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Chris Hughes, Lindsay Hewson and Peggy Nightingale
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3: Developing New Roles and Skills
Chris Hughes, Lindsay Hewson and Peggy Nightingale |
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Introduction
Major Themes
The Changing Roles of Staff
Institutional Arrangements for Staff Development for IT
Approaches to Staff Development for Information Technology in Teaching
Strategies for Addressing Staff Role Changes
Major Issues Arising from the Role Changes of Staff
The three generic strategies we have observed emerging as Australian universities compete are exciting opportunities. While the technology may be already available to implement these strategies, the implications of such changes for university staff are profound. Not only will both academics and administrative staff need sophisticated technological literacy, but the nature of their work and their areas of responsibility will need to be redesigned to accommodate both the new structure and the technology.
In describing these strategies, we briefly explored how university culture can impede strategic change. At a general level, we agree with Boalch:
The limitation will be the time it takes universities and staff to develop the skills needed to effectively exploit the medium, and how universities handle the associated cultural change. Those that have effective staff development and technology diffusion policies and structures in place, and who view information technology as a strategic tool in attracting new students, will be at the forefront.
(Boalch 1996)
It follows, therefore, that an institution's capacity to embrace and exploit IT effectively will directly influence its success in the marketplace. Not only will the core enterprises of universities-research and teaching-need to respond to these changes, but also the management, administrative and support systems in which they occur. In this chapter we examine how different universities have begun to address the major task of reskilling and redeploying the academics, IT specialists, administrative staff and others who are the universities' critical human resources.
Through our study of the literature, site visits and follow-up discussions with colleagues at various institutions, we have identified some major themes relating to support for staff. We begin by exploring the changing roles of staff at the universities studied. We then discuss the institutional arrangements and three emerging approaches to the organisation of staff development. This is followed by an analysis of strategies taken to address role changes. The chapter ends with a discussion of the major issues arising from role changes and, in particular, both systemic and individual resistance to change.
The Literature on Role Changes
The literature on the impact of information technology on higher education abounds with suggestions of changes to the roles of staff that will result. Steele (1995), reflecting a common theme, considers that the increasing use of the Internet will bring a shift from teacher to learner centred models of learning, while Nunan (1996b), in the context of an argument which asserts the coming centrality of 'actionable knowledge' in the provision of education, suggests that the changes 'can change the balance of power between teacher and learner...' and will require the 'retreading' of staff to operate in this environment. In a similar vein, Boalch (1996), writing in The Australian newspaper, states that the changes will bring requirements for new skills as well as cultural change. The recent report by Tinkler, Lepani and Mitchell (1996) encourages the breaking down of the barriers between academics and general staff and the emergence of a new view of these groups as 'co-professionals'.
The Hoare Report on Higher Education Management (1996) stresses the need for a shift from the concentration of academic teaching roles in the transmission of knowledge towards an involvement in market research, needs analysis, curriculum design and evaluation.
Fowell and Levy (1995) envisage the development of para-academics, with backgrounds in librarianship, who will assist academics to understand the resources available and advise them on their use in teaching, provide tuition on information and study skills to students, perform some trouble shooting functions, and produce materials to inform users about electronic resources.
In the United States there is much discussion in the literature and on email lists of the coming changes in the Higher Education sector. In line with a strand of thinking in the management literature (see for example Limerick & Cunnington 1993), Dolence and Norris (1995) assert that to survive universities must move from a teaching to a learning emphasis, with the 'network' rather than the campus or the lecture hall as the fundamental organisational unit. Our analysis in the previous chapter suggests that this is just one strategic option. They describe the process of transformation in organisations and in the roles of staff as a radical change, a process of 're-engineering'.
Changes Occurring in Australian Universities
The implementation of information technology to support the educational and administrative work of universities is clearly resulting in changes in the roles of staff. The changes are causing some tensions and difficulties, particularly in some of the traditional staffing distinctions. One of our interviewees commented:
We can't ask academics to be 'all things to all people', some clarifying of roles and subsequent training is needed..... and, where do 'instructional designers' belong-academic or general?
It is clear that changing roles often means an increase in workload in the short term, and that challenges arise requiring the clarification of work roles and the re-evaluation of work loads. We begin by identifying the main changes discovered during the research for this report as they affect academic and general staff.
Changing Roles and Skills of Academic Staff
Teachers need to have more theoretically grounded pedagogical knowledge, so that they can manage and direct projects using IT for creating resources and facilitating processes. Shirley Alexander's view (quoted in Tinkler, Lepani & Mitchell 1996) is a typical expression of the thinking behind this approach:
We need to break down the belief in technology as a panacea. The real investment has to be made in thinking about their role as a teacher, about learning, and interfacing this with technology to re-conceptualise their role. Technology comes after thinking deeply about the learning experience required.
In the new media of network based learning the teacher is not the primary source of content, but rather a resource person with content expertise. There is a shift in the 'power balance' between teacher and student. The use of contact time is more determined by student needs than teacher's agenda. An academic interviewed for the project said:
I feel the lecture is no longer the channel for information. Now I can rely on another place [the computer tutorials] I actually feel that although that first contact of the week is pretty intense, the other contacts of the week because they are less structured are slightly less intense for me. Now I go in with the intention of just talking about things and answering their questions. I am driven by their concerns and questions much more than in traditional lectures where I almost have to say 'no questions' because I have to be at this point in my lecture in 50 minutes.
The increased time needed to develop resource-based teaching or to handle students on-line, etc. brings teachers into direct conflict with their primary role to maintain research output. We spoke to many academic staff finding time management problematic. Some were resolving the issue by developing a research program focussed on aspects of the use of information technology in their teaching, while others were accepting that the demands of their teaching prohibited the pursuit of an active research program in the short term.
Academic staff may take up technical roles related to media production (interface design, graphic design, instructional design, storyboarding, programming, media selection, file conversion etc.); there will be a greater emphasis on process design for teaching and increased emphasis on the roles associated with the development of distance materials.
IT experienced staff are finding that they often act as staff developers and trainers with respect to their colleagues in relation to communicating innovative practices and assisting colleagues to learn the skills required to use IT in their teaching. An academic leader of a teaching project at the University of South Australia has taken on significant staff development roles in his own School in support of the development of Web based resources for problem based learning:
I have taken the staff from the word processing stage and once you have shown them that there are other possibilities like Powerpoint and HTML they are quite interested....My enthusiasm has been important. I can demonstrate the benefits, communicate them to the staff and I am around to help them and they know they can rely on me. I encourage them to ask questions.
More and different 'basic skills' are required for academic work. Teaching roles are becoming more information technology intensive, with demands for straight technical knowledge and skills increasing: word processing, presentation software, project planning, programming, graphics, sound and video are among the areas coming into contention for inclusion in the core skill sets of teachers.
Academics are also taking on increased administrative work with developments in networked administrative systems. Central data entry and report generation in areas like student administration are being devolved to Faculties and Schools, and some of this work, once done by administrative staff, is being taken up by academic staff.
A Vice-Chancellor pointed out that Heads of Schools who once understood the technologies of teaching (blackboards and classrooms) are now required to make decisions about curriculum developments and equipment purchases with significant information technology components. It is not clear, the Vice-Chancellor suggested, that all managers understand the implications of a decision to teach using the WEB or multimedia in the same way as it could once have been said that they understood the implications of putting on an additional lecture stream.
