Should e-learning change university management?

With the university sector bracing itself for planned cuts after the next General Election, the need to respond flexibly to changes in its market and operate more efficiently is paramount. In the first of a series of articles from members of the University of Manchester’s centre for development informatics, Drew Whitworth considers whether e-learning is the future.

Universities have always been difficult organizations to manage. But there are good reasons for this. In different ways, their core activities of teaching and research are both very sensitive to context. Research projects and classrooms are like snowflakes, with the same general form, but unique in the details. In such an environment, the ‘right’ solution to a problem is difficult to determine in advance. The micro-management of teaching and research therefore depends on flexibility, the ability to think on one’s feet and make rapid decisions where the outcome is uncertain. One draws on the experience of the past where necessary, and evaluates new possibilities or courses of action with respect to the specific context. Thus, effective work in higher education (HE) requires a deep understanding of context, built through reflection on the teacher or researcher’s professional activity. These needs have contributed to the professional autonomy that has historically been offered to academics, and the requirement for continuous professional development, as is true for other professional groups. It also contributes to what Weick called the “loosely coupled” nature of the university and the ensuing difficulties of co-ordination and strategy formation.

“How are universities going to learn to meet these new demands, when in Gooley and Towers’ memorable phrase, they are akin to “ocean liners”, requiring an age to change direction even slightly?”

However, like other public and semi-public institutions, universities are now under considerable pressure to reform their management structure and how they undertake their core activities. This has happened for several reasons. First, increased accountability and good auditing practice are demanded across all university activities, especially those which are funded by the state. An increased global demand for HE has opened up new markets, but also led to the penetration of the private sector into countries outside traditional academic heartlands like the US and Europe. Improvements in communications have made online learning more feasible, but they also place universities in competition with many more institutions worldwide. These technological changes have drawn attention to the difficulties universities have with disseminating innovation and managing change. The traditional, autonomy-based structure of the university can effectively foster innovation at the micro-scale, but is poor at scaling these upwards or transferring innovations into different contexts, such as from department to department, or from postgraduate to undergraduate teaching.

Most universities have responded to these pressures by increasing centralisation.  This has largely been achieved not by asserting the direct management of teaching and research, but through increasing control over procedures, principally auditing, budgeting and the use of technology. There has been a strengthening of university technostructures (a term coined by Henry Mintzberg, which he used to refer to those parts of an organisation “mandated to plan and control the work of others”). Large and complex organisations, universities have always needed a big support staff to assist the work of the professional core, and the maintenance of a campus and library, the marketing of the institution and so on have historically been undertaken centrally. But what is new is the increasing use of techniques familiar in other sectors but culturally alien to academia: centralised financial planning, business process analysis, the provision of a student management system like Banner and so on. Increasingly, academics are also provided with a single campus virtual learning environment (VLE) that they are expected to use. This centralisation through control over technology and procedure is akin to the “new managerialism” being applied throughout the public sector. (For an analysis of these trends see Robins and Webster’s collection, The Virtual University.)

“The trick for the 21st century university is not to replace the loosely coupled, autonomy-based structure with one that lies at the other end of the scale, but of how to find the best of both worlds.”

Yet there is no evidence of these changes enhancing universities’ ability to respond flexibly to changes in its market and general environment. On the contrary. Since the 1960s the sociology of academia has been analysed by writers such as Pierre Bourdieu, who in his Homo Academicus recognised that universities, far from being creative and responsive to demand, were innovation- and risk-averse. Centralisation, and the implied concentration on existing strengths and single strategic visions, does not promote innovation and creativity, as Ralph Stacey recognised in Managing Chaos. The processes described above are, at best, one-off changes of practice that result in one particular model of learning management – one “vision” for how teaching should be run – becoming reified into a technology which the university then becomes locked into, even after the system has outlived its usefulness. The VLE has been called, in a recent conference at the University of Wolverhampton, an “undead” technology: one that has seen its time pass, but which still retains signs of life. VLEs allow the university to spread its reach globally, to record, and thus audit, student and staff activity, and to integrate this work with other aspects of campus management such as enrolment and budgeting: but they also reify practice around a “one-size-fits-all” solution and risk retarding the very flexibility and creativity on which teaching and research depend.

Yet universities are now being expected to demonstrate they can be creative on a sector-wide scale. In December 2009 the Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, wrote to Tim Melville-Ross, head of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and outlined his vision for the next decade as follows (the letter can be read in full on the HEFCE web site):

We want to see more programmes that are taken flexibly and part-time and that a learner can access with ease alongside their other commitments…. we will want some shift away from full-time three year places and towards a wider variety of provision…. I am also asking you… to devise new funding incentives for higher educational programmes that deliver the higher level skills needed [by business]. This will require a robust way of identifying those programmes and activities that make a special contribution to meeting economic and social priorities, and a mechanism to redeploy funds, on a competitive basis, to those institutions that are able and willing to develop new or expanded provision in these key areas.

