January 1999

Volume 14
Number 10

Punished For Success

For the past ten years (at least), those responsible for providing technical support for the users of information technology in colleges and universities (and in industry!) have been unable to keep up with the rapidly growing demands for their services. Those who encourage and help faculty members and students to master the basics of using personal computers and related tools are succeeding. Those who encourage and help these beginners to use more widely available and powerful applications of information technology to improve teaching and learning are succeeding. Expectations for what can be accomplished with educational uses of technology are growing rapidly. Support services for these activities are not.

I began worrying and talking about the ASupport Service Crisis@ in the mid-1980s. Colleges and universities were beginning efforts to train faculty, students, and staff to use Apersonal@ computers. Those responsible for this task soon began complaining about their inability to keep up with the growing stream of questions. In retrospect, I see that I consistently underestimated the impact of the widening gap between expectations and available resources.

Many hoped that the demand for support services would subside as more faculty members moved beyond the beginner stage. However, in the late 80s I began to hear about more frequent requests for more substantial help. As faculty members mastered the basics, some began to expect to be able to use the technology as a more integral part of their own teaching. They needed help to learn how to use Aauthoring@ programs, how to identify the one cable that would effectively connect their own computer with the one projector that was available, how to adjust the computer=s display settings to match the requirements of a particular video monitor, etc.

More recently, as more faculty and students have become comfortable with the use of electronic mail and the Web, efforts to train academics in new applications are meeting with even greater success. But at the same time, IT personnel find they have more machines to support, more complex network connections to maintain, more rapid upgrades of equipment and software to install and explain. These same support personnel have more to do directly with the technology while the number of more sophisticated and even more demanding users continues to grow. Mainstream users (as opposed to Aearly adopters@) of technology can become more self-supporting on the basics, but they demand more help as they explore more sophisticated options.

Technical support personnel proudly describe their successful efforts to meet institutional goals to engage more faculty and students in educational uses of IT. The associated punishment for this success is the overwhelming demand for support services.

New conditions
Accelerating pace. Applications of technologyCespecially related to telecommunications and the use of the WebCthat appear to have significant potential for use in teaching and learning continue to arrive at an accelerating pace from industry (the information-entertainment-publishing-technology-telecommunications industries). The software product development cycle keeps shortening. Competition in the Abrowser wars@ keeps new features arriving faster and faster. Most users cannot comfortably adapt on their own. Professional support personnel cannot keep up-to-date.

Greater accessibility. The increasing availability of hardware, software, and Afaculty development@ opportunities raises awareness, expectations, and demands for support. In the last few years most institutions have made investments that make more computers and related equipment visible and accessible to faculty and students. More faculty and students have moved past the Abeginner@ level of computer and Internet use. People who know the basics and see more accessible machines are likely to want to try using new technology applications in their own teaching and learning (and other legitimate scholarly pursuits).

Wider, deeper use. According to the latest data (1998 Campus Computing Survey), over 40% of undergraduate courses now involve the use of electronic mail for communication among students and faculty in some way. Web use in conjunction with courses is growing rapidly. Dozens of colleges or divisions are requiring or providing computers and Web access for all students and faculty. In many academic disciplines, applications of information technology have been developed that have become essential to the work of that field. Faculty members often feel compelled to include those applications in courses that deal with related topics.

Variety of support needed. It=s not only technical support that is needed. The services of faculty development professionals, librarians, disability support professionals, and others are increasingly in demand. Operating budgets and the number of available qualified personnel for these categories fall far short of what would be required to meet the demand for their services. Coordinating related support services can reduce the expectation-resource gap for each, but cannot solve the overall resource shortage problem.

The range and variety of access to technology and training in elementary and secondary schools and in homes is increasing. The variety of experience and proficiency with IT of entering students is increasing. Consequently, the variety and level of technology-related support needed by students is increasing. [Competition with industry for technical support professionals is increasing, and industry is offering them higher and higher salaries.]

Clearly articulating the responsibility for providing basic training and answers to users= questions among the various support service providers is an important step. For institutions, it is useful to develop an ongoing process for defining Ainformation literacy@ and the means for achieving and assessing it.

External pressure and competition. External pressure to integrate IT keeps increasing (including political pressure, media pressure, perceived threats of competition). Most academic leaders see signs of increasing competition from providers of various forms of distance education. [Note: There is a remarkable ignorance of the degree to which higher education has already integrated information technology into teaching and learning, and the increased costs almost always associated with doing so effectively.]