The same may be said of the manager's role (both academic and general staff) with respect to information technology across the board. The information technology component of work is increasing in all areas, and managers are having to make decisions about the development, funding and maintenance of information technology intensive activities, often with a less than perfect grasp of the technical details involved.
Changing Roles and Skills of General Staff
In parallel with the changes in roles of academics, general staff will need a greater range of skills, including those relating to working in teams. General staff will need all the skills traditionally required of managers and administrators, plus a set of skills related to the development and use of information technology applications in administration. They are increasingly working in teams in partnership with academic staff, contributing high level skills in informatics and other areas.
John Pryzibilla, Senior Assistant Registrar (Systems) at the University of South Australia, with a background in IT sees a trend towards seeking these skills in new appointments:
My position was advertised as Senior Assistant Registrar (Systems) to assume increased responsibility for the [student records] system. They looked for someone with some sort of computing background as well as a management background. The universities here are tending to recruit staff with IT skills, or looking at IT staff to see who has broader skills.... Managerial positions have always required specialist skills of some sort, but the new specialty is IT. The total amount of specialist expertise is just growing. You still need the managerial skills, the registry and administration skills, and now the information systems, and general systems design skills as well.
Numerous examples of the high level demands raised by Pryzibilla were discovered in the course of the site visits. In some universities administrative staff have been involved in the development of specifications for elements of the CASMAC system. In others they have worked on the specification and implementation of in-house management information systems in areas such as student records, human resources, finance or research. These tasks require administrative staff to address the administrative functions with which they have most expertise, as well as the interface of these functions with other systems and practices in the university. Thus the area of 'general systems design skills' is being incorporated into the roles of an increasing number of university administrators and managers.
General staff also need basic understanding of sound pedagogy. Technical and administrative staff need to understand what teachers are trying to achieve so they can assist in creating the appropriate IT-enhanced environment for learning.
New position types are being created, with general staff taking on roles which can be described as 'para-academic'. For example, the roles of instructional designers are changing as the use of information technologies increases. Many instructional designers are no longer text writers and editors, as many were in the earlier days of distance education. Instructional designers are now working across a range of technologies and the design of educational processes is much more prominent in their work. They also tend now to have more formal training in instructional design and educational technology as these professional development courses have become available.
The increased emphasis on distance and flexible learning is making new demands on administrators to oversee resource production and distribution, and to deliver administrative support to students studying off campus.
Significant elements of the information technology infrastructure, such as PC training, media production, computer sales and support etc., are being outsourced and administrators are now taking on the roles of contract managers. This is a relatively new role in university administration. Managers and executives in universities are increasingly being called on to evaluate the viability of and costs associated with information technology projects.
Institutional Arrangements for Staff Development for IT
It is clear that the increasing use of information technology in teaching and administration is putting considerable pressures on staff development arrangements in universities. Many of the institutions chosen for close study by this project had recently reviewed or were about to review their staff development arrangements. The task of developing the infrastructure to allow sensible use of information technologies in the work of universities is challenging in itself, but the need to rework teaching practices, the roles and skills of staff and students, and curriculum content makes the challenge more daunting, especially in times of financial restraint. The challenge is put well by Moran (1996b):
Few universities have the resources easily to redeploy the funds necessary for the kinds of infrastructure and networks now essential. They are struggling also with the immense tasks of reconceiving curriculum content and pedagogies, and building faculty and students' abilities to maximise the potential of the new technologies.
Several themes emerged from our site visits.
Different Development Strategies for Educational and Administrative Activities
It is notable that the development of the skills of staff in relation to information technology tends to be handled differently depending on the category of activity involved. In general, teaching and related activities are the object of much clearer and more richly resourced developmental strategies, and are seen as a much more crucial element in the achievement of institutional goals, than are administrative activities. In some institutions well developed strategies, resourced to a basic level of functionality and supported by structural arrangements, are in place to support teaching activities, while administrative activities in the same institution receive little or no developmental support beyond what can be achieved through ad hoc arrangements, usually with minimal resource allocations.
Thus academic staff are relatively well supported in the development of their information technology skills, at least to the extent that IT is used in their teaching and related educational roles, when compared with general staff.
This differential does not imply that academic staff are being supported in all areas of their work while general staff are not. When information technology skills of a specialist nature are required to support the research work of academic staff, little staff development support is available from institutions. Some support on standard packages such as the Statistical Package for the Social SciencesŪ may be available, and more recently, general support on the use of a range of tools for finding information on the Internet and digital media. But there are few examples of systematic attempts to develop the information technology skills of staff to facilitate their research work.
In some institutions the differential between the support offered for the use of information technology in teaching and the support offered for its use in other areas is quite marked. At the University of South Australia, for example, a significant effort is being put into the development of the information technology skills of academic staff in relation to teaching through the University's Flexible Learning Centre, and even in relation to general Internet based research skills through the Library. In contrast, the provision for the development of general staff in the use of information technology for administrative purposes is apparently limited to contracts with external providers for package training, and to ad hoc arrangements, usually involving one to one assistance on using the institution's administrative systems. The situation is similar at other institutions.
An exception sometimes arises in the use of the Internet where all staff appear to have access to training programs aimed at supporting Internet related skills. The program 'Taming the Beast' on accessing information offered by the Library at Central Queensland University is offered to all staff, and was first offered in the Chancellery.
Most of the staff development units set up to support the development of the IT skills of general staff that we investigated restricted their activities to PC package training. However, we did discover instances of extensive and well thought out support for general staff using administrative systems.
As an example, the implementation of the new administrative system in the Baillieu Library at The University of Melbourne was accompanied by extensive training and support. This was in addition to considerable staff involvement in the specification and trialing of the new system before its development and implementation. The Librarian, Helen Hayes, considers that the implementation would have been even more positive if additional resources had been put aside for developmental support for the project. The Baillieu Library is certified by the Quality Council of Australia and includes regular surveys, focus groups and staff feedback groups in its regular quality monitoring processes. Staff development is a central component of its work, but Ms Hayes considers more attention should be paid to this aspect, and more staff and dollar resources allocated to it for future projects.
Another example from The University of Melbourne, which has recently implemented a range of administrative systems developed in-house, was recounted by Ian Marshman, Academic Registrar:
[We put] substantial effort into training general staff in the new systems and their use. With the new systems there were substantial training programs and now follow up, and they all have hot lines which go back to the functional areas (student admin etc.). The training was done by the program area (finance etc.) and a lot of it was group training sessions, plus the production of training manuals and not much one to one. They [the systems] each have user groups which act as a focal point.
A further example comes from University of New South Wales. The implementation of the University's on-line Finance System in 1994 and 1995 was supported by training sessions offering hands-on experience on the system, run by staff from the Financial Services Division, the 'owners' of the system. The course content was refined and the skills of course leaders developed with support from the University's Professional Development Centre.
The Distinction Between Teaching and Staff Development
Also notable is the extent to which institutions distinguish between their educational role in relation to students (their teaching role) and their educational role in relation to their own staff (their staff development role). In all but a few universities, little attention is given to using IT to meet staff development needs, and staff developers are not seen as significant potential clients of support units.
However, an alternative to the above trends is in place at the University of New South Wales, where the Professional Development Centre caters for both academic and general staff in the areas of educational, administrative and management development through its programs and support activities. The Centre assists various departments of the University to develop training materials relevant to their services and the Centre's Educational Technology Service is available to any provider of staff development as well as to teachers.
