Mobile, wireless, broadband, smartphones, laptops, tablets. Online learning, active learning, adaptive learning. Flipped classrooms, hybrid courses, open-source courseware. Social media, cyber security, business continuity. MOOCs, ERPs, apps. To state the obvious, technology permeates higher education today. Or, to mash metaphors, the ivory tower has been wired, wi-fied, and moved to the cloud. But given technology’s pervasiveness, how well are college and university boards organized to provide advice and oversight in the realm of all things wired and wireless? How can they best structure themselves to help their college or university shape strategies that capitalize on technology’s power, within a context that fits that institution’s mission?
Paul J. LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), has described technology as one of the “macro forces” that higher education can harness in order to innovate. Yet when asked recently how well he thinks the institution he leads handles technology at the board level, he volunteered candidly, “We don’t do it well enough.” AGB data suggest that SNHU is not alone: A recent survey of boards found that just 19 percent said that their institution is prepared to make decisions about the use of new educational technologies as part of its strategic or business plan. (See box below.)
“When you consider the degree to which technology permeates almost all of university operations in one way or another, from academics through student information systems to compliance, financials, and beyond,” LeBlanc says, “I’m not sure that at my own institution we have all our arms fully around how we should think about the questions.”
That assessment seems rather unexpected considering that SNHU is the fourth largest nonprofit provider of online higher education in the United States, enrolling nearly 30,000 students. His observation also seems surprising given SNHU’s stature as an innovator in higher education, which is pioneering competency-based education and three-year degree options. Clayton Christensen, the Harvard-based educator who made “disruption” a household word in higher education, is an SNHU board member. SNHU ranked 12th on Fast Company’s 2012 list of the “World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies.” It was the only college or university on the list, which also included names like Apple and Google.
Exceptional in many ways, SNHU is perhaps typical of a number of institutions in higher education in the sense that its structures for overseeing technology have not yet caught up with the educational and operational innovations that technology is driving. At the board level, LeBlanc says, SNHU currently addresses technology “within the various places where it lives.” In practice, that often means the academic affairs committee or the finance committee.
Again speaking candidly, LeBlanc says that SNHU has acknowledged that it doesn’t have the necessary depth at the board level to be fully conversant in strategic questions around technology. Accordingly, it has started to recruit new board members who can fill this gap, including the CEO of a large technology company and the managing partner for global technology at an international consulting firm. SNHU has also hired an outside consultant to conduct a cross-institutional IT audit and is using findings from that exercise to raise questions about technology up to the board level. Finally, LeBlanc says, “I think probably a very likely next step for us is to have some sort of board committee that looks at technology from an institutional perspective.”
Toward IT Committees
It is not yet a groundswell, but there has been an uptick in the number of colleges and universities that are finding that a separate, standing committee focused on technology is the right tool to coalesce institutional discussions about technology at the board level. The Campus Computing Project, the largest continuing study of the role of computing, e-learning, and information technology in American higher education, tracked the number of institutions with a separate board committee on computing and IT issues in both 2009 and 2012. The survey found that, among all institutions in 2012, about one-quarter (25.6 percent) had a separate IT committee. The most dramatic change between 2009 and 2012 came among public four-year colleges, when the number of institutions with standing IT committees rose from 18 percent to 34.3 percent. Among private institutions, the number with separate IT committees rose from 20.1 percent in 2009 to 27.9 percent in 2012.
At Pennsylvania’s Gettysburg College, for example, the institution’s vice president of information technology, Rodney S. Tosten, used to be asked to report about technology at meetings of both the academic affairs and the finance committees of the college’s governing board. A review of governance at the institution, however, recommended the creation of a separate board committee on technology. Gettysburg’s new standing committee on technology first met in September 2010.
Asked for his input, Tosten suggested that the new committee be composed of representatives from all of the board’s other major standing committees. The board agreed. Tosten knew that would pose logistical problems—the technology committee cannot meet when other committees are meeting—but he argued that the trade-off in the cross-pollination of discussions about technology across the entire board would be worth it.
In practice, Gettysburg’s IT committee uses technology effectively itself. The committee meets three times per year, but elects to make two of those meetings virtual. The committee meets face-to-face once per year in September, then meets in January as a webinar prior to the full board’s February meeting, and then similarly again in April prior to the board’s May meeting. Periodically, too, the IT committee has a chance to interact with the full board, as it did when it took the lead in a recent half-day board discussion on teaching and learning. An annual plan drives the committee’s work.
