A personal history: 29. Strategic planning for e-learning: a personal case-study

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I am writing an autobiography, mainly for my family, but it does cover some key moments in the development of open and online learning. I thought I would share these as there seems to be a growing interest in the history of educational technology.

Note that these posts are NOT meant to be deeply researched historical accounts, but how I saw and encountered developments in my personal life. If you were around at the time of these developments and would like to offer comments or a different view, please use the comment box at the end of each post. (There is already a conversation track on my LinkedIn site). 

In this post, I want to look at my attempt, 20 years ago, to develop a strategic plan for e-learning for a Canadian Institute of Technology, between 2004 and 2005.

Canadian Institutes of Technology

In Canada, ‘polytechnic’ and ‘institute of technology’ are essentially synonymous, referring to post-secondary institutions that focus on applied, hands-on learning and industry-aligned education, often offering programs in technology, engineering, and applied sciences.

In my view, institutes such as SAIT, NAIT (Northern Alberta Institute of Technology), BCIT (the British Columbia Institute of Technology) and JIBC (the Justice Institute of British Columbia, which trains police and emergency services personnel) are one of the main pillars of Canadian post-secondary education. They turn out job-ready, skilled workers which adds enormously to Canadian productivity.

Also, in my experience (I have worked for both universities and institutes of technology), in Canada the culture of institutes and polytechnics is different from universities. Institutes tend to be more focused at both an academic and administrative level, and consequently are less collegial and more managerial, which has both advantages and disadvantages, as we shall see.

Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT)

SAIT is located in Calgary, Alberta and offers baccalaureate degrees, applied degrees, diplomas and certificate programs, apprenticeship trades and continuing education, corporate training, camps and other open registration courses. It has about 14,000 full time students, another 20,000 students taking part-time corporate training or continuous education courses, and 4,000 apprenticeships. It has very close ties with major Albertan corporations. Graduates of SAIT can often land jobs in the oil sector immediately after graduation with starting salaries above $100,000 a year. However, SAIT also provides initial training in many other careers besides those needed in the oilfields. Its hospitality program for instance is often ranked no. 1 in Canada.

The Cisco Chair in e-Learning

In 2004, SAIT had managed to land an endowment/grant from Cisco Systems which enabled the Institute to establish a Cisco Chair in e-Learning.

Cisco is a major American company based in California and develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware and software, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products. In particular, Cisco provided training courses in information technology through its Cisco Academy, and SAIT was one of the institutions offering this program.

I was appointed the Cisco Chair in e-Learning, on a part-time basis, for a total of 80 working days (excluding travel), spread out over a one year period between May 2004 and June 2005. (At the same time, I was also working as a consultant in Barcelona, Spain). The SAIT mandate for me included providing leadership, resulting in SAIT achieving international recognition as a premier institution for e-learning development and research, and the development of a three year strategic and operational plan for e-learning.

Working in Calgary

Although Alberta borders British Columbia, it is a 17-hours non-stop drive through five different mountain ranges, including the Rockies, from Vancouver to Calgary, and just over 1,000 kilometres in distance, about the same distance as Rome from London. This is important to know, because for a period of two years, I was commuting between my home in Vancouver and my work in Calgary. I would leave Vancouver Sunday evening or early Monday morning to fly to Calgary, and fly back Friday evening.

I needed to find accommodation somewhere on an intermittent basis near the SAIT campus, which is located about a 12 minute drive north-west from downtown Calgary, and quite near the University of Calgary. My accommodation had to fit with SAIT’s policies for expenses, which were not extravagant, so I settled on a Quality Inn (now a Comfort Inn), close to the Calgary Light Rail Banff Trail station, which was just two stops from the SAIT LRT station. The Quality Inn was a two star hotel, cheap but surprisingly cheerful, with rooms arranged around an indoor swimming pool and with a small bar. The rooms were small but clean, and I was more than happy staying there.

It was literally just two minutes from the station, and I could see the train track from my hotel window, so in the winter I would wait for a train to pass, then run the short distance to the station just in time to catch the next train. You did not want to stand on an exposed platform for more than a minute in a Calgary winter. One day in May I left the hotel with the temperature just about 20 degrees centigrade. When I came to go home, the temperature had dropped 20 degrees and it was snowing. I had on a short sleeved shirt and a pair of shorts. I had to borrow a coat from a colleague.

Easing into e-learning

I reported directly to the Vice-President Academic, but my main point of contact was the Director of SAIT’s Centre for Instructional Technology and Development (CITD).

