Who You Calling A Jesse?

The Ontario Premier made his speech the other day that gave a big nod to the need for a stronger education system (no mention of the money to do it btw) but along with nod came some silly goals that demonstrate a clear misunderstanding with the state of higher education in Ontario. The globecampus.ca blog outlines some issues but I think it misses the point, we need revolution in education not just more bums in seats.

Here’s my view of the world (simplified/generalize for effect):

• Universities are tooled to create more academics, other outcomes besides professional accreditation are unintentional.
• The government has given money to build buildings over the last 10 years – not lecture halls but buildings – and no money to maintain the buildings.
• Budget cuts have peeled away operating budget of departments over 10 years but the pressure to deliver more has seen staff being hired without the flexibility or ability to look at how things fit within the larger organization.
• Staff are better educated than in the past and in many cases more skilled than the academics yet are seen as second class citizens within the organization.
• Most academics want to teach, do research, and focus on their vocation – they do not want to recruit, do marketing or communications, manage staff outside of their research group, or be a department chair, associate dean, or dean.
• Research funds rarely contribute to the well being of the institution or teaching. Heck they likely don’t pay for the power consumption of the toys they buy.
• Academic time and process rewards mediocracy and we all know mediocre products are crap (I say this while looking at my UW degree).
• Students are paying way too much in tuition and have earned the right to view higher education as a service not an earned place that expects, requires, and rewards hard work (not with a job but with that little warm feeling you get, currently most students think only about jobs).
• Like all of the publicly funded jobs, the leaders are gone or in the process of being chased out. As we head out of the recession a new exodus of the employable from public service will most certainly occur.

To tackle these things takes breaking out of the mediocre and into some pretty crazy thinking. We need to take risks, experiment, and challenge the establishment that is almost dysfunctional outside a few pockets of brilliance. What the Ontario government is offering is more of the same—rhetoric, promises, and likely funds earmarked and the established system not a revolution.

Of course that isn’t for the government to dictate. We need to figure this out and we need the leaders within higher education that are willing to do so. I see glimpses of it but I fear we won’t really go for it as there is little appetite or motivation to break out of the crisis management culture and throw away status quo. However, if I was king of higher education this is what I would try:

• Remove administrative or managerial positions that are just appointments of academics—make them apply against other professionals
• Create a product management office, force them on the world with a mandate to train people to think about their products and projects.
• Put post-docs in the classroom, formalize a new class of research focused academics which they are associated with and require them to ship a new product or service every 2-3 years
• Create a hybrid of distance education and intense campus education along with co-op
• Move staff from the silos of departments to special team pools that can charge out for services and rotate throughout campus (modern take on secretarial pools)—that way you can rally on time sensitive pushes and build expertise along with campus wide perspective
• Service Level Agreements
• More programs and services to students that are not related directly to academics but tied more to the local community (build more VeloCities).

Could be all crazy ideas but I would like to try at least one or two of them ;) We need to think differently about higher education and how we function institutionally. If we continue down the cut backs, hand outs, and status quo we will surely self destruct within a generation.

Disclaimer: I would say this openly on campus and I am pretty sure it may offend some but these are thoughts being thrown out there. We need to start thinking and trying things.

Over the past week we tried something different at VeloCity – we opened up the term not with speakers but instead engaged the students in a serious of brainstorming evenings followed by a weekend focused on starting their startup. Amongst the group discussions, team formation, development, and business planning have been a number of local entrepreneurs that have wandered around the residence talking to students and offering some insights—at least one mentor really enjoyed the experience.

The goal for the week evolved a bit but what I wanted to do is give all 65 students at the residence an opportunity to participate early on by challenging them to have a pitch and a demo by Sunday night. Keeping in mind that most (if not all) of the students here have never had an opportunity to work towards building a business with their peers.

The result? About 50 of the 65 students at VeloCity participated this weekend in fleshing out some ideas and most of the teams actually built a usable application. One of them, the room booking application, will be used at VeloCity starting this week!

At the moment I am a bit tired from the 80+ hour work week to write a big post but I can confidently say that we have exceeded out goals for this week and moved VeloCity clearly away from simply a space for innovation to a community that is actually doing something.

Over on the VeloCity blog is a request for support from students at U of Waterloo for what we are calling a Centre for Student Innovation. The idea is to provide an office somewhere on campus that is more accessible to students that we could offer things like co-working, office hours for off campus entrepreneur resource/mentors, and find out more about the amazing entrepreneurial community here in Waterloo. Sorta like a VeloCity club office of sorts.