Gettysburg board member Ronald J. Smith, a retired former senior vice president of Intel Corporation, chairs the board’s IT committee. “I think for a long time the college, probably like a lot of other institutions, thought of IT as kind of a support service,” Smith says. “When we started the IT committee, it was becoming more apparent to people that there were strategic aspects to IT.” Those strategic aspects gradually came into focus, Smith says, as the board recognized the extent to which technology was infusing campus life in such varied areas as risk management, enrollment management, alumni relations, human resources, registration, and many other functions. Moreover, the board saw that technology had to play a pivotal role in the college’s thinking about expanding online education, blended learning, and other emerging educational applications of IT. As those threads merged, Smith says, the board saw that technology had become “a strategic foundation of the college.”
To some extent, Smith suggests, relegating technology to certain committees restricts board focus, leading board members to think too narrowly—for example, seeing technology as merely a line item in the budget or an added expense in building projects. The IT committee, Smith says, has been able to show how technology can be used to improve the college’s educational offerings, alumni outreach, enrollment marketing, library resources, and overall effectiveness.
The expanding role that technology plays in teaching and learning also drives a lot of the board discussion at Teachers College at Columbia University. As the board there became more engaged in discussions about what would be an appropriate role for the college in online learning, and as the college also sought to refurbish outdated classrooms with technology, the board formed a standing education technology committee. The committee augments its expertise with faculty members who are adept and interested in educational technology and a technology guru who earned his doctorate at Teachers College. (Similarly, Gettysburg College’s technology committee includes a faculty representative as well as a student.)
According to trustee Jay P. Urwitz, a partner in the Washington office of the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, board discussions at Teachers College cover a breadth of technology issues, from what kind of platform would best serve the institution’s forays into online learning to how it might license course content. Recent discussions have also focused on how the integrity of Teachers College can be preserved in online courses, Urwitz says, including what kind of credential online students would get and what steps the institution would need to take to ensure reliability in online testing. Questions of financing and security also arise regularly.
Another institution that opted to create a separate technology committee is Lafayette College, based in Easton, Pennsylvania. Starting as an ad hoc group, Lafayette’s committee on information technology was formally recognized as a standing committee three years ago. In addition to board members, the committee also includes representation from college administrators, faculty members, and students.
Angel L. Mendez, a senior vice president for transformation at Cisco Systems who chairs the committee, reports that it had humble origins and was formed when Lafayette needed to upgrade its IT network. Today, the committee is home to a master plan that covers dimensions of technology broadly across the campus, and it works shoulder to shoulder with the board’s committee on education policy to help plan Lafayette’s strategy for instructional technology and online learning.
“A lot of what we do on our committee is horizontal work,” Mendez says. “It cuts across functional, divisional, and committee lines. There’s a tremendous amount of cross-pollination among committees as well as constituents.”
Yet another perspective comes from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. The college has addressed technology at the board level in a standing committee whose work was driven in part by the role that technology plays in the “Five Colleges” partnership that engages Mount Holyoke with four other institutions in its region. Recently, however, the college has been “looking seriously at the uses of technology as consistent with our liberal-arts core mission,” says Mount Holyoke’s president, Lynn Pasquerella. “Because we are seeing such integration around innovation” using technology both inside and outside the classroom, she says, the college decided to move technology out of what has been called the “Five Colleges and Technology Committee” into the board’s education committee, which will now be known as the education and technology committee.
Another Perspective
The fact that only one-quarter or one-third of institutions across the diversity of higher education have a separate IT committee indicates that there are different ways to think about structuring board conversations around this important topic. One expert who takes a somewhat contrary view to the notion of a dedicated IT committee is Brian D. Voss, vice president for IT and chief information officer at the University of Maryland. In April 2013, Voss was appointed as EDUCAUSE’s first presidential fellow.
Voss suggests that general technological savvy in higher education divides colleges and universities into two distinct buckets. At one end of the spectrum, he says, are institutions that have had a strategic view of IT for more than a decade and have made concomitant investments in technology. On the other hand are institutions that perhaps have not invested in a quality campus network or modernized their information systems—or that lag in figuring out how to apply IT to bolster institutional research capacity or enhance environments for learning. Such institutions, Voss says, “may not have done a good job of building pervasive technology availability and funding models to ensure that technology is up-to-date” and may have viewed IT as “either a necessary evil or a luxury item.”
Voss argues that separate IT committees are appropriate only for institutions that are behind on the IT curve. “If an institution honestly assesses itself to be behind in technology, then a specific IT board committee may have value,” Voss says, particularly if an institution needs to develop its technology infrastructure or frame an overall IT strategy. For those institutions, Voss suggests, a dedicated IT committee can help a college or university concentrate the board’s energy and thinking in ways that can bring technology up to speed. But for institutions that already have strong technologies in place and strategies for moving IT forward, Voss argues that the focus ought to be on the bigger picture. Such institutions, Voss says, are “ready to think beyond the technology itself and talk about how technology impacts every facet of the institution’s mission.”
