Tag: educause19

Presenters

• Susan Grajek, VP Communities and Research, EDUCAUSE
• Vince Kellen, CIO, UCSD
• Jenn Stringer, Deputy CIO & AVP, UC Berkeley (not present)
• John Suess, VP of IT and CIO, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Resources

• New Rules for 21st Century Analytics

JS: We’re re-thinking about changing out a lot of tech recently; what does this mean for our analytics?

VK: my background is in data, has been since I was in my 20s. I’ve been in a range of institutions and verticals since then, but higher ed for some time now. The way we go about analytics is archaic! Scale-out streaming technology has come a really long way recently. It’s so much faster than the traditional way of moving flat files around. We’ve got low-cost storage and serverless technologies. Virtually all our mental models around manufacturing analytics is owed to the 20th century. Here are some rules I’d like to put forth:

1. we need to conceptualize things as verbs
2. express things with maximum semantic complexity
3. build provisionally
4. design for the speed of thought
5. waste is good
6. democratize the data

Data analysis should be viewed proximal to the business rules; sharing is power. It requires organizational incentives to make it happen though. I believe that to compete in the 21st century, we need to follow the rules above.

JS: talk for a moment about your research; is analytics going through a paradigm change?

SG: I think it is; I think higher ed is going through a paradigm change. It’s going to be an unevenly distributed change, though. How do you do it proactively and affordably? Many institutions are purchasing predictive analytics tools (29%), and the two-year change in this trend’s influence on IT strategy is significant.

JS: when you look at the stats on these things, you’ll notice that there are a lot of us who are doing them. Our institutions have mountains of data, but much of the data we’ve got has not been incorporated into vendor models. We’ve been using Caliper learning analytics data running in AWS, allowing us to build a 360-degree view of students. When classes make heavy use of an LMS, this is great, but when they don’t not so much. Capturing and processing student data depends on the systems feeding them (i.e. attendance systems feeding early warning systems). Unfortunately, these projects are not typically done in less than six month stints.

SG: the three pillars of Dx are culture, workforce, technology. It’s not just the technology. How do you put together a revolutionary analytics approach that will work with your institution’s values?

VK: if you try to get buy-in all up-front, you’ll never get anywhere. How many of you have experienced data wars in your institutions? (a lot of hands raised). Segregation of duties is job one…the CIO must be able to control stewardship of data. You need to have the inspiration to build the infrastructure to support it. You also need an IT organization to build this without the shackles of the 20th century. I needed to learn my own language!

JS: I didn’t have the same level of authority as Vince. I had to figure out how to work closely with my provost. We needed this to support the provost and academic affairs directly. If you can’t say you own data, you need to know how to work with everyone to make things work properly.

SG: we have an opportunity to rethink the relationship between the data science academic colleagues…how do we not make the same mistakes as we made with computer science departments in years past?

VK: tap into the motivations of your faculty. Support graduate students, support grants, find those common interests or you’re not going to get very far.

JS: about three years ago, we started our internal data science efforts with our undergraduate students. We partnered with the departments and started working on a couple problems. The students were getting experience with real-world problems, like who was going to come to our university so that we can better allocate our marketing dollars to attract the students our efforts would influence. We’ve also been incorporating Jupyter notebooks into our work. We now partner with our CS department and leaning into the research side.

SG: let’s talk about the money. How does this become affordable to most institutions?

VK: for us, it’s clear we need to do more research using pound for pound fewer administrators than we’re used to. We should be running much of this using AI so we can spend more of our money on educating students, which is what taxpayers want. We need to increase productivity of individuals.

JS: we’ve historically spent a lot of money on tools, but usage has not been as strong as we’d like. More open source, more cloud is a more flexible platform that will allow us to move and invest in staffing more appropriately. If you make a dent in student success, it can serve as a significant payback mechanism.

Question: how do you grow your own capabilities? Most vendors say “give us your stuff and we’ll figure out your problems for you.”

JS: we’re trying to move away from that model.

VK: if you’re improving instruction, great! If not, we’ll reverse engineer your work pretty quickly and share our work widely.

Question: how do you put an end to the data wars/data hoarders?

VK: when you unleash a system with a breadth of information that people find useful, it takes on a self-correcting role. Nothing more corrosive than a very powerful person who has something that they need to make come true.

Question: this conversation is about the institution, not the student.

VK: we engage our students liberally. It’s a balance of concerns; we can learn a lot about this from our peers in the medical industry.

JS: through degree audit systems, we’re providing some windows into student data for students.

Presenters

• Vince Kellen, CIO, UCSD
• Orlando Leon, CIO, CSU Fresno
• Helen Norris, VP & CIO, Chapman University
• Phillip Ventimiglia, CIO, Georgia State University

Intros and definitions of digital transformation

VK: growth…lots of construction! Replacing ancient mainframe systems (found out about that in his interview, haha). I HATE the phrase, personally. I was a consultant in the Web 1.0 days, and I hated it then.