SAIT set up a Strategic Development Committee on e-Learning which I was invited to chair, and which included two deans, the Director of CITD, the Registrar, and representatives from both the Faculty Association and Student Association. This was an invaluable source of advice and guidance for me while I was working at SAIT.

There was already a program (Laptop Learning) where students were issued computers by SAIT. The computers were made available to about 25% of the students, mainly in Business Administration and the Information Technology programs. There were some clear benefits to this program, but also some limitations:

• the computers were only used in in-person classes as a support for lectures
• the in-class computer activities were often of a low instructional level, such as completing a survey
• students had to lease the computers from SAIT, and some complained that this was an extra expense as they already had their own computers
• the computers were classroom-based and could not be used for distance education programs.

SAIT was also using WebCT, a learning management system, available for faculty and students, but apart from about 40 fully online courses, WebCT was used mainly as a back-up resource for traditional in-class lectures.

CITD had the basic skills and expertise to help instructors develop quality e-learning courses and programs, but was not large enough to cope with a major expansion of e-learning. The decision to offer or move to e-learning was determined in most cases by the individual instructor, so when I first arrived at SAIT in 2004, actual implementation of e-learning was small and unco-ordinated, apart from the high quality fully online courses designed in collaboration with CITD.

Many of the instructors at SAIT were professional tradespeople with no professional qualifications in teaching, and a large proportion were employed part-time at SAIT. Vancouver Community College had recently developed an Instructor Development Program (PIDP) which CITD, through a memorandum of agreement, was able to offer both as an in-person and an online course. However, I had recently been on an external review of this program, and had noted that it covered only classroom teaching, and that another version was needed for e-learning and distance education.

There was a good deal of interest in the use of digital simulations in some of the trades areas, but nothing to date had been developed.

Trying to develop a vision for teaching and learning

I quickly realised a major effort to persuade instructors at SAIT to increase their use of e-learning would be needed, and to gain the most benefit from e-learning, the teaching process would need to be re-designed, especially regarding hybrid or blended courses. I therefore needed to arrange ‘vision’ workshops for each academic department, where I could:

• make the case for e-learning,
• demonstrate examples from within and from outside SAIT of quality e-learning,
• get some idea of where instructors saw the future going in their respective disciplines
• get them to suggest a ‘vision’ for how they could teach with technology, and
• discuss the needs and concerns of the instructors.

To start this process, the VP Academic and the Director of CITD helped set me up with individual meetings with each Dean/head of department. My job was to explain why I was at SAIT and to get the Dean’s support for the workshops. This went surprisingly well, with most Deans highly supportive of the idea of a workshop for their instructors.

However, when the VP Academic asked me how the interviews with Deans were going, I said:

‘Great – all but one has agreed to meet with me and most are supportive of the idea of a workshop.’

‘All but one?’ said the VP. ‘Which one?’

I told him.

A couple of days later, I got an email from the VP’s assistant, saying that a meeting had been arranged with the recalcitrant dean in a couple of days time.

I turned up for the meeting at the appointed time, and was kept waiting in the outer office for nearly 30 minutes. When his assistant said I could go in, the Dean had his head down reading something. He didn’t look up for another minute or so. When he did, he looked me straight in the eye and said:

‘I hate f–king consultants. You get paid a lot of money which could be better used for teaching, you’ll write a report, then nothing will get done. This happens all the time in this place.’

I suppressed a laugh, reached out my hand, and said:

‘I see we’re are going to get along fine. Let’s both make sure that this time, something does get done.’

After that, we got on quite well and a workshop was arranged.

A failure to develop visions for e-learning

Although workshops were set up for most departments, they did not go as I intended. First there were difficulties in getting instructors to attend. Many taught part-time as well as holding down full-time jobs in their trade or profession. They were often paid by the hour so there was simply no time for them to attend. The result was a preponderance of full-time managers or program co-ordinators at the workshops. Because of the difficulty of people finding time to attend, the time for the face-to-face workshops was limited to an hour, which was insufficient to allow time for follow-up discussion and some agreement on a future vision for teaching. Most of this discussion then had to be conducted after the workshops in online discussion forums.