Mandelson’s reference to flexibility is presumably an indication that the government want learners to be able to access education at a distance if necessary, and outside standard 9-5 hours and the university semesters. But the latter part of this quote also implies that a “just in time” approach to the design of degrees will benefit institutions directly. Those universities which can achieve this kind of flexible response to the needs of the market will have an advantage in subsequent funding rounds. How are universities going to learn to meet these new demands, when in Gooley and Towers’ memorable phrase, they are akin to “ocean liners”, requiring an age to change direction even slightly? Particularly when Mandelson accompanied his letter with news of substantial cuts in HEFCE funding, which will inevitably mean a lack of resources for any large capital investments in new technologies or structures for the foreseeable future?

Transforming the core activities of universities through the use of e-learning and other ICTs can occur, but because teaching, to remain of high quality, must be sensitive to context, this is a process with multiple possible end-points. The danger is that an approach which pulls management and professional practice into inflexible technologies, provided centrally across a campus and with their use mandated by policy and technostructural controls, will damage the university’s core business. The risk is that academic autonomy and professional development are seen primarily as obstacles to change. The former can be this: that is admitted. But, by definition, the latter is not. Instead, CPD plays an essential role in retaining the quality of a university’s core activities. Without such quality the university is under threat, either generally, or from competitors offering a better service. It is a fallacy to imagine that all students are demanding new technologies, but there is a widespread increase in demands for assured quality in HE. Several Russell Group universities have recently experienced protests led by Students’ Unions around what students see as a reduction in quality due to the introduction of e-learning.

Flexible management requires a flexible technological base. This is true of any organisation. Because the core activities of universities are context-sensitive, and are generated, ideally, by continuous professional development, then managing the technology-rich university requires the development of CPD structures which incorporate technology not as something which is provided in a finished form by the centralised technostructure, but which is, at least potentially, generated wherever teaching, learning and research take place.

“Such experimenters were not seen as “mavericks” or dissenters, but as the early shoots of what the university might look like in ten or twenty years’ time. They could respond flexibly to changes in markets and technologies and, through monitoring and professional development networks, disseminated new innovations across the campus as they became proven.”

Such learning can result in changes to practice across the university, as long as it is resourced and managed in ways which preserve the possibility of experimentation and flexibility. A couple of years ago, I interviewed the CEO for e-learning from a major US public university (who must remain anonymous due to constraints placed on my use of data). I do not claim that his view is unanimously held, but I offer it as an example of how the value of autonomous professional enquiry into technology can be perceived by a member of senior management in a large university. My research partner (Dr Angela Benson from the University of Alabama) and I had used three different degree programmes on this campus as case studies: one used WebCT, which was the institutional VLE at the time, but another had developed and maintained their own bespoke system, and the third took a laissez-faire approach with its teaching and development staff, permitting them to use whatever system best met their personal needs: as a result many used Moodle. I asked the CEO if he was happy with this diversity and he answered:

I’ve grown to think it’s not exactly the right thing to do… On the other hand, and let me give you a completely different line on this, I do not want to be locked into a vendor, I think a campus CMS is a big behemoth, and it’s hard for us to switch. So having multiple labours on campus is actually good for vendor relationships…. Also innovation can happen in more dimensions when we have more flavours going on. Resource is tight for supporting things of this nature at the campus level, so we tend to be utilitarian, and not creative. The units are more likely to be creative, and that’s to be encouraged. Personally I would like to be doing all the creative activity, I got into this profession because of that, but I fully understand from a business model point of view, it’s unlikely to happen given current resource allocation, so from that sense I think that the distributed approach to different systems is a good idea.

The key question, for this manager, was from where the next generation of e-learning innovation would come. He recognised the technostructure had no mandate to undertake the creative work required. These technologies continue to change, and as he said, the large, institutional VLE has benefits for accountants and those who are responsible for ICT infrastructure, but from the point of view of the core professional activities it can be a “behemoth”. This university therefore not only tolerated, but resourced, experimentation around the campus with new technologies while still offering centralised technological support to those programmes which needed and desired it. Such experimenters were not seen as “mavericks” or dissenters, but as the early shoots of what the university might look like in ten or twenty years’ time. They could respond flexibly to changes in markets and technologies and, through monitoring and professional development networks, disseminated new innovations across the campus as they became proven. Ultimately, technology in this university was distributed in ways which allowed the academics to view it as an opportunity, not a threat to their autonomy.

In Managing Chaos, Stacey forcefully claims that in the face of uncertainty, long-term strategic planning is a mere palliative with no real observable effects on the sustainability of an organisation. If universities are to respond to new challenges and offer flexible programmes supported by technologies which are in a constant state of evolutionary flux, then centralisation is, by definition, counter-productive. The trick for the 21st century university is not to replace the loosely coupled, autonomy-based structure with one that lies at the other end of the scale, but of how to find the best of both worlds. The field might be wide open for the first institution – which may be a private sector one – that pulls off this trick and then finds a way to flexibly expand its capacity to deliver “just in time” teaching.

Drew Whitworth is programme director for the MA course in Digital Technologies, Communication and Education at the University of Manchester.

For more information on the centre for development informatics visit: http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/cdi/

Image provided courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nics_events/3578004168/