What we need are email from U of Waterloo students(to velocity at uwaterloo.ca) in support of this idea. It seems a bit crazy to think we need that but we really do as there are a lot of good groups on campus competing for very limited office space. I think VeloCity has the best idea but I am biased. It would be great (and easier) if a few really successful entrepreneurial UW Alumni wanted to maybe donate some resources to expand or build something for VeloCity, any out there reading my blog?? ;)

Until those investors arrive, we do need those emails to make that happen. Please spread the word, retweet, make a facebook group in support!

On the way home yesterday I wrote this post in my head about dozen times. Lots buzzing around after some great discussions and some late nights in Milwaukee. HighEdWeb is by far the best conference focused on web technology, strategy, and networking in higher education. It isn’t because of the speakers (although some were simply amazing), it is because it brings together people from the most diverse collection of schools from across North America all with similar problems but different solutions.

Messages I kept hearing:

• Web teams in some schools are already starting to evolve as they grow while other schools still have layers of committees (Web Task Force – WTF – is my favorite) duplicating work and removing accountability. Not many teams of one left out there.
• Usability testing is required, it is not an option. I would slide towards more of ‘usability monitoring’ along with iterative improvements is the way to go. Not many schools are there yet but enough are going there to see a trend starting.
• Engaging your audience using Web 2.0 tools with Web 1.0 thinking doesn’t work. You probably don’t know you are doing it.
• CMS deployments solve one problem, create many others that aren’t as bad as the original problem. No surprise here.
• Problems or challenges: budgets are being slashed, recruitment is getting scary, web initiatives are underfunded even though they could have a big ROI.

There were some extremely entertaining moments around the keynote from the second day. The presenter was well out of touch with the audience, slides were poorly designed and outdated, and his content was poorly delivered. He got mobbed on twitter (and isn’t on twitter himself even though his topic was on using the web to engage your audience) with the outside audience reacting in a funny way. The backchannel was rough on him but honestly if I did that I would expect the same reaction.

As for my presentation, I think it went ok, people seemed to appreciate it. I got totally nervous given how packed the room was though. I am sure they noticed but nothing nasty on twitter ;) In retrospect, I tried to cover too much in a 45 min slot. I could have easily broken it in half and I think people would have got just as much out of it. Project Management is a workshop, a lighter overview is a presentation. Maybe they will let me do that next time. Really looking forward to HighEdWeb2010 or 101010. My slides are here:

I have posted enough about what is broken… Not everything is. Heck UW is in great shape compared to other schools in Ontario. So what works? I currently work in a great example of what works at UW—despite the natural aversion to change in some areas we embrace risks that challenge our assumptions on how things work. What are some of the good projects in the time since I have been working at UW that I know of:

• VeloCity (but I am biased)
• Living and learning programs in housing
• Special Projects Group in IST even existing (a project team tasked to build stuff in the age of ‘just buy it’)
• Institute for Quantum computing. Before Perimeter was here, IQC has been pushing quantum physics from theory to practice.
• The Daily Bulletin – a blog like thing that has been online since before the internet (there was a gopher presence)
• Engineers without Borders started at UW
• The Warriors football team got their own field even though everyone seems to like basketball more—but you can’t share a home field with another team.
• The Research and Technology Park and its growth—it is the place to be if you want to connect to what is really going on in the Waterloo tech space. This one is the biggest in my mind.
• Canada 3.0 – ambitious, out of place, unexpected, brilliant

There are countless other projects, big and small, that have been exciting to know about or participate in. All of them show that even in the face of a challenging culture that is found all across higher education, UW finds a way to make cool stuff happen.

I am not going to drop the ‘we can do better’ position but I do need to celebrate some successes every once in a while.

The new UW logo continues to create a stir with the request for feedback on the new logo and a couple alternatives. Pretty much immediately after the request went out UW Opinion was lit up with a range of colourful commentary, some useful suggestions, and some posts that are way out to lunch.

With regards to the new logos I don’t have much to offer about any specific design but I still think the staff at UW could do way better. I don’t think they will though as the process is broken (something I mentioned in my post back in July). A post by Sanjay on UW Opinion touches on it as well.