Approaches to Staff Development for Information Technology in Teaching
In the following section we move from our general discussion of staff development for information technology to discuss the approaches institutions are taking to the development of information technology skills in teaching roles only. While staff development in this area should ideally be integrated and coordinated with developmental support for a range of roles related to but not directly involved in teaching (in areas such as student administration, technical and professional support to schools and teachers, etc.) we found no examples of systematic efforts to achieve this level of integration.
Three distinct approaches to the organisation of staff development in the area of information technology for teaching at the institutional level are emerging. We have characterised these as integrated, parallel and distributed. While no institution exhibited a pure form of any one approach, and most in fact combined a range of elements characteristic of different approaches, evolutionary directions were evident.
In this approach support for the development of educational skills is linked to educational and information technology, and to institutional goals and directions. The links are reinforced by structural arrangements which combine in one unit: central support for the development in teaching and learning; support for the development of skills in the use of information technology in teaching; and multimedia and on-line teaching production facilities. The approach, which is essentially top down, aims for a tight integration of information technology planning at all levels and the use of the plans and objectives developed as a reference point for decisions about resource allocation and staff development support.
The University of Melbourne, an institution of very different character and expectations from the University of South Australia, is also increasing the integration of staff development for information technology in teaching with mainstream staff development for teaching and it is supporting this integration with significant resource design and production facilities, located both centrally and in faculties. Both of these universities are examples of an integrated approach as can be seen from an inspection of their case descriptions in Chapter 1.
The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology is pursuing something of a similar approach, with its Curriculum and Academic Development Unit (CADU) focussing on general educational issues, and its Flexible Learning Environment Unit (FLEU) taking responsibility for technology related issues. CADU and FLEU are placed together in a group called the Educational Program Improvement Group (EPIG) which provides a structure and mechanisms for coordination. The intention of the location of these two units in the EPIG and of the provision of the communication and coordinating mechanisms to achieve a high level of integration at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology is 'integrated', although the ongoing existence of the separate units is suggestive of the 'parallel' approach introduced below. Despite the integrative intention (and the present classification), we were also told that the two units often work separately, so the operative arrangements are perhaps more than just suggestive of a parallel approach. RMIT is working towards a seamless integration of its Higher Education and TAFE components and the two groups in EPIG work with staff from both sectors.
Benefits of an Integrated Approach
The integration of information technology related staff development for teaching into mainstream staff development and the addition of resource design and production capabilities, together with the development of strong links to the mainstream planning processes of universities clearly has a number of benefits. These include:
Issues Raised by an Integrated Approach
Access by Staff to Appropriate Support
Significant development in the use of information technology for teaching purposes in universities occurs, at least at the moment, through the effort and motivation of individuals and small groups in Departments and Schools. A comment from The University of Melbourne shows a keen awareness of this:
Our major strategy is to work through project and developer forums where they can show off their projects. A lot of this is still the gifted amateur and we spend a lot of time trying to ensure that they do not go off the rails.
Potential stifling of efforts and motivation of individuals and small groups by an approach which imposes directions and priorities from the top.
At the University of South Australia this possibility is recognised explicitly and accepted as a cost to be borne if the maximum benefit is to be achieved from the small sums of money available for flexible delivery development. As one defender of the USA system said:
We are a very poor university and every dollar has got to lead to some development. ...the result is that the odd individual with some great idea will not get through the process, but we are not actually in the business of finding Einsteins in this area. If they had such a bloody wonderful idea they would get a CUTSD grant.
At the University of Melbourne, the possibility of stifling local development has not arisen-indeed the explicit aim is to support local initiatives. There is a relatively high level of local resources in the institution, and the provision of central support to local projects from the MEU is not yet tightly linked to mainstream planning processes. However, as the 'incentive budgeting' process bites harder into faculty budgets, the possibility of local initiatives which do not meet Faculty or University goals being stifled may yet arise.
Potential to narrow teaching and learning options available to students by over-emphasis on technological solutions rather than stressing the need to encourage staff to shift their perspective from a transmission model to a facilitation model of teaching
Many would argue that the need for staff development to support academic staff in their teaching roles is much broader than is encompassed by a tight connection with information technology in teaching concerns. Indeed some academic developers interviewed saw the need to encourage staff to shift their understanding of the nature of teaching, away from a transmission model and towards a facilitative/interactive/ constructive model as more fundamental than the need to encourage the use of information technology in teaching. Some developers see the integration of staff development in support of teaching with educational technology support as an unwarranted alliance with the potential to significantly narrow the teaching and learning options available to staff and students. On the other hand, others believe that integration allows the (pedagogical) horse to draw the (technological) cart.
This approach involves the addition of a unit or centre for information technology in teaching support, alongside existing staff development arrangements as a parallel operation. Thus staff development for IT in teaching is separated from staff development for teaching and learning generally, even though some accommodation of the concerns of the latter may be made by the former (sometimes by making the technology focused unit an academic one, or by giving it an academic head, or by agreements to cross refer).
Case Study 6: A Parallel Approach at Southern Cross University Background
Southern Cross is a small regional University struggling to find itself after ending an unhappy amalgamation with the University of New England. The split is final and the institution seems now to be rejoicing in its freedom.
There are 6100 EFTSU and nearly 9800 persons enrolled. Staff interviewed often mentioned that 45 per cent of students are enrolled to study at a distance. There are 450 FTE staff, 250 of whom are academic.
The main campus is in Lismore, but there is another important facility at Coffs Harbour which, unusually, is shared with TAFE and secondary school education. In addition there are University Centres in a number of other locations including Port Macquarie, Grafton and Murwillumbah.
The University sees itself as a very important regional resource but is also looking to an expanded international involvement. The intention is to enter into partnerships with other Australian universities and many overseas to provide a range of learning opportunities and resources such a small university could not provide on its own. A 'virtual' and 'global' university, made up of components from many currently discrete bodies, figured in discussions. Internet technology would make this not only possible but would make it unavoidable as competition from the international 'heavies' in higher education will increase. Southern Cross aims to carve out its own few niches and areas of excellence, and to rely on others to share theirs.
Staff Development
There is a Teaching and Learning Unit (TLU) headed by a professorial level Director, and there is a newly established Technology in Learning and Teaching Unit (TiLT), also headed by a full professor. TiLT is a project funded until the end of 1998 with the brief to kick-start moves toward a 'university without walls'. Both respond through a Deputy Vice-Chancellor to the Vice-Chancellor. Staff report close relationships between TiLT and TLU though there appear to be differing priorities for development of teaching strategies to improve student learning: TiLT seems to be responding to the decision that SCU will deliver courses via the Web, while TLU is trying to change the perception of teaching from knowledge-transmission to facilitation of learning regardless of medium of instruction. Their goals could be complementary but they are not necessarily so, and conflicts may arise.
There are a number of other sources of staff development and training in IT at SCU. The Learning Information Centre (LIC) offers training on accessing information sources, the Staff Development Officer arranges courses of instruction on using PCs and software programs, and TiLT is offering courses on Photoshop and creating Web pages.
Academic staff have access to the Teaching and Learning Unit for courses and advice on teaching, but they go to TiLT if technology is involved.
The University of Technology, Sydney, appears to be pursuing a similar approach with its Centre for Learning and Teaching working alongside its Institute for Interactive Multimedia.
