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There are three widely held assumptions about the state of technology
in liberal arts colleges:
- each year, technology becomes more entwined with and more critical
to teaching, learning, research, recruitment, advancement, and other
key institutional activities;
- the rapid pace of technological change forces colleges to continuously
evaluate, deploy, and support new technologies;
- the cost of maintaining and upgrading technological resources increases
substantially each year.
There is a fourth assumption, often mentioned but not well-established:
- collaborative efforts can leverage the resources of small colleges
to help them address the problem of rapid technology transitions.
In December 1999, representatives of Occidental, Reed, Swarthmore, and
Vassar met in Chicago to discuss ways to explore the fourth assumption.
Each college was facing a dramatic increase in demand for web technologies
and was struggling to find a strategy for web support that would be both
robust and sustainable. Collaboration offered the prospect of minimizing
the risk of making bad technology choices, leveraging the collective technical
expertise of our institutions, and sharing some of the costs of web development.
The focus on finding ways to weave web technologies into a variety of
academic and administrative activities, coupled with the elusiveness of
solutions, led the group to refer to the effort as the Web Integration
and Sustainability Project -- WISP.
Challenges to Collaboration
Although liberal arts colleges have a rich history of collaborating with
one another, there are comparatively few examples of technology collaborations
that have yielded noteworthy results. Some of the more successful efforts
have involved small groups of colleges with extensive pre-existing consortial
ties such as Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, and Haverford, the Five Colleges in
Massachusetts, the Claremont University Consortium, and the Minnesota
CLIC group. As the WISP participants discovered, there are formidable
challenges to technology collaboration that liberal arts colleges must
take into consideration:
- technological diversity
- organizational differences
- differing priorities
- project scope
- distance
- institutional commitment
Technological diversity -- When forming the WISP collaboration,
the four participants focused a great deal of attention on the fact that
each used the SCT-Banner administrative system for college operations.
The assumption was made that co-development of web interfaces and database-to-web
utilities would be expedited by this underlying commonality and that software
modules would require little or no modification in order to be used at
any of the four colleges. This proved not to be the case.
During the first year of the project, a technical task force of web programmers
drawn from each of the institutions did a study of web development tools.
Occidental hosted a two-day multi-vendor workshop to allow the task force
to examine a variety of products. Despite energetic efforts to identify
a single development environment that would meet everyone's needs, the
task force eventually concluded that variations in staff expertise, differences
in the mix of end-user platforms, prior investments in associated technologies,
and other factors argued for the adoption of a diverse set of web tools.
The WISP experience in this regard is instructive. Despite their relatively
small size, the technology environments and investments of liberal arts
colleges are neither simple nor homogeneous. Even institutions that share
a common enterprise system such as Banner may be sufficiently different
to make standardization on a single web development tool unrealistic,
especially given the range of rapidly evolving choices (e.g., Java, ColdFusion,
PHP, Tango, and many others).
This conclusion prompted the technical task force to seek an alternative
avenue for collaboration. The search eventually led them from programming
to analysis and design. Rather than producing "plug-and-play"
modules to be used at all four schools, attention was turned to the development
of specifications and strategies that could be implemented, with custom
features, in each environment. This approach has proven to be extremely
valuable and provides a useful model for other liberal arts college technology
collaborations.
Organizational differences -- Groups that support technology
at liberal arts colleges come in many different sizes, shapes, and reporting
structures. This is especially true for emerging technologies, such as
the web. Building interdepartmental teams is often difficult within an
institution; the task becomes even more formidable across institutions.
During the WISP project, technical staff were sometimes frustrated by
their inability to identify an appropriate counterpart at another institution.
Working with colleagues who don't have the same set of responsibilities
can bring new insights to a project but it makes the adoption of a shared
perspective and action plan quite difficult. At times, WISP technical
staff realized that only by bringing together a combination of staff from
IT, communications, libraries, and other departments could they hope to
have the necessary decision-makers involved in a planning or development
effort.
Differing priorities -- Another key assumption of the
WISP collaboration was that there would be a great deal of overlap in
institutional objectives and associated technical priorities among small,
private liberal arts colleges. To confirm this, we conducted an internal
study to identify areas of potential overlap. To our surprise the intersection
of priorities across institutions was relatively low. While all four colleges
shared a high level of interest in issues relating to student recruitment,
institutional advancement, curricular improvement, access to information
resources, student and faculty diversity, facilities enhancement, and
so on, the specific technology goals arising from these areas of interest
were vastly different. In cases where technical goals did intersect, differences
in operational practices were often substantial enough to render a "one
size fits all" approach impractical. Some institution-specific customization
proved to be necessary for shared modules even in "highly standardized"
areas such as budget reporting.
Project Scope -- The administrative overhead inherent
in a technology project--planning, budgeting, communication, documentation,
approvals, and so forth--rise significantly when collaboration is involved.
Unless the scope of a project is sufficiently large, the overhead can
quickly eclipse the work of the project itself. Many collaborative web
projects that were initially discussed by the WISP group were eventually
tossed out because they lacked the necessary scope in terms of software
development complexity, range of use, or anticipated life span. Selecting
projects that met the "scope" test proved to be difficult. Discussions
with other colleges, however, convinced us that an inordinate number of
collaborative technology efforts failed to meet expectations precisely
because the relationship between project scope and administrative overhead
were not carefully assessed in advance.
Distance -- One of the more intriguing challenges of
this collaboration was its bi-coastal character. We speculated that the
use of email, listservs, web sites, blogs, and other forms of online communication
might enable staff at the four colleges to transcend the great distances
between them. Eventually this proved to be true, though not quite to the
extent we had hoped. What we discovered was that face-to-face meetings
were vital in order to establish a foundation for making productive use
of online communications. Sporadic organizational meetings during the
first year were insufficient to build the needed sense of community and
shared objectives.
During the second and subsequent years of the project, campus site visits,
workshops, joint training sessions, and WISP meetings held in conjunction
with conferences, allowed the mid-level staff to develop increasingly
strong working relationships. Had the distances between the participants
(and the cost of face-to-face meetings) been less, it is likely that a
productive team dynamic could have been achieved much more quickly and
effectively. Extensive face-to-face contact--afforded by geographic proximity--should
thus be considered a key component of future liberal arts college technology
collaborations.
Institutional commitment -- The most difficult challenge
of any collaboration lies in the tension between self interest and group
interest. While the underlying goal of collaboration is to achieve a whole
that is greater than the sum of the parts, in reality there are costs
of collaborative engagement that tend to siphon away the benefits of collaboration.
These costs include administrative overhead, additional staff workloads,
and compromises to one's technical agenda, among other things. In order
to deal effectively with these costs, there must be, within each participating
institution, a clear commitment of leadership, will, and resources. There
must also be a shared understanding and endorsement of the goals and benefits
of the collaboration by senior officers, faculty, administrative staff,
and technical staff.
Early in the project we discovered that much of the leadership needed
to come from users --registrars, comptrollers, admission officers--rather
than from IT staff. Without shared goals and shared expertise at that
level, it would have been virtually impossible to collaborate on the design
of a web module, much less on the implementation.
Leadership and shared commitment were tested many times during the project.
Technical staff from each of the institutions often found WISP-related
activities to be an unwelcome burden to their workloads that offered no
obvious or immediate benefits. Finding ways to relate their technical
agendas to the collaborative WISP goals was difficult at times.
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