edtech

Some Advice On How To Introduce Large Scale Systems

Posted on by Jon K.

I began writing a draft of this after the place I worked at as we were decommissioning one of our institution-wide systems and thought about the other side of the process, onboarding systems. Of course, the end of the line is a natural place to do some reflection. I won’t dig too deep into the specifics of each (that would require a beer or two to lubricate the wheels) – but I’ve been parts of teams that introduced (cumulatively) 10 new organization-wide systems over the last two decades, across three education institutions. I’ve also been part of decommissioning upwards of 15 or 16 different organization-wide systems. It’s a skill I’ve developed.

Liam Neeson Skills GIFfrom Liam Neeson GIFs

So where to start with tips? Use the vendor. They are still looking to impress you, so make sure you use their implementation process. Make sure you take advantage of every single opportunity to get to know them, how they think. As an administrator on a system, it really helps to understand the assumptions they’ve made to get to the decisions they made about designing the system. Attend their promo webinars, read almost anything you can about the system.

Talk to others who use the system. The vendor will likely give you someone who loves the system and they’re useful, but look at the list on their website of institutions and cold-call. Work your network. Search Twitter. Look for who replies to their tweets/social media and see if they are actually using the system. Yes, it’s detective work, but it’ll likely show you what you’re in for when you actually get the system stood up. This forms an informal community of people you can reach out to when the vendor doesn’t understand your questions, or when you don’t want to ask the vendor.

Get stakeholders involved early. Get Equity and Inclusion involved before you sign anything. Get accessibility and privacy involved before you sign anything. Don’t be a bungler who buys a thing, and then talks to the Privacy Office and Equity. Make it part of your purchasing process (even if it’s not required). Equity and Inclusion has an opinion about tech, especially in light of the millions of whitewashed claims out there about AI and all sorts of stuff. Even more innocuous stuff about language choices – where we can help make things more equitable easily. Having those voices at the table are, in my opinion, crucial.

Plan out you transition and add time to that plan. My rule of thumb is times everything by 1.5. If you can afford to, triple the time. You know it’s not going to go smooth. For a transition – remember you’re doing double work – decommissioning one system while onboarding another – that requires people to do work while you’re occupied.

STORY TIME!

When we did a system switch, the vendor was in the middle of a major overhaul of the system and we had a month to onboard and get people going. The onboarding and late adoption cost 40 hours overtime (including working on a holiday at 2.5 times pay) and something like 100 lieu hours. It would have been helpful to draw out the five-year plan (even if the contract was three years) and identify over the next five years, who’s doing what. Who’s job is it to be promoting this tool? What’s the communication plan for expressing the value of the tool? Who does that? You don’t have to set metrics to achieve – but you should expect early growth and adoption, then settling. What does that look like? Say you start with 15 courses using a tool, who supports that tool? What happens if they get sick? Leave the institution? Lay all that stuff out in writing. The person that gets sick or leaves might be you. Ambiguity at this point is a death screetch heard across the heavens. It kills buy-in and confidence in the long-term support of the thing. If it’s only a short-term solution, that’s fine, make sure folks know so that they aren’t envisioning a long-term solution on something that is going away next week.

The next time the team negotiating the contract (this time for web conferencing) took all the time and left us a month to implement and switch. We did it, but the money saved was eaten up by overtime and lieu time. I swore I would never do that again. The very next time they gave us less…. and it ended up costing more. So now, I know when contracts are up and I’m asking a year (or more) in advance things like “are we renewing?” Of course, I have bosses that ask me about this sort of stuff now, and I have some influence… but not everyone is so lucky. To that end, sometimes there are things you cannot control. Be honest with your users about where the issue is – even if it’s with you. If you’re within six months of the end of the contract and folks are talking about pulling the plug, make sure you’re getting extra people to manage the transition. I work with bona fide rockstars. As a group we can do pretty much everything in whatever ridiculous timeframe you can do. However, there’s a functional limit. As a lead, I know what our functional limit is, and it’s my job to make sure my bosses are aware of how close we are to functional limits.

Lastly, make sure your ebullient supporters are tamped down a bit. Let them know, you love their enthusiasm, but not everyone is on the same page. It can be offputting to have ardent followers of a tech solution be cheerleading in the face of skeptics. All that does is create a divisive atmosphere that doesn’t end up helping anyone.

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Is Everyone an Instructional Designer?

Posted on by Jon K.