The arrangements in place at the University of Wollongong, where the Academic Development Service (ADS) works in parallel with the Educational Media Services (EMS) seem also to conform to this model. However the range of centres with staff development responsibilities (The Library, EMS, the Information Technology Service, ADS and Personnel Services) and their coordination through the Academic Staff Development Advisory Committee (ASDAC) which provides a single source of information about courses and other support, indicate the presence of some elements of the distributed approach.
The parallel approach is also evident at Monash University where a number of Centres and Units operate together, including the Quality Education at a Distance Research Unit, the Distance Education Centre, the Educational Development Centre, the Centre for Multimedia and Hypermedia Research, Educational Media Services and the Professional Development Centre (NB. Changes are underway).
Benefits of a Parallel Approach
Separate or parallel provision for staff development for information technology for teaching can be argued to be a sensible approach for several reasons. It:
Issues Raised by a Parallel Approach
Achieving Cooperation between the Various Units
Underlying the problem of cooperation between teaching and learning units on the one hand and educational media units on the other may be a fundamental difference in their theoretical positions. The work of most teaching and learning units is informed by theories developed from considerations of the nature of student learning, which gives them a strong learning focus, whereas many educational media units work from an instructional design position which tends to emphasise delivery and content organisation issues, giving them a teaching or training focus. The two approaches are not irreconcilable or even practically incompatible, yet employ different concepts and terms to describe their terrains, and this may lead to distrust between practitioners and place barriers in the way of cooperation.
It is noteworthy that the 'integrated' units investigated at the Universities of Melbourne and South Australia seemed to have worked through the theoretical issues involved and to have gone beyond the 'student learning' versus 'instructional design' concerns expressed by others. It may be that the integrated approach forces a re-conceptualisation of the basis of support offered - a re-conceptualisation which is not demanded of units operating in parallel.
Potential for a Narrow View of Options made Available to Teachers
There was a concern that units focused on technologies such as multimedia, may not take a sufficiently wide view of the educational issues raised by staff, offering for example a multimedia solution to a problem because multimedia lies within the unit's range of expertise, rather than seeing that, for example, the root cause may lie in an inadequate course or curriculum structure which, if addressed, may permit alternative solutions to emerge.
Some, mainly those from general teaching support units, argued that specialist units with a technology focus are unlikely to refer clients to their counterpart (although we encountered instances where such cooperation was claimed to work well), and hence that staff electing to seek support from a technology focused unit will most likely be guided towards a technology focused approach to addressing their teaching concerns. There was concern that this might result in the use of expensive technological solutions where cheaper ones were available and appropriate.
Potential for Confusion, Buck-passing, Competition
The availability of parallel units may result in confusion among staff as to which is the most appropriate source of support. Depending on the degree of cooperation between service providers involved (and this issue may be made more significant where one unit is academic and the other not), neither unit may be willing to address an issue-each considering it the province of the other. Alternatively, the units involved may effectively compete for the business of staff, resulting in the provision of support not on the basis of what is appropriate for the teachers' situation, but on the basis of the need for an increased clientele by the units themselves, or on the expertise available.
This approach is perhaps more bottom up in its essence than the other two, because it places considerable responsibility for project management in the hands of local innovators. The approach involves a range of units offering support on the basis of their expertise and location in the university. Technology focused units supporting the technological aspects of projects, teaching and learning units supporting the pedagogical aspects of projects, faculty units supporting local development with the help and technical resources of central units available as needed etc. The project groups teach themselves the skills they need, seek developmental support from local or central providers, or hire in skills, and primary responsibility for project management remains with the project. The University of New South Wales, as can be seen from its description in Chapter 1, is an example of the distributed approach.
Recent developments at the University of Sydney, with a move by its Centre for Teaching and Learning to take on responsibility for advice and support in the area of information technology in teaching through its New Technologies in Teaching and Learning (NETL) project, but with no significant production facilities in the Centre, indicate a trend there towards employing a distributed approach.
A similar distributed model is in place at Griffith University where the Griffith Institute of Higher Education has a Flexible Learning Development Unit which assists staff and Schools with planning, addressing the educational issues and project management, while liaising closely with the central production unit, Flexible Learning Services. The close cooperation between the two flexible learning groups suggests a tendency toward a more integrated approach than at the University of Sydney.
Curtin University has a Teaching and Learning Group (TLG) with responsibility for academic staff development in the pedagogical aspects of IT, but Academic Computing Services within the Computing Centre also run workshops and seminars on teaching and learning technologies, the Internet and presentation, and the general staff have administrative computing training with the wider public programs available at the Computing Centre. One manager commented, 'Curtin is a devolved place... distributed but not coordinated'.
Benefits of the Distributed Approach
The distributed approach offers an economical solution to the provision of support resources without imposing unnecessary controls on innovative teaching projects.
Issues Raised by a Distributed Approach
The Coordination and Management of Project Activities and Elements, including Pedagogical Decisions
Since no one-stop facility exists as a support and production mechanism, and since there is little planning control exercised centrally, considerable responsibility for the coordination of projects is given to individuals and groups. While a central unit, such as the PDC in the University of New South Wales case, may assist with the design, planning and management of projects (and with the selection of media and technical services and consideration of broader educational issues), there is no requirement that this expertise should be used. There is, therefore, a potential for poor project management and for making poor pedagogical decisions. The possibility for local groups to develop projects without central support arises in all approaches, but is perhaps more of an issue in an approach where so much responsibility for the educational and managerial soundness of projects is left in the hands of local groups.
Potential for Innovations to Falter
With a relative lack of visible institutional support for the use of information technology in teaching, many possible developments may not get off the ground or may not proceed to a stage where the full benefits of the innovation will be achieved. In addition, 'poorer' units may be left behind while 'rich' ones forge ahead.
Potential for Waste, Duplication of Efforts and Resources, including Equipment
In a laissez faire approach, considerable duplication of effort (and of expenditure in separate budget units) may occur, and the quality of products may be quite variable. Central coordination and facilitation can provide a focal point for achieving synergy between groups working in the same area. If a coordinating unit does not address this issue, fragmentation of effort and of directions may result.
Strategies for Addressing Staff Role Changes
With a few noteworthy exceptions, there is little evidence of institutions actively planning for the role changes that the extensive implementation of information technology in education and administration are starting to bring. The noteworthy examples are mostly related to the administrative work of universities.
Addressing the changing roles is often made difficult by the rapid pace of technological change. As a senior administrator said:
We have not yet looked hard at the roles issue. The change is so rapid we don't have the freedom to define roles, because as we define them new technology comes along and makes the definitions meaningless. Designing web page front ends was not on the drawing board a few years ago. But now you can do it in a few hours with the latest tools.
However, a number of clear strategies for addressing role changes were identified in the data gathered for the report. These include the identification of development needs, the use of role descriptors, the use of intermediate steps and points of leverage, and inter-institutional cooperation. These strategies are discussed below.
Formal Needs Identification Processes
There was little evidence of the use of systematic developmental needs analysis processes to ascertain developmental needs in information technology. This may well be because the institutions, rightly, perceive that such formal techniques, applied at the institutional level, are too slow and costly to be of great use in fast moving areas like information technology.