I think a big part of the problem with the logo boils down to an organizational cultural one that speaks to how people value art, communications, and design in this community. Over the years working at UW I have had a chance to work with many talented designers that have been treated as contract staff that are to simply create exactly what they are told. They aren’t seen as authoritative talent that was hired to handle ‘how things look.’

Usually what happens to the designer is they are forced to use bad photos, odd fonts, colours, and layouts as dictated by the client when they know they don’t work together. What it comes down to in design consultant terms, staff groups at UW are the nightmare client that you can’t get away from because it is your full-time job. They aren’t allowed to do what they are hired to do…. and yes, I said staff groups at UW are nightmare clients. I have been on both sides of it and I don’t think people do it intentionally but I do think people in general do not value the skills and expertise of others—particularly design talent.

It is likely that a lot of other higher ed institutions suffer from this organizational culture issue.

What I would ask from the leadership in higher ed in general is to let professionals do their jobs, don’t let them step outside their roles and step on the jobs of others, and understand good design can not be done on the cheap. Otherwise you will have burned out staff that feel overworked and under appreciated—the type of people that shut off and loose the passion for their work.

I should add… a lot innovation, personal growth, and good experience comes when people step outside their defined roles. My point is that people should be challenged to step outside their roles in a more strategic way. It should not just be normal that an admin assistant takes on a co-ordinator role for the admin assistant pay or worse take on the role of a co-ordinator that is already trying to fulfill that role.

Starting in September is the first full term that Virginia and I will be able to guide how things work at VeloCity. I am really excited to change things up a little and offer some events that I think are more inline with what the outside-the-uni startup community is use to seeing.

Some things we are keeping:

• Startup conference on the first Saturday of the term. We are calling it VeloCity 101.
• Bringing in speakers when they are available to offer some insights on experiences.
• Working with community partners to help enhance the overall experience and resources available to students at VeloCity.

Some things that are sort of new:

• More things that involve whiteboards and building ideas into products.
  
  • A regular schedule: Alternating Monday nights with Tuesday mornings and offering a brainstorming/social/discussion on the Monday night and a breakfast networking/talk event on Tuesday.
  • The first Saturday conference will try and reduce the lectures and engage in conversation.
• Invite the larger community to participate and getting the students in VeloCity to participate in the community events.
  
  • This means demos, talks, etc.

…and so far that is all we have. We will need to react to the needs of the group but my goal this term is to have 100% of the students in the residence actively engaged in the discussion and over 66% building something… even if it is simply a lemonade stand in the SLC.

I had some fun with the Spring term even though we were still trying to find our bearings jumping into a program that is moving so quickly but I am really looking forward to the fall term.

The Canada 3.0 started today in Stratford Ontario (45km west into farm fields from Waterloo) and surpassed a lot of people’s expectations I think. The morning had the typical political talk you would expect when government folks are given a microphone along with the University of Waterloo making it clear it is committed to the Stratford campus and all the potential developing such a campus may hold. What followed was a day of great conversation about communities, what to do to foster entrepreneurial talent, mobile technology, and more.

It was high level discussion mostly but it was honest discussion focused not on how great Canada is but where Canada needs work. Have a look at the twitter stream under the #can30 hash tag for some great bits of information. Day 2 promises to be more interactive with work groups tackling some of the issues presented today.

I spent a lot of they at the VeloCity booth talking to people that are interested in the idea and colleagues at other schools that are a bit envious that Waterloo has such a residence. I will be around for day 2, stop by the booth and say hi!

Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the regional Higher Ed Web Conference that was held at Cornell University over the past two days. What a great conference put together by Jason Woodward and his team at Cornell. The speakers started off yesterday with a heavy focus on how to get the user involved in your web project from user testing to engaging folks through social media story telling.

Today we moved into an actual project aimed at a particular set of users at Cornell, into project management (my presentation), and off into the high level thinking about the future of higher ed with Mark Greenfield. My head is swimming with ideas and issues but even more focused on the purpose of the web in higher ed.

My presentation slides are here, thanks everyone for the great feedback and I look forward to continuing many of the conversations online and maybe even at the big Higher Ed Web conference in Milwaukee in the Fall:

Shortly after I started working in the Higher Education web space (2001) I came across the brilliant post by Jeffrey Zeldman on A List Apart that lead down all sorts of paths towards web standards and accessibility. I wasn’t alone. I think many web folks that were dealing with the internet bubble bursting were inspired by Zeldman’s call to arms to change things and many had the time to explore the possibilities. I did what I could in my position to influence the University of Waterloo web space and in 2004 we had a XHTML/CSS layout that was clean and accessible which was finally let loose on campus in early 2005.

