson, 2016).

A major part of the economic critique are calls to address the U.S. competitive position in the increasingly global economic order. The looming threat posed by competition with Japan in the seventies and eighties has given way to the newer threats posed by China in the twenty-first century, but the critique is the same. U.S. colleges and universities, along with their K-12 sector mates should do more to shape a competitive workforce. The latest formulation of this critique includes the stress on preparing students for the fourth industrial revolution, an economic transformation reliant on cyber-physical systems that will dramatically change the way we work and live (Schwab, 2017). Note that the abundant sources of advice regarding the alignment of colleges and universities with the job market are typically muddled with little in the way of clear direction. While some employers call for more employees with specific skills, others stress the need for flexibility and more recently creativity (Tomlinson, 2012). From inside higher education, it is possible to find a group of employers saying just about anything you would like them to say. This, of course, creates more justification and opportunity for faculty to stand pat and double down on current ways.

Globalization plays a more direct role in calls for reform in higher education beyond that associated with changes in the broader economy. As globalization has proceeded, colleges and universities find themselves with new sources of potential students spread throughout the world as new middle-class populations in a number of countries seek to position their children for the future. This has allowed institutions to diversify their students and their economic risks particularly with the U.S. middle class under growing pressure. But these new opportunities for enrollment have been accompanied by emerging new competitors as U.S. colleges and universities find themselves with the potential of losing both international students and domestic students to foreign institutions. This had led some to reposition themselves as global institutions by forming new campuses outside their home country and/or by developing affiliations with international partner institutions (Welch, 2002).

As the higher education sector has expanded, more and more institutions find themselves in competition with other similar institutions. This competition has taken a number of forms. For elite research institutions, the competition for faculty who can, in turn, compete for research dollars has led to increases in salaries and increased costs for laboratory and other facilities necessary for cutting edge research.

For most institutions, competition for students within the U.S., and now abroad as well, has been driven by changes in student expectations for what colleges and universities will provide. Perceived pressures from students and their parents seem to have resulted in a new generation of amenities that fall outside the realm of the reality of earlier generations of college students. These include improved living conditions at residential campuses, recreation facilities, and even transformed instructional settings such as classrooms, libraries, and laboratories. The competition for students and the resulting improvements in the campus experience has, in turn, led to another set of critiques focused on the cost of college and the unabated increases in tuition that have become a permanent feature of higher education (Archibald & Feldman, 2010).

The cost pressures on higher education have been exacerbated by the reduction in public support as state budgets have come to place a lower priority on funding higher education and as federal and state regulatory regimes have created the need for more staff focused on meeting regulatory requirements. These pressures and changes ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Wind Resistance: Why is it So Hard to Change Higher Education?
• Chapter 2: The Land That Time Forgot: Approaching the Library
• Chapter 3: Renovation as a Near Death Experience
• Chapter 4: The New Normal
• Chapter 5: Building a Lab in the Library
• Chapter 6: Projects, Projects, Projects
• Chapter 7: Collaborative Solutions
• Chapter 8: Publishing
• Chapter 9: Software Development
• Chapter 10: Design
• Chapter 11: Media
• Chapter 12: Consolidation
• Chapter 13: The Learning Theater Project
• Chapter 14: Efficiencies in Educational Research
• Chapter 15: Focus
• Chapter 16: The Unfinished Agenda
• Index