As an alternative to formal needs analysis methods, many of the developmental strategies being employed embody informal needs gathering mechanisms. An example might be a package, platform or purpose based special interest group which meets regularly to consider topics put forward by its members. Special interest groups of this kind are in operation at several institutions, including the University of New South Wales, where at least five are supported (in areas such as the Windows and Macintosh Operating Systems, Hypercard, Multimedia, and the World Wide Web), and The University of Melbourne.
Generic Descriptions of Changing Roles
Some institutions are adopting a generic approach to the redefinition of staff roles. The approach involves the development of descriptors to be used for a range of possible degrees of user skill and involvement in information technology. This approach fits in with the call by Martin and Ramsden (1994) for the development of a list of 'core competencies' for academics (although their report does not suggest that skills in the use of information technology in teaching should be included). A number of descriptor sets are available in the literature. The Tinkler, Lepani and Mitchell report (1996) on Education and Technology Convergence proposes four stages of development:
aware->conversant->confident->competent
and goes on to sketch the staff development strategies appropriate to each, suggesting that they lie on a continuum from highly structured support at the earlier stages to peer assisted 'osmosis' at the later stages. Longstaffe (1996) proposes three stages of development from naive (the majority of staff) to knowledgeable and sophisticated (a very small group).
The University of South Australia, as part of its planning process, has adopted a set of generic descriptors for the degree to which its academic staff and students are using information technology in their educational roles. The descriptors include accounts of the software and hardware requirements and staff development needs for each level of user. They also provide a description of the user's main activities (the interactions they engage in, the information sources they access, the administrative functions they perform etc.). The University's is a five category set:
non user->emergent->progressive->high level->essential user
The last category, 'essential user', refers to staff teaching computing and information systems and the like, where information technology is definitive of their roles. The descriptors are providing targets for the activities of the Flexible Learning Centre (including the Staff Development Unit and Student Support Unit), the Library and the Information Technology Unit at the University of South Australia. The targets specify the support focus for specific categories of user, such as: 'providing access to equipment, training and staff development to move all staff and students to ... emergent user level by the end of the year'. Interestingly, an alternative target of 'moving all users up one category' was considered but abandoned because of concerns over the ability of the network infrastructure to cope with the increased use that would result.
We discovered many examples of developmental processes aimed at moving staff into a fuller use of information technology through a series of intermediate steps. Thus teaching staff seem frequently to be introduced to presentation software such as Microsoft PowerpointŪ as an intermediate step towards greater involvement in using information technology in their teaching. Glyn Rimmington of the Faculty of Agricultural Science at The University of Melbourne described the steps his colleagues have taken towards greater use of information technology in their teaching:
At the department level we started the change a long time ago in the mid 80s by introducing computers and networked micros. In the late 80s we connected to the University network and introduced email, word processing spread sheets and statistics applications. Then we fitted out a lecture theatre for Multimedia projection, we were the second to do it. I led a movement to change lectures from acetate to PowerpointŪ, now 8 out of 10 staff use PowerpointŪ. We needed to get to the stage of using Interactive Multimedia and CDROM, but it would have been crazy to do it in the late 80s, so we created intermediate steps to move the staff along and PowerpointŪ has been important for us. Given the age profile it has been successful.
June Gassin at The University of Melbourne suggested that learning about the new technology and becoming comfortable with its use involves the acquisition of a new vocabulary and a new way of working, and that this is a preliminary to being able to research technology's role in learning in a discipline:
You have to walk before you can run. First you have to teach the teachers how to use the technology, how to feel comfortable with the technology, how to use that new vocabulary both in their speaking and in their teaching, how to integrate it, before they can start doing serious research with it. If you have no understanding of the technology or how it works, you don't know how to integrate it into your teaching, then how are you going to know what research questions to ask.
At the University of Canberra support for non-users or resisters of IT is offered via workshops which focus on improving your teaching rather than on technology - this can lead to a first contact with IT within a sound teaching and learning context.
There was considerable emphasis on certain activities providing good occasions for developmental work. Involvement in these activities, it was thought, permitted the developmental opportunities to be relevant and to be valued by the participants. A frequently cited example was the development of curriculum or teaching materials, and this activity is used by the Flexible Learning Centre (FLC) at the University of South Australia as an occasion for the provision of staff development opportunities related to technology. Denise Bradley, now Vice-Chancellor, explains the process:
The development of curriculum materials is a powerful form of staff development for academics. Actually doing it with a process expert enables staff to make the transition from a transmission model to thinking about what kind of learning they want to get out of this material. So we have seen turning courses into the distance mode as a powerful transforming force for academic staff, and the people we have taken into the FLC are those with a broad expertise. The job of the FLC is not to sit down with a pile of lecture notes and turn it into something. What we have said is there is more to it than that. We get the content and we massage it with the academic, and as we ask the educational questions we develop them. The academic is supported but we use the change from a transmission focus to a learner focus as a form of staff development.
The often encountered strategy of supporting staff undertaking IT based projects, frequently characterised as 'supporting the innovators', is another example. This strategy is used by the Multimedia Education Unit at The University of Melbourne, by the Professional Development Centre at UNSW, the Institute for Interactive Multimedia at the University of Technology Sydney, and by the Flexible Learning Centre at the University of South Australia, among many others. The support of projects is seen as a good opportunity to develop the skills and knowledge of staff in teaching and learning generally.
However, innovators are often not easy to support. Their technical skills and concerns are sometimes in advance of those of staff developers. We found several instances where the support offered lagged behind the skills of the project leaders we spoke with, particularly in the area of the World Wide Web. In addition, Denise Bradley at the University of South Australia, suggested that attempting to keep up with the innovators could in fact be a problematic strategy as their concerns sometimes run ahead of what made for sensible teaching and learning. She suggested that to concentrate on teaching and learning needs was a better strategy.
At the University of Canberra ongoing support for high-end IT users is provided via external 'experts' who raise issues of evaluation, project appraisal and management and demonstrate best practice in a series of workshops.
Cooperation with Other Institutions in Staff Development for Information Technology
There were some instances of institutions cooperating in the provision of developmental support for the use of information technology. A notable example is the FOCUS staff development group in South Australia. FOCUS is a joint venture by Flinders, South Australia and Adelaide Universities and it provides, inter alia, PC package training courses to staff in the participating universities. The Australian National University and the University of Canberra have run a cooperative program which employed a 'Developer in Residence' at both universities. (See the appendix for a list of specific staff development strategies observed at different institutions.)
Major Issues Arising from the Role Changes of Staff
Changes driven by the rapid deployment of information technology in all aspects of work within universities raise many issues about working conditions and staff needs for development. These include implications for industrial relations, the need for extensive training and development, and the question of whether such development should be compulsory or voluntary. In a time of economic constraint, these issues become particularly difficult.
Industrial Relations Implications of Changing Roles
Clearly the changes which are coming from the increased use of information technology will change work practices and conditions, and this will have industrial relations implications. As one interviewee said:
There are difficult decisions to be made, very difficult. If we move out of a teaching area and you are so specialised that you can't adapt, then you are on the payroll and just gobbling up budget, and we have to help you transform and be of use, or help you get out.
There was little evidence of institutions addressing the industrial relations implications of information technology specifically or systematically. Clearly staff development and training programs are designed to 'help you transform', but there is little evidence of activities or programs, apart from offers of redundancy and early retirement, designed to 'help you get out'. Universities differ not only in the macroscopic arrangements being put in place to support the implementation of information technology, but also in local level strategies.