This is a re-post of writing that appeared here: https://idigontario.ca/2018/10/28/is-everyone-an-instructional-designer/ as part of the 9x9x25 challenge. Admittedly, I’m not an Instructional Designer, but I am. Here’s the post:

Am I an instructional designer? I work in educational technology, talk to people about using tools and help people design better learning, but does that make me an instructional designer? Educational technology is a place that can often drive pedagogical change, and it’s strange how often it goes unacknowledged as an accomplice in converting people to better pedagogy. How often do you as an instructional designer have a conversation about a piece of technology that forces the person you’re working with to rethink what they’re doing, and how they’re doing it? It may not be the great revelatory exclamation of “Oh my, this is going to change my life!” – but sometimes drastically, sometimes subtly, a change is made.

EdTech forces change.

It’s change that is opted into, by selecting the tool or technology, but it is change nonetheless. I can hear the counter arguments; “that’s not change, it’s choice!” I’d counter, that it’s a choice to change. Often in the adoption of a new tool, you have an opportunity to make large scale changes; most people don’t do that, but they make a smaller, incremental change. Sometimes change stops there. Sometimes, it pushes further, changing assessment strategies, approaches to instruction, facilitation techniques. That’s where you (or I) are able to help.

My role has been traditionally to help people with the how of things; how to set up a gradebook in the LMS, how to use classroom response tools to do things in the classroom – and early on I realized that lots of people really were looking for how-to, but never thought much about the why they were doing things. Sometimes the answer to why was simply, “the department asked me to go online” – but the people who did think about the why ended up much more satisfied. Looking to help in a more productive way I’ve become somewhat annoying in consultations, asking things like “why are you doing this?” and “what do you hope to accomplish with this change?” Those questions are less about technical details, and more about design of learning. It’s been interesting to note how instructional design intersects with media development, technical support, systems administration and of course, teaching. Each of those intersections can be opportunities to talk about how that particular learning experience can be improved. Creating a video? Why, what can that help you accomplish? The questions open up a rich conversation filled with the proverbial box of chocolates. In some ways, that make me, a (looking at my work badge) Learning Technologies Analyst, an Instructional Designer.

It’s unfortunate, that I didn’t know that until six or seven years ago. Honestly, it would’ve made my early career make a lot more sense. So those of you who are working in educational technology, supporting the use of a tool and putting in tickets to bug vendors to fix things, you might be an Instructional Designer.

Jon Kruithof is a Learning Technologies Analyst at McMaster University

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Technology Has Missed Education During the Internet Age

Posted on by Jon K.

Holy crap! My entire life is a sham! The whole Web 2.0 thing we’ve been writing about for years, didn’t exist! OK snark over. I’d like to point out that this, very slanted to favour the current VC funded educational technology movement, written by a guy who could profit greatly from moving cash out of public education into his privately controlled hands (and we can talk for hours if that’s a good idea or not). I would’ve responded there, but TechCrunch requires you to sign in with your Facebook account, and that’s my personal life attached to that service, not my professional one. Oh well, the flame wars would’ve been epic. Here’s the first juicy quote…

Despite its importance, education seems to have been missed by the Internet revolution. When I walk down the hall of a middle school, not much seems to have changed since I was a student some 15 years ago.

OK, the halls won’t tell you anything. The halls are going to be the same. Although if you were there when students were in the halls you would notice the very common sight of a smartphone or even the odd tablet. But you’d actually have to look for that. However, if you look in the K-12 classroom, you’ll see a lot more instructors using different types of technology. The most interesting change will not be in the schools at all, but in the student’s home, where they connect to the school board LMS, or look up things to help them understand on the Internet at their teacher’s request. Some more advanced teachers (and you can look squarely at Google’s Teacher Academy and awards, Apple’s Certified Educator, Microsoft’s Teacher Academy to see evidence of the contrary). If that doesn’t really hold water for you, what about TeacherTube, EduBlogs or any of the other K-12 friendly sites that have existed since the mid-2000’s?

Luckily, that is changing. There are a growing number of entrepreneurs working to reshape education. Every year, thoughtful new solutions come online to solve a piece of the problem. Innovators are working hard to create students who can learn how to learn, who can think critically and who can lead.

Correct, things are changing. Entrepreneurs trying to reshape education is a real threat to education, much like how hypercapitalism is a threat to our sovereignty. Entrepreneurs will only seek to reinforce the common pedagogies – ignoring those who are working in collaborative or communal modalities. Capitalism likes behaviourist, didactic pedagogies as they’re easy to replicate in a software environment. Thoughtful solutions? No. Profit opportunities? Yes. And 99% of them fail. Look at the first EdTech boom (circa Web 2.0, or 2005) and how many of those companies have lasted? Very few.

