Joe Sabado – Higher Education & Technology Leadership

I don’t know about you, but I’m so busy at work just trying to keep up with what we need to build and maintain existing systems for our customers, it’s hard to see what’s coming ahead even a year ahead of us. Projects I work on take months, even a couple of years to build and I’m working on many of them at a time. I’m very busy managing. I think this is the issue posed by Clayton Christensen about disruptive innovation. Organizations miss emerging technologies/opportunities beyond their horizon because they’re too busy trying to meet the demands of their current customers. I can definitely relate to this.

If I don’t read books, blog posts, tweets, collaborate with folks outside work, I don’t think I would  even know about the larger issues and trends impacting higher education like MOOC, online learning, and student financial debt crisis. I work to satisfy the needs of our university students and our customers  but I read/communicate outside my university work to keep up with larger issues.

In a way, my interactions/experience with my personal learning network (PLN) which consists of higher education professionals and those outside higher education are what I use to disrupt my day-to-day, localized thinking. There are many ideas, programs I would like to implement at work but the reality is that I first need to satisfy what our customers demand and need. Does that mean I don’t think about new ways to meeting these demands? I absolutely think about new/improved ways, but they cannot be disruptive to a point where what I do severely impacts how they serve their customers in the process. They are incremental improvements. I believe in the idea of learning through failing, but “failures” do cost resources and money so when we implement or try new programs, we better start out with some thoughtful approach and define what we need to accomplish, we just can’t be trying new things just for the sake of experimenting. After all, our salaries and resources we use come from students and their families.

So, I go back to the idea of using my PLN and my experience outside my work to explore new ideas, to dream beyond possibilities, and to disrupt my own thinking. I was in with a twitter conversation about technology and graduate programs earlier tonight that got me thinking about the future of student affairs profession. I write this post, I am looking at my Pebble smart watch and waiting for my invite for a Google Glass. I’m thinking about buying this Estimote Beacon and combine it with Leap Motion to experiment with the idea of geo-fencing in my home. These are wearable and sensor technologies that I can’t see us using at work anytime soon (though I think they’ll be as common as smart phones the way it is now). But, it does not mean I can’t dream about what it may be like a few years from now either and imagine a campus so different from what I see now.

The topics of change and innovation, specifically technology-related, intrigue me. I read about disruptive innovation, diffusion of innovation, and continual improvement process. At this point, I’m still trying to wrap my thinking as to how these relate and when can/should they be applied in higher education. I have more questions than answers, so I seek new knowledge and perspectives to make sense of it all.

I work in the technology field within higher education, where I’ve witnessed and implemented business processes enabled by technology since the mid-1990s. In the last few years, the pace at which technologies change has become even faster. Who would have imagined the growth and impact of social media, cloud, mobile, and big data just five years ago? Last year, I started noticing more articles about wearable computing and the “internet of things.“. The blurring of the lines between computing services and products only available via IT departments years ago and those readily available to consumers, also known as “consumerization of IT,” has only become more pronounced in the last few years. These changes have provided opportunities and introduced new challenges. All these observations have led me to become more interested in anticipating where the future of higher education and technology may be heading.

If change and innovation in higher education are only about technology, maybe it would be easy if not because change involves culture, politics, traditions, paradigms, and personalities. Technological changes happen within how higher education views itself regarding its perceived roles (preparing students for careers, providing civic service by molding students as productive citizens, research) and how it operates (shared governance, teaching methods, funding priorities, etc.). There is no consensus on these views. The role of faculty and teaching methods are now being challenged in light of new learning opportunities provided to students because of technology, including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and personal learning networks. Current technologies have also added a new spin to the old debate of how individuals learn (objectivism vs. constructivism).

Beyond philosophical debates about the role of technology in higher education, from a practical perspective, it takes time and resources to introduce and implement new ways of using technology. It’s a process, and the process involves human emotions. As one who works in IT, my role is a service provider to my university’s communities of staff, faculty, and students. At the core of my responsibility is ensuring the systems they use work appropriately as they would expect. Network outages and disruption of applications/web services are what we try to avoid.

Given that failures, trial-and-error, and not-so-perfect systems that lead to disorders of services are all part of the process when introducing new systems, how do organizations balance the need to manage stability and provide room for transformational (potentially disruptive) innovations? How do organizations gain buy-ins from faculty, staff, students, and administrators to adopt new systems and ways of doing things? More importantly, the question is when and how do we know when to apply incremental improvements vs. introducing a new way of doing things and disrupting the system?

I’m hoping someone in higher education has figured out the answers to the questions I pose above because I have yet to figure all these out. Let’s talk if you have figured it out or have some ideas.

n light of new learning opportunities provided to students because of technology, including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and personal learning networks. Current technologies have also added a new spin to the old debate of how individuals learn (objectivism vs. constructivism).

Beyond philosophical debates about the role of technology in higher education, from a practicality perspective, it takes time and resources to introduce and implement new ways of using technology. It’s a process, and the process involves human emotions. As one who works in IT, my role is a service provider to my university’s communities of staff, faculty, and students. At the core of my responsibility is ensuring the systems they use work appropriately as they would expect. Network outages and disruption of applications/web services are what we try to avoid. Given that failures, trial-and-error, and not-so-perfect systems that lead to disorders of services are all part of the process when introducing new systems, how do organizations balance the need to manage for stability and provide room for transformational (and potentially disruptive) innovations? How do organizations gain buy-ins from faculty, staff, students, and administrators to adopt new systems and ways of doing things? I suppose, more importantly, the question is when and how do we know when to apply incremental improvements vs. introducing a radically new way of doing things and disrupting the system?