Broad and Extensive Need for Training
There is widespread agreement about the need for extensive developmental support for staff, especially in the use of information technology in teaching. At the same time there is recognition that, as one interviewee put it 'staff are stressed and have little time for training'. Geoff Scott of the University of Technology, Sydney has commented that:
...in a general climate of change and restructuring, the perceived threats cause people to retreat and wait until its over before they seek personal change or development.
(Scott 1995)
Beaty (1995) considers staff development as an essential component of any change process:
Staff development is an essential requisite of change management. Without it staff cannot be expected to practice in line with the policy's intention and cannot be blamed for this. ... To put policy into practice demands that staff be made aware of the policy, that they have the opportunity to question and discuss it in order to fully understand and tune it to their practice, and that they develop the ability to deliver it through a program of staff development.
Since the current changes in the roles and organisation of universities involve massive change, this view is endorsed by the project team in relation to the need for staff development to support the implementation of information technology in universities.
Some institutions are using compulsory elements in their developmental programs to support desired changes. An example comes from the University of South Australia whose year long induction program for new staff is compulsory and includes a technology strand.
On the other hand several people put forward strong arguments for voluntarism. June Gassin, Director of the Horwood Language Centre at the University of Melbourne, described the staff development program used to support the Computer Aided Language Learning laboratories in use there. They ran a series of workshops, some 3 days, some 2 hours a week over 8 weeks, some with guest speakers from other universities. The program provided support at a basic level to about 30 teachers from 13 languages. Many attended, including the Head of School. It was voluntary, and staff attended the same workshop repeatedly until they felt comfortable with the technology. Professor Gassin stressed that a warm, inviting and supportive atmosphere was crucial to the success of their implementation.
Everyone was welcome, no-one was forced, no one was made to feel inferior or silly because they did not have IT skills. It didn't matter if they could not turn on the machine. The ones who did not want to come did not come.
If people think you can get into IT without putting in extra time or extra effort they are naive. That does not mean it is not worthwhile. After the initial staff development program, and we always have a full time technician in the labs, after three or four weeks even novice teachers are fine.... So there is a learning curve and a nervousness curve and once you get over the hump they like it very much.
All these factors have the potential to create resistance to change.
Within complex organisational structures like universities (see also the discussion in Chapter 2 in the section headed 'Culture') some level of resistance to change is inevitable; however, by identifying the nature and origins of that resistance, we can develop specific strategies to overcome it.
Whenever contextual change occurs in the external environment or within sub-units of the organisation, individuals and groups often respond by withdrawing from the change process, and returning to what they consider to be 'core activities'.
The global factors affecting the higher education marketplace-competition, technology and structural change are compounded by factors from the national context-change in government, funding policies, student intake legislation, industrial action by staff, moves towards casualisation of workforce-to create an unstable climate for both the institutions and the staff within them. Trade-offs in enterprise bargaining, loss of tenurable positions and restructuring at a local level are reflecting the increased turbulence in the sector.
In addition, the pace of change in technology and the increasing costs of staying technologically current are not creating an environment that is conducive to innovation and experimentation. The resulting resistance can be categorised at two levels:
The interviews and site visits carried out during this study provided some insight into the detailed nature of these two categories of resistance in Australian universities.
One Vice-Chancellor identified two issues that he considered unavoidable sources of frustration in his attempts to introduce IT. Despite efficient strategic planning processes, the time horizons necessary to implement new policy were often being overtaken by technological progress. The lead time for the development of a mainframe purchasing system meant that it was unable to offer the user-friendly graphical user interface that had since become a standard on desktop computers. This led to user dissatisfaction with the newer, more efficient system, and an unwillingness to abandon older, inadequate systems that staff knew. His second concern was the general shortage of competent staff with the skills mix necessary to function as academics or administrators in a 'virtual university' environment.
As the network increasingly becomes the fundamental organisational unit of universities, another area of resistance can arise from territorial disputes over the ownership of, or responsibility for the network. Under many traditional structures, costing and responsibility for the physical facilities resided with an IT Services or Facilities department. With the increasing use of networks for teaching and learning, academic staff and students have requirements that go beyond basic data storage and retrieval. They seek system access and functionality which challenge many of the old data management paradigms of security and data integrity, and which demand hardware and software unfamiliar to IT service staff.
Ownership of data provides another example of resistance arising from territorial disputes. At one institution there have been 'huge arguments about the use of CEQ (course evaluation questionnaire) data' in which the traditional view of such information as private is challenged by a need to share it via information networks for the benefit of the organisation. Similar disputes have occurred at another institution between academic computing and IT management over the control of the network: 'techies rather than decision-makers had control of the network..[which led to].. a great deal of resistance on the policy side because of loss of control'.
A more fundamental issue underpinning some resistance to the uptake of IT is the shift in organisational power associated with effective use of IT in an organisation. Organisational hierarchies function on the flow of information between levels of management, and access to specific data is managed on a 'need-to-know' basis. Much of the authority and accountability within an organisation relies on the control of this information flow. The horizontal equity that networks bring to older vertical management dynamics openly challenges these authorities. Again, the capabilities of the technology outstrip the human organisational principles, and time is needed to renegotiate new management systems to adequately exploit the dynamics of technology. These stresses are increased when access to the network is unevenly distributed.
In addition, new organisational units such as TiLT at Southern Cross University, the Educational Media Service at Wollongong and the Multimedia Education Unit at the University of Melbourne embrace responsibilities in both teaching and learning and technology, so adding to the crisis in authority. There are equivalent consequences for budget allocation, as sub-units of the university seek funding to accomplish specific IT goals within the wider networked environment.
A director of a technology support group identified another area of systemic resistance arising when university policy clashes with IT practice at an individual or school level. The director expressed it as 'top-down' meets 'bottom-up'. The individual teacher or administrator who is enthusiastic about the use of IT, is often at the cutting edge of technological potential, and motivated to apply new products and ideas to her/his work. Such people are innovators and find stimulus in the challenge of solving problems.
By its general nature, corporate policy in IT has to be based on more considered and proven long-term standards that cannot easily accommodate this innovation. A simple example is of a teacher of an Internet-based subject wanting to use CGIs (common gateway interfaces) to handle student interactions on the university's WWW server. While the technology is able to deliver the functionality required by the teacher, IT policy may prohibit software that enables students to write data to the university server. The teacher becomes discouraged and either duplicates hardware by setting up a dedicated server, or abandons the teaching/learning goal as impossible within the current policy. Such clashes highlight the different agendas of staff within the organisation, and demonstrate resistance arising from frustration and competing agendas (see also the discussion of 'The IT support crisis' in Chapter 5).
The nature of these systemic resistances are such that individuals are almost powerless to address their cause, and so are led to take individual action despite them or to retreat from the use of IT in their work. Both reactions are counterproductive for the university. Institutional strategies are needed to create an environment in which both corporate and individual goals are facilitated by IT. There is, however, a separate set of issues that can be associated with individual reaction to the introduction of IT in universities.
Cummings (1996), in a discussion of this issue, categorises individual resistance to the use of IT by the questions which capture the concerns of staff and identify the sources of the resistance. These questions typify the common active and passive resistances found in universities and colleges.