Again, this did not work out as planned. Instead of using the online, threaded discussion forums in WebCT as I suggested, for some reason I never understood, the discussion forums were set up in mySAIT, which was never intended as an online group discussion forum for instructors, and which did not facilitate threaded discussion. Also, because this would have carried me well outside my contracted hours, I was unable personally to moderate each discussion. This was left to the program co-ordinators, who themselves were often unsure as to what was expected in the discussions, and many had had no previous experience in managing online discussion forums. The result was that clear, concrete visions for teaching in the future were not achieved for most departments, at least not as a result of this process.

However, the workshops were useful for me in understanding the instructors’ and the administration’s readiness (or lack of it) for e-learning, and the operational difficulties that would need to be overcome to implement e-learning successfully on a wide scale. I also learned never to assume that people have prior knowledge or experience in using educational technology of even the most straightforward kind.

Finding sufficient time for instructors to have thoughtful and well-structured discussions about the future of their discipline or profession, with input from external stakeholders, and the resulting implications for teaching, is essential for deciding on the effective future use of technology for teaching. However, finding sufficient time for this visioning is also the most difficult part of strategic planning. Everyone is too busy, so everyone carries on as normal until a crisis occurs.

Forging ahead

My remit though was pretty wide. E-learning is not just about teaching. It requires a wider set of administrative and technological factors to be taken into account, such as web services, IT support, and online enrolment, so I not only talked to instructors but also to administrators, technical support staff, and students.

Eventually, after widespread discussion and consultations, I presented a Strategic Plan for e-Learning at SAIT with 85 recommendations. However, the main point made was that the move to e-learning is not just about flexible delivery or the moving of classroom content to the web. It requires a re-thinking of the curriculum and how best it can be taught.  This resulted in the first and most important recommendation:

• The move to e-learning should be combined with the adoption of new methods of teaching and learning that reflect the needs of a workforce in an information-based society

I recommended a rate of production of approximately 90 new courses a year in either mixed mode or fully online, within an overall three year plan for teaching and learning for each academic department.

In the report I also stated:

• SAIT’s biggest problem is capacity…there are major limitations in terms of readiness of faculty, a shortage of qualified support staff, and conditions of employment that restrict a rapid move to e-learning.

I put a heavy emphasis on the need for faculty development and training:

• The main challenge is to bring about a change in culture, where training and professional development for instructors is seen as a core competence or requirement, and not an optional extra thrown in at the end of a tiring teaching year.

I noted the Conference Board of Canada’s recommendation that the minimum amount of training needed by a knowledge worker to remain current in their job is approximately three months spread over five years, equivalent to roughly 10 days per year. Given that many instructors were hired on an hourly basis, they would need to be paid for any extra training time, so I recommended an increase of the equivalent of 30 new full-time instructors over five years, to find the time to train and develop instructors in e-learning course design and development. Although most of my other 85 recommendations were accepted, this last one was a bridge too far. The cost was deemed too high.

As well as providing a business model for self-sustained e-learning course development and delivery, I also made recommendations regarding intellectual property and academic content management, and the need to move the mandate of the Cisco Chair towards research and evaluation of e-learning. (In 2008 I worked with Martha Burkle to develop a three year plan for e-learning research at SAIT, which she became responsible for implementing.) If you would like to see a copy of the full report on strategic planning for e-Learning at SAIT, you will need to contact SAIT directly, as it is their property.

Conclusion

Successful strategic planning in post-secondary institutions is difficult. It requires a good deal of time and buy-in from all stakeholders, but especially instructors. Above all, it needs to be accompanied with a strong business plan and inevitably some financial investment to make it work. In future, before planning such an exercise, I would ask for some indication of the willingness to invest in e-learning (like: how much?) before even starting the planning process. This would provide a good indicator of the seriousness of the intent. Also today I would be much more aware of the impact on climate change of 16 return flights to Calgary within a 12 month period. However, change not only costs money, it requires strong personal connections. You need to look people in the eye to gain their trust and to persuade them to do something different.

I’d be interested to hear from SAIT instructors or administrators how it all worked out in the end. I know SAIT did eventually move successfully into online learning, but did SAIT emerge as an international leader in e-learning as a result, as planned?

From my work at SAIT, I learned a great deal about the culture of an Institute of Technology, and, to a lesser extent, about the unique culture of Calgary. I certainly learned about the difficulties and limits of strategic planning. Indeed, as the recalcitrant dean hinted, the consultant is usually the one who learns most from the experience. However I feel immensely privileged to have worked with some great people at SAIT – and learned the hard way about the unpredictability of the weather in Calgary.

Up next

Work and life in Barcelona at the Open University of Catalonia