PV: tech is disruptive, for sure. Dx for me is not a strategy, it’s something we do to support the university and student success (and into prosperous careers). We want to enable tech on campus to make things better for faculty and students…make the journey easier to navigate.

OL: we’re all about student success (hey, who here isn’t?). Dx to me is business process innovation (what we called it about three years ago). Now, it’s all about working with our partners and how all the new technologies support higher ed and our students, including digital literacy. Glassdoor says the top skill employers are looking for is cloud computing, and we don’t do that too well now.

HN: smaller, private university…challenges are a bit different but largely the same. I’m a lot like Vince, perhaps not as extreme. I think this is in the progression of what we do in tech. It’s rooted in the strategic plan of the university (i.e. supporting strategic growth and fundamentally different ways of teaching, such as in our pharmacy school).

Specific Innovations at Respective Universities

VK: many components that we’re woking on, especially growth. Online education is a priority for us right now, adult learners in particular. Something that’s important is celebrating our physical space. ERP and analytical infrastructure is important for us, in light of our forthcoming mainframe extinction. I’ll be happy to be out of the data center business. Biggest transformation is in the IT work itself, i.e. homebrew, devops, not as much software development.

PV: supporting student success and progress to graduation. Advising at scale requires technology. We’ve improved grad rates over the last 10 years via technology and data to “move the needle” in small steps, identifying risk factors and looking for what’s next, i.e. “peeling back the onion.” We have a strong team that allows us to quickly integrate new technologies with Banner, up to 40 integrations per year which extends our investments. We were able to more effectively use classroom spaces by looking at our space demand data based on class schedules; this has saved us a lot of money. Looking at the pedagogy (i.e. what we teach), how do we get students across the range of degree programs we offer “digital ready?” One way we do this is by allowing them to do a project with data and visualizations with Tableau. We also have a digital learners to leaders co-curricular program. Project-based learning is a big part of developing and building out our newer curriculum…this will help us “level up” our students’ skills.

OL: business process innovation is big for us, but we’re also looking at blockchain for providing a record of student knowledge that lives beyond their time with us. We’re also looking at a lot of interdisciplinary education.

HN: can you talk about your perspective about how you do innovation while “keeping the lights on?”

OL: we need to be able to carve time out of people’s schedule, prioritizing this, to transform our culture.

PV: you can’t say “these people are innovative, and these people are not.” Everyone in the organization (not just IT) needs to be thinking about innovation. People need a willingness to experiment and step out of our silos, whether it’s enterprise IT, instructional designers, edtech professionals, faculty, etc. and figure out what process will work best for the organization. It’s not a one-person kind of effort…if you do it that way, you’ll hit a brick wall.

HN: VK, can mainframe programmers innovate?

VK: haha, that’s tough! I’d rather frame it in the form of projects and not individuals. For example, we created a cloud optimization center, and that was a pilot fronted by faculty. This led to an NSF grant. I will say this: innovation needs extreme defense and protection; it’s fragile! Need to shield these projects from being pushed into production prematurely…need to let innovation incubate a bit.

HN: what about faculty involvement? At Chapman, it’s hard to get faculty into something that’s different. Give them something new, and they often struggle with it. The human touch is still very important. Face-to-face contact is increasingly important the more innovative the project is. Newer faculty tend to be more open to innovation. How about all of you?

PV: redesigning classes and buyout of time are important, faculty need to get credit for the work they do. How do we make sure we’re raising our people up and providing them the support they need when they’re doing something new? We can’t penalize people for taking a risk (the cameras are always rolling, in the form of RateMyProfessor and other review websites). Working through the kinks in the process is key.

OL: how do you do this well in a smaller environment, Helen?

HN: often there’s less bureaucracy. We definitely have a smaller staff, so we can’t do some of the fun things we’d like to do. We offset that by partnering with vendors and other universities. We have a partnership with a local org that allows us to use their data for machine learning and analytics projects.

VK: at larger universities we have the illusion of larger budgets. We start small too, and we grow from there. We have a lot of faculty doing really cool and wild stuff, so how do I interest them in doing work with us?

OL: is Dx critical or hype?

VK: here’s my problem…innovation is to be focused on an opportunity for another person. I want to make the customer experience better (how do I do that?), OR how do I bend the technology to make things work differently (when all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail). I prefer to reason from market opportunity backwards. All of edtech is consistently underestimating the last mile of support! You can’t replace molecules with electrons in every case.

HN: my president wouldn’t like the term “Dx,” but is OK with digital innovation.

OL: higher ed needs to shift and pivot. The central valley where we are is particularly at risk for replacement of jobs by technology.

PV: we’re in the 4th industrial revolution, and tech is fundamentally changing higher education institutions. Many institutions are in fact going away and many of the areas that remain are highly tech-dependent. Campuses need to become less resistant to change, and we can help our organizations make that change and serve our students.

HN: is digital disruption like Zoom or Uber?