A director of a technology support group used three other categories that reflect similar sentiments: clashes of policy and practice, lack of time to learn about the technology and issues of complexity. Another factor influencing many, but particularly senior management appears to be embarrassment - not wanting to admit publicly or to peers an ignorance of IT issues or inadequate skills. Poor attendance at staff development sessions by middle and upper management sometimes indicates the emergence of this kind of problem, although other factors are often involved.
Self preservation, or the maintenance of the status quo was also suggested by an interviewee as a source of individual resistance, in which a willingness to change duties or work conditions could lead to redundancy or reclassification. 'you have ... in any organisation .. an entrenched few who are pit dwellers, who are not willing to move and are not at all keen on the new environment and will continue to resist .. as long as they work in that environment.'
Addressing Systemic Resistance
Not all the systemic resistances identified above are tractable or can, indeed, be addressed alone. The inevitable friction generated by structural change, as areas of responsibility shift and combine, is ongoing and not unique to the introduction of IT.
While the presence of policy or guidelines does not necessarily ensure commitment or even compliance, its absence invites anarchy. Policy is anathema to some academics and perceived as control and interference in their scholarly autonomy. However, it is apparent that, in the global environment described above with increased accountability, market competition, changing roles and a more corporate strategic approach to the provision of higher education, a shared or negotiated vision of the enterprise is essential at all levels of the organisation.
A first step towards addressing resistance to IT is to integrate its use within the agreed goals and purpose of the university and to create a climate in which IT use is seen as essential. Policy needs to be written, in consultation with current and potential users, so that it is clear and accessible. There were many examples of this across the institutions visited. For example, University of Queensland: Information Technology Strategy 1995, University of South Australia: Corporate Planning 1996-2000, Deakin University: Information Technology Strategic Plan for Learning and Teaching 1996-2000, Queensland University of Technology: Information Technology Plan 1997-2001.
More importantly, the policies have to directly influence core practice. Significant progress towards the successful uptake of IT in both teaching and administration was evident in those universities whose senior management had not only expressed a commitment to IT in policy, but who took practical steps towards providing access and practised it themselves.
Leading by example, Vice Chancellor Conyngham at Southern Cross University has accelerated IT commitment by making email the lingua franca of management. He has set a high priority on having a computer on every desk and encourages staff to find their own level of usage. He has established two dedicated listservs-ISSUES which provides a direct secure hotline to himself, and FORUM which provides a shared space for discussion and policy dissemination. Use it or be left out of the loop. 'The real change will come when a high percentage of staff are using this [IT] in an everyday way.' Such personal involvement and access may not be practicable at larger institutions, but this approach demonstrates committed leadership.
A staff member at the University of Melbourne recounts how their Vice-Chancellor sent a letter to each staff member which explained their strategic directions including an emphasis on IT as the means of keeping Melbourne at the cutting edge. 'This VC constantly talks about mainstreaming the digital revolution .. He is constantly reinforcing that need... He recognises that a place like the University of Melbourne can't operate like it used to ...we have to move much more strongly into this [IT] area..' Distributed campuses like University of Western Sydney and Deakin rely heavily on access to email for their internal management communication.
At the University of Canberra the Vice-Chancellor has established 'Don's Open Line' for direct access by staff. He also uses email lists to debate current issues such as the budget cuts. The University has a broadcast email service which (with restrictions) is used for general announcements and notices.
Points of leverage towards the mainstreaming of IT can be found in funding mechanisms. Denise Bradley, Vice-Chancellor, University of South Australia emphasised the use of planning and funding mechanisms to encourage faculties to bring their information technology activities into line with the University's vision.
The Australian National University through CEDAM (Centre for Education and Development of Academic Methods) also uses funding to seed specific IT-based initiatives in teaching and requires beneficiaries to conduct workshops to share and promote their work across the university.
The shifts in organisational power and authority inherent in the introduction of IT appear to generate many of the territorial disputes referred to above. Areas of responsibility, power, value and self-esteem are determined by a person's relative position within organisational structures. Changes to the structure invite renegotiation of roles. Representation in decision-making processes and the ownership of policy that this implies, provide a powerful means to overcome this resistance. While leadership is important in setting the organisational climate, democratic processes provide a means of distributing power and responsibility for a university's IT strategy equitably.
Addressing Individual Resistance
The categories of individual resistance identified above require a range of responses, some which target directly the individual and her/his internal values and beliefs, and some which seek to modify the work environment to better accommodate individual situations.
If IT use affects the practice of individual staff, this needs to be reflected in her/his duty statement or job description. At the University of New South Wales, when a postgraduate course was developed for delivery over the Internet, the initial responsibility for its establishment was taken by the academic staff, but the duty statements and regular responsibilities of the administrative team were renegotiated to accommodate the ongoing support of this teaching. New skills were needed which were not in the original jobs, and formal training and recognition of this new responsibility was undertaken with time and budget allocated for the transition.
A structural strategy to overcome individual resistance is the formation of teams with a mix of skills in which individual responsibilities are extended and shared. This provides staff development in a real context, and opportunities for individuals to become involved in IT within the relative safety and support of a group. Most IT-based teaching employs a level of technological complexity that necessitates a team approach to its design and production, so many opportunities to encourage both academic and administrative staff involvement arise.
Team approaches can be used effectively in administration as well as teaching. A good example of a team approach in an administrative area was the implementation by the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne of their new library system. Work teams from the library were extensively involved, along with client groups, in the development of the specification of the system, and the training program which supported the implementation was conducted by in-house staff as well. On-going training and support for the application is provided locally within work teams by identified staff who receive additional training.
To complement the IT commitment engendered by policy and leadership, staff need to see demonstrable examples of the benefits of IT. Desensitised to the marketing hype surrounding many of the new media such as the Internet, staff become cynical towards the benefits of IT and disconnect it from their experience and work. Staff developers and management need to present opportunities for staff at all levels to see IT in action in both teaching and administration, and document its benefits. The generic IT competency descriptors described earlier determine the potential audiences for such sessions, and content may target novices through to sophisticated innovators.
At the University of New South Wales, general IT awareness-raising seminars are held by the Professional Development Centre to focus on specific issues within IT application such as authoring, instructional design and project management. These sessions also use current projects to showcase good local practice and to promote innovation. Rather than simply celebrating IT, these sessions provide a way to model a sound pedagogical approach to the use of IT in teaching, and a chance to identify faculties or individuals in need of more individual support. The University of Melbourne also offers short, faculty-based courses and seminars which draw on local and visiting expertise to offer targeted staff development to specific groups within the university.
Another strategy to promote staff awareness and to provide accessible information involves using the network medium to teach about itself. On-line staff development can use the WWW to establish sites that provide a central point of contact for any staff who seek information about IT. Recommended software and hardware, on-line training in HTML and email, innovators and service providers, demonstrations of on-line teaching packages and global links to IT resources can model the on-line teaching environment and efficiently handle what might otherwise have been many individual inquiries. This resource is also available to students who may in turn create a demand for this type of teaching. As suggested by the leader of a WEB based teaching project at University of South Australia, such strategies provide an entry point for staff development. He found little staff resistance to the learning of practical HTML skills, and this led to greater involvement with staff development in other IT issues.
A different level of support can be provided through a grant application advice service, which encourages and guides innovation in IT. Staff are counselled on how to plan and develop innovative development applications for both internal and external funds. Group meetings are held in advance of funding cycles at which technical and pedagogical input is available to refine grant applications. Successful applicants are then used to promote IT use in the university, and gain established links to support the progress of their projects.