Things changed on campus and I spent more time on usability testing and meeting with the few students that relied on adaptive technology. I wasn’t put off by the fact only two people might notice the enhancements as I knew UW was doing the right thing by fixing things. However, all of the applications students and staff rely upon were not going to be fixed or changed with even the course management system saying it was section 508 compliant but that version was even less usable than the main user interface. A problem that I have observed is that accessibility laws or regulations seem to force people under the covers in the HTML to make things work in screen readers (sometimes) but people ignored how usable the content or the application actually is.

It gets stranger by the day, developers demand unit tests they can meet to make the app accessible but there aren’t any… I don’t think. Laws and guidelines just compound the problem by giving people a false sense of compliance. In the case of learning environments most aren’t even all that usable but golly gee they are 508 compliant. It starts to drain hope.

Blame technology or developers?

A developer most certainly should make browser based apps (HTML/JavaScript/CSS apps) ‘professional’ grade by using semantic HTML, unobtrusive JavaScript, and sensible colour contrasts. That checks off a lot boxes in terms of Search Engine Optimization, re-usable code, dealing with rendering fun, and accessibility. There are different ideas of what it takes to make a web app or page accessible however, and I am not sure a developer should kill a load of time on certain things (that change with the project) like zoomable layouts—especially when browsers are implementing features that make that time wasted.

I am not sure that is inline with that Derek brings up in his post When is the right time for accessibility? as I think some (or a lot) of the things that are generally seen as making HTML as ‘accessible’ really should be the responsibility of a different team of developers (mainly those that make web browsers). I don’t disagree with the strategy of implementing accessibility later based on need and I think Derek’s post offers a bit of an olive branch to developers. You shouldn’t be expected to be all that accessible until you actually know that (a) people will use your product and (b) knowing how people will use your product.

What is my problem?

Honestly I don’t know. Call it a long winter, annoying problems repeating themselves for years, and new experts making the same mistakes.

I started this post sometime after I saw the small torrent of comments about a JavaScript framework which was summed up in Drew’s post The Cost of Accessibility. Drew is on that fence of innovation needs to take into account the reality of the web browser right now and I am not sure I agree.

At the same time I got into a few insane conversations about making the new job system for co-op on campus accessible and IE6 isn’t dead (like we had hoped) for an important 5% of our user base. Our development process makes it insanely difficult to spend time testing, fixing, and tweaking for accessibility (application is hiding behind a VPN and has a few other features that make it hard to access outside of our network). We use jQuery wisely, CSS, and HTML to the browser. AJAX is sprinkled in parts but nothing should depend on it. For a first version that isn’t really ready for user testing it has some good fundamentals but someone pulled the ‘yes but you are missing x’ and I just got deflated.

The problem, in my mind, goes back to the way people think about accessibility. The whole issue is an Art not a Science and certainly not engineering. Engineers have left us with this problem, with HTML, a stateless browser, and a crippled feature set that forces hacks, short cuts, etc. They are doing their part, slowly. Code artists like Derek Featherstone and Drew McLellan help spread the word and lower the barriers through simplified approaches and keeping the dialogue going.

HTML 5 gives me hope even if the Engineers aren’t too quick to drop it in our browsers! I am not really cynical ;)

With the economy slowing (or grinding to a halt) mixed with credit being hard to find, higher education institutions might be facing a perfect storm that could shake poorly run institutions to the ground. Students with parents that have the money to pay for their education might be hard pressed to do so, jobs to pay for tuition might be harder to find, loans outside of state assistance might dry up, money for research might be cut, and public along with private donations will likely be even harder to get. This all spells trouble for organizations that wish to maintain a status quo. For those looking to fix some big issues the climate could be ideal.

What are the biggest issues facing higher ed both with regards to the organizational structure and the adoption of technology? My list is short (it is hard to keep short):

1. higher education has an identity crisis – a religious battle is going on internally between the ‘leave me alone, things are fine’ crowd and the ‘wow this is messed up, why are we here?’ crowd
2. the culture has created processes that make change slow and ineffective make sure that any change is painful
3. young talent is defeated by a management class that doesn’t know what management is (and I blame academics for that)

I have already posted my thoughts on how to deal with inefficient committees and the fun that surrounds item 2 and some of 3 above. The first is the illness with the following points the symptoms… I think. I want to explore my thoughts as to why we (higher education) are here and what we can do about it (besides better meetings, time on task tracking, etc). This is a series of blog posts as I don’t want to post some rant in big essay form.

