There have been several posts about the lack of commitment by academics to projects once they have started. These contributions seem to have come from people in support units who assist academics to create educational Interactive Multimedia (IMM) materials. In other words, people in areas like mine. I have experienced and am experiencing similar situations.
I would be interested in the comments of teaching academics (the other side of the fence!) to the following weaving. There are some interesting insights to be had, I feel.
Re-reading this, I also apologize that this is so long, and perhaps off the track of the initial discussion. However, there seems to be a need, and I had to clarify my thoughts on this issue for a seminar I am giving next week anyway!
The range of comments received is summarized below, followed by my analysis of the situation, and some of the steps we have taken at Curtin to circumvent this. If you are in industry, you had better stop reading now!
[quoting Pennell, 30 Oct 96] ¥ lack of focus by academic staff, lack of effectiveness of release time: people who were included in the project team (perhaps for reasons of internal politics) were allocated paid release time but did nothing for the project. Others consistently failed to attend planning meetings, citing administrative pressures.
¥ lack of Faculty commitment: when the academic left before the completion of the project (two projects) the orphan could not be "sold" to the replacement staff. Perhaps they saw it as being too complicated and too far away from their conventional teaching methods, so that additional effort would be required to implement and administer the new system. (Not only not invented here, but not invented by me?) Does this problem arise from the reward criteria built into academic progress?
[quoting Ramondt, 30 Oct 96] What was totally unforeseen by all, is that the content expert would encounter major demands on his time and energy which severely restricted his availability to focus on writing and narrating the content.
[quoting Gibson, 30 Oct 96] How do you help a professor, who has very successfully taught his/her course alone, see themselves as the subject matter expert in a project and accept that successful multimedia development is a team process?
How do you help that professor, who has either never heard of instructional design or views it as a very rigid process that will rob them of their creativity, to see the value of the process in developing multimedia?
How do you keep team members accountable for their responsibilities when faculty are tenured and respected and can drop out of the process without any repercussions?
[quoting Quinn, 1 Oct 96] The main investigator stayed away as much as possible, and had the programmer spending time writing up conference papers about the project, as well as focusing on bells and whistles (where's the sound? the video?).
[quoting Moller, 1 Oct 96] I have tried to convince these excellent lecturers to develop IMM and then publish about the project, but it is often not the kind of publication that get lots of attention. How does one convince academics to spent so much time on the development of IMM as subject matter experts?
On the other hand we find academics who arrive with stars in their eyes and dreams of developing a IMM program that will revolutionize the field--only to disappear again after they realize the amount of time involved. Yes, like Russ Pennell said in his comments on faculty commitment, often the young ones are eager to help but departmental heads do not buy into it and the young eager lecturer drowns under the workload. Many reasons for not completing are stated, but it is a major problem.
When we can not convince faculty to be creative about interaction we seldom take on such a project...
In what follows, remember that I am also a university academic, albeit one who doesn't teach students.
The symptoms seem to be one or more of the following:
There are probably a whole range of other excuses, but it is hard to identify if these are real reasons, or ways of justifying one of the symptoms above.
My initial essay raised some issues about academics' relations to general staff in IMM projects. I have experienced projects where the content expert has seen their role as simply giving their lecture notes to the "technician" so he or she can simply convert them to format X. My follow-up post on communication pointed out how essential it is for all team members to have an equal role, whether they are academic or not. This means some stereotypes have to be broken. The power relationship between academic and technical staff needs to be challenged.
Academics are busy people (in Australia). And multimedia projects are hugely intensive in time requirements. So something has to break. Many academics do not and cannot realize how much work is involved in successfully creating educational IMM. The people who got them excited about it didn't tell them that! So, when the number of hours in the day run out, some hard decisions have to be made. Does the IMM project suffer, or research, or the family? The degree of commitment to the IMM project determines whether it will be dropped, or something else (see below).
Some academics attempt to solve the problem of lack of time by delegating the responsibility of the project to the programmer/team. Perhaps "abrogate" is a better term than delegate. I was involved peripherally with one such project, where the lecturers involved would visit the programmer each week to view progress and ask him to design and implement a module on topic X. The programmer had no expertise in topic X, and only very sketchy instructions about how to go about it. That project is not complete.