When interviewed this fall, Voss said that the University System of Maryland board of regents, the governing board for the University of Maryland, was in the process of deciding its own strategies for addressing big-picture considerations of technology. Voss said the fact that the governing board of a Big Ten university was taking the time for such deliberations underscores how vital it is that board members at all colleges and universities engage in such a conversation.
As William E. “Brit” Kirwan, chancellor of the system, notes: “At its fall 2013 retreat, the University System of Maryland board of regents focused on the disruptive potential of information technology. From the board’s perspective, advances in information technology create the real possibility for simultaneously improving student outcomes and reducing costs. This is especially true with regard to course completion, student retention, and graduation rates.” He adds, “The board of regents, largely through its committee on education policy and student life, will devote this year to actively pursuing the potential of data analytics and new technology-based learning platforms to advance its academic mission and of cloud computing to streamline its administrative operations.”
Questions for Boards
Kenneth C. (Casey) Green, founding director of the Campus Computing Project, suggests that one of the key challenges for organizing productive board discussions around technology is cultural. He says, for example, that there is often an inherent disconnect in board discussions between academics used to discussing options at length and the pace of reform that board members with an industry background might seek, being used to faster decision-making processes and faster implementation. “Some of this is really a tale of two cultures, and how they communicate with each other,” Green says. “Technology is a metaphor for change. And that is part of the challenge in higher education: We in higher education typically don’t do ‘change’ well.”
Green says broader issues are at stake. “The lament that I hear about technology in higher education these days is: How do we get colleges and universities to do more with IT to support and enhance teaching and learning, and why aren’t we doing a better job of leveraging IT for management and administration? Part of the challenge is that higher education no longer leads but often lags on a lot of these things,” he says.
The central IT question for college and university boards, and the one around which they need to organize themselves, is not what Enterprise Resource Plan (ERP) to select or online-learning developer to partner with. Green says the central question is how technology can help to enhance and advance higher education, and how technology-based applications, resources, and services will serve the institution’s mission and strategic plan, contribute to a culture of continuous quality improvement, and enhance institutional outcomes.
In that context, Green suggests that boards should ask themselves a number of key questions about technology. The first steps are to assess the institution’s strategic plan and IT plan. Then, Green says, the board should ask:
- How does the IT plan support the strategic plan with regard to goals for instruction and learning, effective and informed management and administration, and the institutional impact and outcomes for our students?
- When did we last update our strategic plan and IT plan?
- Within the context of the IT plan, when did we last update our plan for IT security and IT disaster recovery?
- Do we have a viable financial plan for IT that recognizes the recurring costs and the replacement costs of technology resources and services? Is the plan fully funded?
Boards need to be honest about asking “What do we do well here with IT, and what must we do better?” Green says. “What’s the institutional priority for ‘better’? What’s the timeline for ‘better’?”
Again suggesting that technology is a metaphor for change, Green says that the heart of the question that boards should ask about technology is this: “What are we doing to create a campus culture that values and supports continuous quality improvement in our instructional efforts and administrative practices? And how are we, as a board, organizing ourselves to support that?”
“Honestly, the technology is often the easy part of the campus IT conversation,” Green adds. “If you think about technology on campus, it’s not about which application. It’s about how we make use of it, and what benefits we want and need.”
Boards Talk about Technology: An AGB Survey
The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) conducted a survey about boards and educational technology in spring 2013. More than 2,000 board members of AGB member institutions participated (a 15 percent response rate).
According to the survey results, more than half of boards (57.6 percent) are spending more time on educational technology issues. (See Figure 1 below.) But only about one-third are getting board-level information about online learning that they would consider excellent or even good. More than twice as many board members think online learning will be “important” or “essential” at their institution in five years (71 percent), compared with today (28 percent), yet only 19 percent of board members think their boards are “prepared” for making decisions about educational technology. And as many as 20 percent say that their board doesn’t discuss technology on a regular basis as part of its responsibilities.
When it comes to board structure, 52 percent report that most board work related to technology and learning resides in the academic affairs/education committee or a similar committee, and 17 percent said it was the work of the board as a whole. Another 11 percent of the survey’s respondents said such work resides with a technology committee or task force. (See Figure 2 below.)
To see the full report, with insights on how boards view technology, visit AGB’s Web site here.
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