Next post: What are research, educational, and training activities in Higher ed?

Karlyn Morissette has set her ’biggest problem in Higher Education’ on the total inefficacy of higher education institution and how that is enshrined in the culture. I agree. From my viewpoint, Staff and Faculty in Higher Education spend far too much time in committees that have no mandate or authority (or even an agenda or a chair). The "building of consensus" for every little thing paralyzes progress and forces what I see as a continuous pursuit towards mediocrity.

Examples given in Karlyn’s post we see every day in higher ed (committees, endless pursuit of a pet project). The problem gets a lot worse when you look at some of the typical decision making processes that have layers of committees that stretch over months with 12 or so people on each of them. In the case of grad admissions or research funding, committees don’t make decisions but instead push an application up to another committee to consider. Finally someone might make a decision but usually that some one is in no position to make a proper decision as they have no idea what they are deciding on. They just sign the paper and move on.

Time is money except in Academia where time builds authority

To me this boils down to a lack of appreciation for people’s time (at least in Canada, specifically Ontario). It is understandable from the academic viewpoint, you have been in school all your life. Getting a phd is a long process and that process works. An academic’s time has little value over simply having their presence on campus as their entire purpose is to think and do research. Their work hours are open, this is their life. Unless the committees get in the way of their research or teaching there is no real cost.

However, staff time is different. At a guess, historically higher ed (being run by academics) hired clerical staff for clerical tasks. They weren’t required to make decisions as the academics were in charge. With 1000 or so students that might have made sense. As institutions grew they hired more professional staff. Professional staff hired more professional staff to help manage the business of the institution. These professionals are often more skilled and necessary to ensure a level of service. However, academics ensured the committee processes remained in place and that they had final say. This does nothing to empower staff and the skilled professionals that couldn’t accept that left higher ed in the 80’s (at Waterloo anyway). Larger, older institutions seemed to simply professionalize phd/academic roles which laid down the academic committee process that leaves decisions with academic chairs and Deans.

Note: The evolution of academia in North America and beyond is a thesis topic methinks… so my abridged assumptions shall end here ;)

The culture was enshrined over the 1990’s and the insane cut backs that higher education had to deal with. New staff didn’t come in, culture took over. I would assume that the reality of ‘it is easier to beg forgiveness’ always has been present but I found when I started working in Higher Ed that it was the only way to get anything new done. Sadly that approach is wrong (most of the time). It is wrong because sure you change things but you don’t have lasting change. You simply embarrass other people and get shut out of any future process. On the rare occasion you succeed in sparking lasting change but you have still marginalized yourself and others to get there. That isn’t a good way to do things.

Identify value, document process, and stop doing things that don’t need to get done

In order to have lasting change you need to participate in the process, ask questions, understand why people fear change, and give them a big nudge in the right direction. Lead by example, act professional, and be kind to those that will attack you for what you doing. It isn’t easy but in the medium term you will see change. After 8 years working in Higher Education I am convinced that no amount of positive change is worth treating people poorly. If someone makes it impossible to do anything then bulldoze them but I doubt you will have to fight the bully if you build support by other means.

There are a few simple things you can do that borrow from the world of Project Management, Drucker, Roberts Rules, and others:

• Ensure a committee meeting always has an agenda
• Identify the Chair, support the Chair in keeping the meeting on track
• Identify who makes decisions and what is required in order to have a decision made
• Identify who will carry out the decisions
• Do not take things personally even in the face of obvious personal attacks
• Track your time on task, report it to your manager on a weekly basis
• If you are working on a project, get agreement on what ‘finished’ means (open ended projects are probably the worst specific waste in higher ed)
• Identify what you expect to get out of the project
• Figure out what doesn’t need to get done and stop doing it

All these things help identify value in what you are others that are working with you are doing. That value will help make people feel better. If they feel better about what they are doing they are more likely to take risks on the current project or one in the future.

Organizational waste, inefficiencies, etc will not be fixed over night in higher education. But making an effort now (especially in the face of cuts) will help in the future.