In her post Anne-Marie discusses how open source and higher education collaborations can be part of the solution to encourage innovations in HE and become less reliant on market based services. From the perspective of academic upper management questions I would consider are about cost, time, meeting the goals of the strategic plan and reputation. Cost savings would need to be part of my decision making around creating positions to adopt innovation and I would want to know the results I could expect from the investment in terms of meeting the goals of the strategic plan.
Sharing costs across higher education would be compelllng to administrative leadership in higher education as Anne-Marie mentioned in her post but I would need to know the details of this to base my decision on. ROI would be a top consideration when considering moving towards creating positions to innovate rather than purchase solutions.
I would need to understand how dedicating resources to innovating in digital learning environments and then sharing those innovations openly would contribute to the institutions strategic plan. Does it align with the goals the institution has laid out in their plan and how? Does it move us closer to our goals? Does the proposed change align with our explicit values?
Thirdly, what does the institution risk by not contributing to open source and collaborative innovation across the sector? In terms of the reputation of the leader and the reputation of the institution and what does the institution risk by not being part of collaborative efforts in terms of reputation?
Thanks for your thoughts on the administrative and cost perspective of innovating technology and solutions in higher education. I appreciated your notion of considering ROI and think this should be considered across all stakeholders. What is the ROI for the institution, the students, or the knowledge base in general? How do we decide on and implement a system that doesn’t burden our students with additional cost or privacy concerns?
The issue I considered was around supporting innovations within higher education institutions rather than purchasing market education technology products. In my original post I considered this from an administrators’ perspective and forwarded that ROI of investing in learning technology development would need to be understood.
This level of analysis likely does not rely on student data as it would be a higher elevation of consideration for the institution and sector impacts. The moral issues around capturing student data could be almost fully avoided in this lens. My understanding is these investments would be made to replace the reliance on market solutions within the institution and so, the data required would be less in the weeds of individual students and would instead be looking for large data point by answering the following questions:
• What innovations in digital technology are taking place at our institution now, during points of time after the investment and at the end of the agreed upon end reporting?
• How many classes and how many students are impacted by the technology solutions developed from the investment?
• How does the innovation replace market solutions?
• What is the reach of the innovations? If an innovation is developed for a particular class is it then replicable for other classes and disciplines and does it have application outside the institution for the community to utilize?
• What does the innovation create for public use?
• What has the institution financially saved by replacing market-based solutions with our innovations developed in-house and what have students saved?
• Were students engaging with the innovation as co-creators or as content consumers?
• Who adopts our innovations and how often and how much? Quantify the value.
• Who do we adopt from? How often and how much? Quantify the value.
• How do our innovations disrupt or make market solutions obsolete?
Many of these questions can be captured through survey rather than analytics, from faculty survey rather than individual students and from larger aggregates of data rather than individual data. While the data is important to justify the investment Anne-Marie Scott herself cautions that the costs over the long term where we fail to innovate and continue down a path of purchasing market-based applications over developing our own learning solutions reduces our overall capacity. From this, I would suggest that long time lines of data collection are required with this particular change where we are creating a 180 in an institution that has relied on market based technology solutions and will now be forging ahead with in house developments.