Regarding the other more difficult resisters-executive staff who are embarrassed to admit the need for development and the true 'luddites' who refuse all attempts at change-some have held small group sessions in basic IT and computer literacy exclusively for heads and managers to develop those skills critical to the effective use of the university's systems.
A harder line is often recommended for entrenched resisters of IT, ranging from ignoring them to encouraging retirement with redundancy packages.
... a small number of older people ... who see it as dehumanising .. don't see the need to change. I ignore those people. I am dealing with those who are reasonably enthusiastic. I cannot change the culture in a department, it has to come from the enthusiasts within.
To expect the adoption of new roles and the development of new professional skills by what many consider to be already overworked staff, begs the question of incentives. Both academic and administrative positions in universities already require multiskilling, and it is recognised that the relative remuneration for university staff has been declining for some years. In short most people feel that they are doing enough, and while some are motivated to use IT in their work by curiosity and enthusiasm, the majority exhibit some degree of resistance.
Universities do have reward systems; and they are better for academic staff than for administrative staff.
For academics, the systems determine eligibility for appointment, tenure, promotion, award of research grants, and occasionally even awards for teaching excellence; in addition, there are less formal incentives such as peer recognition which might lead to paid consultancies or travel at someone else's expense. Some received pay incentives but this is unusual in most disciplines. However, these rewards often reflect the values and priorities of the traditional university in which research is most valued and teaching is a secondary activity.
In the on-line networked environment of the virtual campus (which may be closer than most think), academic activity will rely on IT for the production, distribution and legitimation of knowledge (Nunan 1996b). These skills in IT are not the ones commonly rewarded, nor are the skills of team-work, advanced curriculum design, and so on which we discussed in a previous section. The time commitment to adopting sophisticated IT in one's teaching is substantial and draws staff away from their research. While teaching excellence is beginning to be formally recognised in many Australian universities, the current reward and incentives schemes are simply inadequate to deal with the recognition of service in the new environment. Even when relief from teaching commitments is given so an academic may develop some teaching innovation, this is usually an informal arrangement within a school and carries no weight in formal reward structures such as promotion.
Grants under the auspices of the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching (CAUT) offered limited incentives to staff who wished to pursue teaching development. Some 79 per cent of CAUT grants were awarded to IT-based projects, though CAUT specifically tried to discourage people from this emphasis. The grants were small and only available for a year, and once again institutions did not consider them of equal status with research grants. CAUT has now been replaced by the Committee for University Teaching and Staff Development. The funding for this Committee, which also incorporates the scheme for funding staff development initiatives, the Commonwealth Staff Development Fund, has half the money the two initiatives previously had.
The Quality program of the Keating government offered virtually no incentives to individual academic staff, except that some institutions made some Quality money available for internal grants to individuals. The future of this program is unknown.
For administrative staff, upon whom IT also places many new demands, as we have seen, the motivation to change is even less. There is, in the structure of general staff appointments, no concept of promotion. The only advance is to leave one position for a higher one, and it is necessary to compete on the open market; reclassification of a position which has grown in scope is a difficult procedure and often unsuccessful. Occasionally, staff are given time away from work to acquire new skills or knowledge or secondment to do a particular task, but this is unusual.
Some administrative initiatives have been funded in the past by National Priority Reserve grants, and occasionally institutions have used Quality money for administrative projects, but the future of these programs is unknown.
All staff would welcome financial recognition for IT commitment and effort, either directly through higher level appointments according to skills and responsibility and duties allowance, or indirectly through time-in-lieu, or more flexible working hours and conditions. Though no evidence was found in our survey of such practice, both academics and administrative staff expressed interest in rewards other than money. Cummings (1996) suggests that flexibility in working hours, childcare and working from home are realistic incentives to offer which do not require reclassification or new jobs to be created.
As a general principle, a number of staff interviewed suggested that universities should start by building IT rewards into existing reward structures. This would mean promotion and appointment procedures need to explicitly include work carried out in the preparation, development and trialing of IT-based teaching within the desirable criteria for an academic appointment. More importantly, there needs to be demonstrable promotion and appointment under these criteria. Despite policy, staff will recognise and participate in a commitment to IT when there is clear evidence that the institution values such activity. A complicating issue in this approach is that most IT courseware development involves a team process in which credit for individual effort is difficult to determine. Similar issues have arisen with regard to the ownership of intellectual property and guidelines need to be provided to direct team processes and to acknowledge effort.
Existing grant funding mechanisms also need to target IT as a priority. By including specific grant categories for IT development and by committing a budget for the purpose, management can provide incentives to staff to work in this area. Equally, avoidance of IT priorities and outdated teaching or administrative practice can be penalised by withdrawal of funds. At The University of Melbourne, the Vice-Chancellor's support for IT development is manifested in 'the provision of large sums of money for the development of these projects' and departments and schools not becoming involved are actually penalised through the withdrawal of access to funds. Through a budget 'clawback' scheme at the University, there is an annual reduction in funding of 5 per cent that can only be regained through targeted quality initiatives, most of which involve the use of IT.
Most universities currently do have internally funded grant schemes to acknowledge and promote initiatives and excellence in teaching. The problem is that the emphasis is often on those projects that frame IT use as research, and the recognition of IT for teaching alone, is lost.
...it's very clear that our reward structures do not recognise some of those activities.. an academic staff member who invested huge chunks of their time developing a genuine interactive multimedia ... presentation ... I don't think would be rewarded by current models either, unless along the way it became a research project.
Another possible strategy involves the allocation of time for IT development. Some institutions have introduced work relief practices in which budget is directly used to buy in additional part-time staff to take over lower level seminars and supervision, while others schedule work in advance according to a mix of teaching, research and IT-based course development. The head of a group at The University of Melbourne allocates $15,000 each year to provide relief to teachers involved in computer-assisted learning to help staff with their projects. Peter McTigue of The University of Melbourne, believes that trying to generate quality IT projects is so demanding that relief time is essential. 'That is the only way you will get people to do it.'
Less tangible rewards flow from the attention well realised IT projects and teaching may attract. One innovator recognises the political benefits of success, and reports an 'embarrassment' of attention from local and overseas visitors who come to see her department's initiatives, but capitalises on this attention through successful grant applications. A report of such development work can also form the basis of a paper or conference presentation which adds to publication and research output.
Indirect incentives are evident in that staff who do become involved in IT signal to the university community that they are innovative and motivated which can lead to greater job security. The perception of IT competency can be a valuable asset in the increasingly competitive academic and administrative job market. In some cases this has led to more tangible benefits. Staff have been given a higher duties allowance during a critical period of their work unit's planning and development to compensate for the demands on IT skills and time required to implement it.
We noted that some writers and some institutions were using stages of development to focus their thinking on staff needs in regards to learning about and using information technology in their work. It may be that the approaches to staff support we have described above are more or less suited to different stages of development. That is, if the majority of staff are in one of the early stages of development-for instance, aware or emergent-the integrated approach may be best in that it offers most control and focus and can identify and address majority needs. By the time the majority are competent or high level users, an institution may move toward a distributed approach with less fear of chaos and wasted resources. Rather than thinking of one solution as the best practice for all time, institutions should be assessing current needs and planning to reassess on a regular basis so as to utilise scarce resources most effectively over time.