PV: I came from corporate brick-and-mortar, and it used to be thought that “all that would go away,” but that has not in fact happened. In some ways, it’s increased the value of physical stores…extending the relationship with consumers by providing them with more choices. Overall, I think things are getting better.

VK: we don’t have enough neuroplasticity to change ourselves so much that we can completely modify the way we work; we’re all sitting here in a room, not unlike a cathedral in 1,200 AD! I love digitization, but the disruption we’re talking about is not the same as the green revolution’s or those enabled by Moore’s law. Our outputs have more of a flywheel effect.

OL: we still use paper for performance reviews; we can change that to a digital process, then into a workflow. What’s the next step? Let’s make performance reviews an in-flight thing that we can do in our day-to-day efforts.

HN: final thoughts?

VK: how do humans comandeer tech to influence their social lives. We need to keep the humanistic element in mind as we go through the Dx process.

PV: it’s not one big thing, it’s hundreds of things. We need to systematically address each thing.

OL: you’ve gotta start somewhere, it needs to be top-down and bottom-up with conversations at every place in between.

Presenters

• Michael Berman, Chief Innovation Officer and Deputy CIO, CSU Office of the Chancellor
• Mihaela Popescu, Professor of Media Studies, CSUSB
• Berhanu Tadesse, AVP for IT/Infrastructure Services, CSU Fullerton
• Max Tsai, Coordinator of Digital Transformation and Innovation, CSU Fresno

Michael discussed the size & scale of the CSU, 3.7 million living alumni! CSU is focused on teaching and learning and economic impact. A single entity, 23 presidents, 24 CIOs, more than 24 IT departments(!)

Innovation Focus Areas

• Enabling innovation at the campuses (in response to Campus CIOs: “Is there something the system can do that would allow us to be more innovative on our campuses?”)
• Building innovation infrastructure: building things that will allow us to innovate faster.
• Fostering a culture of innovation: providing a space for staff to innovate.

Innovation mini-grant program has been very successful: 29 projects funded at 14 campuses for a total of $222,500 distributed. We also have cloud credits from AWS and Microsoft Azure. “Innovate at the core so that campuses can innovate at the edge.” We do community building, including a webinar series called “Innovate Live!” an innovation cafe, AWS webinar series, Cal State Tech Conference (which attracted over 400 attendees this year)…more info here: www.calstateinnovate.org

Mihaela Popescu talked about extended reality at CSUSB. Mission is to explore the technological affordances, design and implementation principles, and impact of immersive media for learning while promoting high-impact practices for students. We wanted to build open-source solutions for what we were building. We do all XR experiences (360 video, AR, VR. We built an immersive media and learning lab so that students could participate in high-impact practices: build and learn. How to produce assets on a shoestring? work with faculty from art (3d assets), music (3d sound design), and other faculty as SMEs. We built a VR experience for nursing, a fully-designed environment where students practice a discharge process; Ambrosia: gamified fully-interactive, multi-player archeological artifacts in experiential situations; cyber security experience; VR for public good: GenCyber, Native American Art, In|Dignity Exhibition.

Berhanu Tadesse talked about CSU Fullerton’s investment in innovation projects (stipends are provided for coursework). We have an organization to support this! All projects are tied to strategic goals. Examples include Adobe integration into digital literacy programming, iTuffy an AI-powered chatbot to address basic student questions about services on campus. A video was shared that described the iFullerton app, the iTuffy chatbot, and other support services.

Max Tsai talked about what’s happening at CSU Fresno, through the lens of limited resources. Started with very little resources! We built up our innovation, resource and development/hub of digital transformation. Getting started was hard…we looked at ourselves like a startup (limited $$ and staff resources, early times for the tech we wanted to work on). We revised our product line so it would support student success. We did technology support well, so we built on that strength, investing in people and building up the culture around that. We also collaborated with multiple campuses to leverage the skills we didn’t have on our campus…this went a long way toward building up our team’s skills! Doing the work is great, but you really need visibility to grow your team. On top of this, we work with vendors as partners…we don’t want to be just their customer, we want to be their VAR (Value-Added Resellers). As an example, we helped AWS with the RoboMaker project.

The keynote this morning (Steven Johnson) set things up nice: by providing people with a place where they can play, we can accomplish a lot through experimentation and innovation, while simultaneously keeping people’s careers fresh. In our central office, we have a small team that isn’t so much about doing innovation, as it is about enabling folk on our campuses across the system to do the innovation. How to take this home for use on your campuses? Top-down commitment helps, we built this into the system-level strategy; a bottom-up approach is to find people doing innovation across your system. Find those innovators and bring them together…having that support and exchange will go a long way. If you’re going to build it, you need to find a way to include everyone…i.e. it’s no good if you have a small group of “innovators” while the rest of the team is “doing the real work” of keeping the lights on. Max described the role of the innovation architect (building capacity) and innovation engineer (building operational support) at CSU Fresno…these roles balance out needs.