In some early projects, we weren't respected by our clients. We were viewed simply as a production team, who would take the provided educational material, and produce a computer program to order, as designed by the content expert. This was soul destroying work for the production team who could see flaws in the design, and who were experienced in the area, but were excluded from the design process. The perception of our group as production team, without intellectual ownership, was compounded by the necessity to charge for our services. This complaint also came through strongly from the responses above. Luckily, there were a number of strong personalities in our group, and we set out to change this perception.
There is a solution, but it is not a magic bullet! I believe that a solution to the problems mentioned above are for the IMM development group to position themselves so they are viewed with respect by their clients. A second and related point is to set up an effective staff development model, so staff are exposed to the possibilities of technology and know that there is a group with significant expertise in producing educational technology applications.
Perhaps in some of the examples described above, the development group decided to accept a project under any conditions, because at least there was one academic who wanted to do something. However, if more attention had been paid to staff development and "evangelizing," there might have been a range of interested people, and the development group could have been more assertive about taking an equal role in the project (or saying that the instructional material was crappy). Or alternatively, they could have dropped the project of the academic with no time, and focused on other activities. Certainly, we do that often. If an academic, for whatever reason, has no time to work on a project, then we let it sit there until they are ready again. We can use the time more effectively exposing other staff to the possibilities.
One advantage we had in establishing an environment of mutual worth and respect with our clients was the presence of academics like myself in the development group. This added valuable "street credibility" to any relationship. Another advantage is that our group is part of a larger Computing Centre, and there are always a range of projects to which people can be assigned.
I need to clarify this point. In 1992 and 1993 our section ran on a deficit budget and had to raise money to stay afloat. These days, we run on a balanced budget. We still charge nominally for production work, but we don't need the money. In this way we can happily wait for projects to gestate, without having to get frustrated at academics who say they are too busy.
The Computing Centre presents a range of staff development activities in Information Technology (IT) at Curtin. Individually, they are not particularly important, but as a whole they have had a large effect over five years. The range of measures described below have taken us out of the early adopter stage into mainstream acceptance that IT is useful in education. In fact, several schools and departments are now attempting to position themselves for wholesale adoption of IT in teaching.
The points below describe some of the activities:
This was supported by several million dollars through the university's IT plan, which installed the network infrastructure and lecture theater equipment. The result is that IT is seen as a core productivity activity by a majority of staff.
These initiatives were supported by the success of the early adopters in producing projects which were educationally sound and fairly cost-effective. Special efforts were made to "nurture" key people in schools and departments, so that their example would inspire colleagues. This has been very successful in some schools.
I need to comment more about the residential IMM workshops we hold. Luckily we have an Agricultural campus, 100km away, which has an Internet connection. Once or twice a year, we take about 16 staff and 8 support people there to live and breathe multimedia for a week. By being off-campus, we can get 12 hours work a day out of the attendees (!) and stop them from dropping back to their office after lunch, or going to meetings.
The format is: two days of the usual thing of making a trivial project in groups, then we do a day of theory which can be anchored on their experiences, and we finish off with two days of them working on their ideas for their own projects.
These workshops have directly led to a number of activities in schools, teaching grant applications, and successful teaching grants.
So far, I haven't addressed the issue of getting faculties to support their staff in teaching technology projects. In fact, why should they, if it is only a few heroic individuals attempting "to boldly explore where no woman has been before?" However, if the university has a strategic push from the top to adopt technology, and the early adopters are seen to be successful and supported, then the use of the technology enters the main stream. That is when faculties start to support their staff.
To get this far, you have to have the strategic direction from the top, but also an integrated staff development model and structure. These days, schools and departments are coming to us asking us to share our expertise about teaching with technology, rather than us running seminars and getting the same 20 faces each time.
It takes time, and commitment from the university to adequately resource a production and staff development unit. Funding for one or two positions is not enough. How many of you are like Russ Pennell? He achieves some wonderful things, but there is just him, and he is expected to single-handedly change a university campus!