I’m hoping someone in higher education has figured out the answers to the questions I pose above because I have yet to figure all these out. Let’s talk if you have figured it out or have some ideas.

image credit: http://www.innovation-post.com/what-is-the-difference-between-innovation-management-and-change-management/

My “day job” as a service provider (IT) includes keeping the lights on, which means making sure the vendor and home-grown applications are functioning, managing several projects, fulfilling my leadership//supervisorial responsibilities to my staff, planning department/technology roadmaps, making sure my staff and our customers are happy, meetings, and dealing with emergencies in between. This is the reality of our daily work for many of us, not only in IT but as student affairs practitioners.  From an IT perspective, any changes we introduce must not have a disruptive and negative impact on our departments and their customers; this means changes must be incremental. Indeed, new projects present opportunities to think about and implement business process transformations. These projects take time, people, and resources and require navigating the university’s politics, personalities, and cultures. These all lead to the fact that we rarely have time to spend on experimentation to explore what may be considered radical ideas. Given the constraints and realities of our work, how can we find the time and place to experiment and explore new ideas?

I spend enough time on various social media platforms (Twitter, Linkedin, blogs, Facebook, etc.) to read exciting ideas from professionals in and outside higher education. Following twitter back channel conversations from the conference can be exciting because this is when folks share ideas to return to their campuses to implement what they just learned. I do wonder how many of these ideas ever come to fruition. Personal interest is one thing, but promoting ideas as part of one’s formal job responsibility/authority is more challenging. Even grassroots initiatives that may succeed at a small scale, at some point, will require institutional support for these initiatives to grow at a larger scale.

To student affairs and higher ed colleagues reading this post, how have you managed to find time to do your “day job” and experiment simultaneously?

One of the benefits of working for a central student affairs IT department is that I get to work and learn about the different business processes of the various units within student affairs. I also know about other teams on campus, like academic departments, who are often our partners regarding the information systems we provide. More significantly, I learn about the subcultures and issues specific to each department and those they serve. Working with these units for many years, I’ve witnessed and participated in these evolutionary changes and business transformations on our campus. These changes span the entire student life cycle, including enrollment management units, student services, academic services, and residential life.  Most of these changes have been responses to issues faced by the departments and the university. By looking at when systems were placed into production and the reasons behind them, it’s possible to figure out the campus’s political, cultural, student demographics, and environment, or beyond, at that particular time. An example is the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a program to track international students and scholars in the United States. It was a program we had to implement on our campus by 2003 because of a federal mandate. This holistic perspective of student affairs is a unique view that is probably only available to Senior Student Affairs Officers (SSAO) as their positions are at the level where their scopes of responsibilities span multiple units.

Understanding the business processes is the window to my education on what student affairs are. My view of student affairs is that, as a profession, we provide support for students in their personal and learning development while at our institutions. To understand student affairs, knowing what these units do is not enough. One must seek to understand the reasons behind them. This process involves learning about student development theories, the history of higher education and student affairs, administration, governance, professional competencies, and topics specific to each section of student affairs. Because I did not attend a graduate program in student affairs and higher education, this process has been through self-directed learning, most of which comes from reading textbooks, journals, social media, and materials I can get my hands on.

To get a broader perspective of student affairs meant extending my experience and knowledge beyond UCSB student affairs, where I work. Social media has made it easier to connect with colleagues from other institutions. It is through social media that I’ve developed my Personal Learning Network (PLN). I work for a research university, and it’s been enlightening to learn from colleagues from community colleges, small liberal colleges, private, and other public institutions. While the theories and topics I read in textbooks may have come from decades ago, the lessons I learn from my other colleagues are present and often involve discussions about the future of higher education and student affairs. I even recently had the opportunity to visit another campus to do an external review of a student affairs IT department, which further gave me a different perspective.

Learning about student affairs through IT may not be the conventional way, but I’ve come to appreciate the value of my experience working in IT when learning about student affairs. I also realized a long time ago that I needed to combine my practical experience with theories to understand student affairs fully. It’s an exciting time in higher education, and technology is a significant component and a driver of the changes happening in our field. Social media, mobile, cloud, big data, and distance learning are technologies that have introduced new issues and opportunities to students and student affairs staff as well. It’s fun to learn these new technologies, but it is essential to understand the implications behind using them. What do these technologies mean when it comes to how we perform our work, how we communicate with students, and how do they impact student development and learning? Working in student affairs, IT is an excellent place to be a witness and be part of these changes.

Higher education IT departments’ indirectly support student learning, development outcomes, and student success by providing technical support to the departments. In addition, by employing students, higher education IT departments have opportunities to directly impact student success by providing them with experiential learning opportunities to learn soft and technical skills in preparation for their careers. Given thoughtful consideration, students could be provided with learning opportunities that complement/enhance the lessons they learn in the classroom. This mindset is consistent with the values of student affairs, the belief that learning happens within and outside the classroom.

Maximizing these learning opportunities requires re-examining technical job duties (code, troubleshooting) to include non-technical activities, so they may learn how to communicate, work in teams, lead, and develop critical thinking skills. One of the typical comments from computer science students we’ve hired is how much they learn about working collaboratively and in teams from their experience working for our department. They only get to work in teams in one or two of their computer science classes. As supervisors, how do we ensure that learning happens in the technical and soft skills areas? With career staff, we have performance evaluations based on job descriptions. We can extend this practice to students by providing them with performance evaluations and also defining learning outcomes, using assessment techniques to measure their progress towards these learning outcomes along the way. These learning outcomes could be grown in areas of technical and non-technical competencies.

By being intentional with the areas of competencies for our students to develop by defining learning outcomes, I believe they would be more effective in their positions. At the same time, we are contributing to their learning process and preparing them for the careers ahead of them.