But before we can talk about the future, let’s review the past…

Sure, but I don’t trust you to get it complete, right or even anywhere close to objective. Ignoring that just over half of the graphic deals with pre-industrial revolution, and ignores the Gutenberg Press; why do we need to know about pre-industrial revolution information, as education was a privilege of the rich – it could be argued up until the 1950’s but that’s an entirely different blog post – and a radically different thing? Oh, the cherry-picked examples (much like what I’m doing here) are problematic at best, misleading at worst. In between 1996 (when the White House offered 1 billion dollars for computers in schools) and 2006 (Khan Academy) nothing happened.

Except a whole lot happened. There’s this thing called the LMS that happened. Video taping lectures (a practice dating back to the 1970’s) and digitizing them on CD-Rom, then DVD, then on the Internet, happened. Several ePortfolio companies started. Oh yeah this thing called WordPress. What about Wikipedia? Yeah, nothing important there. Open Source software doesn’t really work in a venture capitalist world.

…and the current edtech landscape.

Misses so much that you’d hardly have time to write out what it misses.

Luckily, there are some great companies who are working to change this by focusing on helping parents give their children a solid educational foundation. The space is dominated by apps and gamification, which appeals to children’s natural curiosity and provides research-driven cognitive and non-cognitive activities to help facilitate development. On-demand app-based learning is a great supplement for families who cannot afford pre-K.

It’s not luck, it was a gap that is perceived by startups, and a few companies made a few apps that were decent for pre-K. I don’t know about pre-K efficacy, but I do want to question the idea that poor people are using apps because they can’t afford pre-K. I’d suspect that poor people aren’t using anything because they can’t afford the devices that apps run on, nor the monthy fees (if they exist). So the people using these apps are probably those who would be able to help educate their children, pre-K or no pre-K.

Also the space is dominated by apps because there’s no organization to sell enterprise level software to.

The common school was built for everyone. It was open to all races, classes and backgrounds. It taught a common curriculum to every student. It was designed to process thousands of students and get them to a base level of competency. It was the era of mass production’s answer to educating a mass of students to prepare them to enter the workforce.

While it was built for everyone, it most certainly was not open to all races (uhhh, segregation?) or classes (often the poor chose to send no one to school because the farm needed workers). This whitewashing of educational history needs to stop. Mass production didn’t start in the post-civil war era, it is commonly associated with Fordist principles, which coincide with the factory assembly line in 1910’s. Also, this whole passage glosses over the societal uses of school – socialization, networking, collaboration.. of course it does.

But the era of the assembly line is over. We are in an age of mass customization, fueled by technology. Seth Godin recently asked, “What is school for? If you’re not asking that, you’re wasting time and money.” We need to question the traditional approaches to education and embrace new modes of learning to help create the next generation of leaders.

To create the next generation of leaders? Leaders develop themselves. We don’t need to target leaders, we need to target the other 99%. Seth Godin sucks. You have to ask what is school for to understand what purpose it serves in society (hint, it’s not to create leaders), not to use time well or earn money. At least one thing is right here, mass customization is here, but if we’re just swapping UI interfaces over the old teaching methods, are we really improving things? I don’t think so.

Students are going to university because it is “the right thing to do,” often without a thought to the ROI on their education or the work opportunities after school. Only 19 percent of full-time college students graduate in four years, which dramatically increases the cost of their degree.

Why does education need to have a ROI? It’s not a business, it’s an education. The graduation in four years trope is problematic yes, but it’s mostly because students are working more than previously, just because of the cost of education, and can’t afford to not work. Part of that is the privatization of schools, part of that is the outsourcing of public funds into the hands of profit motivated companies, part of that is the rising costs of administration and part of it is the slowness of universities to adapt to a five year model rather than four. None of these problems can be fixed with an app.

Over the past several years we’ve seen the rise of the modern edtech industry. There have been massive investments in the space, and the success of these firms will dictate the future of the edtech landscape.

More successful exits (like Lynda) will help to propel the industry forward. Investments in the first generation of edtech have also made it difficult for the second generation of companies to attract investment, as investors have been watching this first cohort closely to gauge results.

You do know that Lynda started in the mid-90’s right? You know in that gap you illustrated between 1996 and 2006? It’s “exit”, to which I can only assume means the purchase of Lynda.com by LinkedIn as a value-add to users of LinkedIn, which hasn’t worked out quite so good for them. If you believe that the purchase was meant to prop up the value of LinkedIn’s stock, like some do, then really it’s not about education at all, but finance.

 

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