Faculty rewards and ownership. More academic leaders and board members are encouraging faculty members to use technology in their teaching and to try Adistance education.@ At most colleges and universities the mechanisms for evaluating and rewarding faculty teaching efforts are not structured to recognize the challenges and accomplishments of instructional uses of technology. When calculating faculty workload there is increasing confusion and disagreement about how to count Adistant@ students.

Developing Adistance education@ course elements requires the faculty to make much greater use of institutional resources (technical and other) than when modifying or developing Atraditional@ courses. As a consequence, more institutions are developing policies about ownership of faculty-developed course materials that differ substantially from previous laissez-faire custom. (Usually in the past, faculty members could rightly assume that they Aowned@ whatever they developed for a particular course). Those who provide support services for the development of new instructional materials (or the modification of old ones) are rarely considered as having any ownership of the resultsCand they usually don=t receive extra rewards for that work.

The problems
This Support Service Crisis is not a temporary aberration; it is a reflection of a new commitment. Higher education has accepted the challenge of adding a new dimension Cof integrating information technology in a way that can increase access to better quality education. The potential goes way beyond providing all students with a grasp of the uses of IT tools. Teaching and learning can both benefit from new uses of IT. Greater expectations can only be achieved with greater support services. For the foreseeable future there are no ways in which the uses of the technology itself will achieve significant reductions in instructional costs or reduce the need for professional support services.

Reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic. Reorganizing support services can achieve some improvements; but when expectations exceed resources too greatly, reorganization alone is insufficient. When the gap between expectations and available resources is too great (as it is on most campuses), relations between technical support professionals and those who rely on them often become quite hostile. Each experience so much frustration in dealing with the other that they cannot easily recognize their common problem and shared goals.

While there is always hope of finding ways of using technology and reorganizing administrative staff to increase productivity and efficiency, those increases are likely to be quite small when compared with the additional resources needed to develop and support educational uses of information technology. The potential for improving education with technology cannot be achieved without increasing the resources available for supporting its use.

Partial solutions
Communication and coordination. To achieve the full potential of educational uses of information technology, those who provide the relevant support services must be able to communicate more effectively with each other and with those who need their services. Mutual understanding of their shared predicamentCof the expectation/resource gapCcan reduce the energy-wasting hostility between service providers and Ausers.@ Unnecessary duplication of effort can be avoided. The full range of support services must be coordinated and focused on helping faculty succeed in learning how to use new educational options.

The pace of change in the educational role of technology will continue to accelerate in the foreseeable future. Support service providers will not be able to close the gap quickly, but they can learn to work together and live with constant change more comfortably and effectively

Student (Technology) Assistants. While the needs of students impel the educational changes that result in greater demands for support services, these same students provide the one resource that can partially solve the Support Service Crisis. Most colleges and universities are already using students to help with the more routine and less challenging technology support tasks (such as monitoring computer labs). But a few institutions are now providing more varied and advanced training and supervision for their Student Technology Assistants.

These students can recruit, train, supervise, and evaluate other students; although it is essential to provide skilled professional management overseeing the full complement of student assistants. These student assistants can help their peers and the facultyCand every category of support professionals (library, faculty development, disabilities, etc.) As students gain the knowledge and skills needed for these more varied roles, they have more opportunities to become more active in shaping their own education.

As their responsibilities as technology assistants expand, they also gain unusual opportunities to work more closely and collegially with faculty members. Many students report these opportunities as providing the most beneficial educational experiences of their undergraduate careers.

More resources. Once we recognize the need for larger annual operating budgets for support services, two difficult questions remain What else can the institution give up in order to support the improvement of teaching and learning with technology? What additional resources are available to provide support services for those who are improving teaching and learning with information technology?

Many institutions have already exhausted the options for the first question. Most institutions still lack annual operating budget commitments for equipment replacement, software acquisition, upgrading, training, maintenance, and user support.

Colleges and universities need to include in annual operating budgets and institutional planning efforts funds sufficient to meet the growing needs for professional support services. This is easier to acknowledge than to achieve.

Society must recognize the growing value and costs of widespread academic uses of information technology. Even with better communication and coordination among support service professionals and more widespread and effective use of student technology assistants, the demand for additional support services will continue to grow. It can only be met with increasing societal investment in educational uses of information technology. It is worth it. 

Steve Gilbert is president of the TLT Group, the Teaching, Learning, and Technology affiliate of the American Association for Higher Education. This article is based on a posting to Steve=s AAHESGIT listserv.

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