The CUNY IT Conference has grown significantly since its inception five years ago, from a few hundred attendees at the first conference to well over a thousand this past Friday. Seemingly, every IT person from within CUNY attended, lol (did you ever notice that when “lol” is used, most often nothing funny has preceded it?).

The conference is an interesting convergence of the separate areas of IT at CUNY, with attendees ranging from registrars to systems administrators to instructional designers to, yikes, historians. I attended three panel discussions, in addition to the keynote address, and each event raised important questions about the state of information technology in higher education, generally, and at CUNY specifically. In anticipation of questions and discussion that I hope will come, I’m dividing reviews of each panel into their own posts below. My apologies for taking over the top of the blog, but there was a lot that I found interesting and thus a lot to share.

The first panel was a presentation of the work of the CUNY Online Baccalaureate Program. This was likely the most highly attended session at the conference, and also the most densely populated panel (I believe there were thirty-seven presenters limited to forty-five seconds each… or at least it seemed that way). The speed of the presentation and the minimum time allowed for questions made it difficult to come to any conclusions about the program. The presenters also, more than once, positioned their experiences as “one-hundred eighty degrees” different from one another concerning this pedagogical conundrum or that, so it seems that the faculty teaching in the program also haven’t yet reached any synthesized conclusions. That, I suppose, is to be expected from something so young and experimental. Each course in the program, which offers a degree in Communication and Culture, is taught entirely online through Blackboard and Learning Objects, Inc. extensions to it. While some of the faculty felt that Blackboard did a fine job of facilitating their classes, others felt stifled by the software and its proprietary logic, and have looked for outside solutions.

The short presentations combined with the Blackboard wall between the public and the program make it difficult for me to assess exactly how effective the online instruction is. The faculty do seem to feel as though they are teaching and reaching many of their students… this, it seems to me, is the most you can really hope for from a program that’s taught entirely online. Clearly, there are a lot of talented faculty involved in the program and a lot of resources invested, so it seems likely to me that a lot of good work is happening. Hopefully, we’ll hear more about the CUNY Online BA in the future.

No faculty member really wants to teach a course entirely online, but I do feel that this program allows students to complete a degree who, due to work and family commitments, might otherwise find it impossible. The program fits well within the CUNY mission of providing affordable, quality higher education for the diverse population of the city and, judging from what I saw, the instruction is rigorous and demanding. In this case, technology is entirely responsible for making it possible.

The most astounding factoid to come out of this session was the claim made, privately to me, that there hasn’t been a single instance where a student has needed technical aid, because the program orientation covered every possible potential problem. I have a hard time believing this, but if it’s true, that must have been the Best Orientation Ever.

The keynote at the CUNY IT Conference was an enjoyable presentation from Chuck Dziuban, the Principal Investigator of the Distributed Learning Impact Evaluation and Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Central Florida. Dziuban theorizes the emergence of new teaching technologies, and has a boatload of data to back up his conclusions. As a historian who fancies himself rigid, I’m no great fan of explaining historical developments through the concept of “generations,” though I have to admit I found Dziuban’s research that broke down satisfaction with online learning practices by age intriguing. The most interesting conclusion, to me, was that the younger a student, the less likely they are to be satisfied with what their faculty are doing in online courses. Since most college faculty are older, this very fact calls into question the ways that faculty evaluate their own online teaching, and illuminates the challenge we have going forward in designing online teaching tools that intimately connect with students. We keep getting older, while the students stay the same age. To download Dziuban’s Powerpoint, chock-full-of-stats, click here.

Chuck Dziuban did a fine job, but as theory values the abstract over the concrete, his talk provoked thought more than it suggested actual, real uses of technology in the classroom. The second panel session I attended was a group of CUNY historians who designed online teaching modules as part of the “Investigating US History” project. The modules consist of scalable research projects that employ primary sources available via the Web. Students are directed to examine a series of historical documents—say, lithographs and advertisements related to the slave trade, or audio tapes of Lyndon Johnson’s conversations in the White House– and then to write responses, on a course Blackboard site, to the prompts of faculty members.

The historians involved in the project are top-notch, and both the scholarship directing the modules and the design of the site are strong. I was struck, however, by how methodologically similar the pedagogic process of these modules was to the ways in which primary sources have been mobilized in the teaching of history for years. The Web has drastically improved access to primary sources, and the success of these modules lies in how faculty have framed the sources for students and directed their exploration. The site harnesses the Web’s speed and ease of information exchange for high-level history teaching. In this case, new technologies have expanded what can be done in the classroom without significantly altering the processes of teaching and learning.

It seems to me that the next generation of technological teaching tools—the products of Web 2.0, which enable increased interactivity– may pose a challenge to traditional pedagogies. While I haven’t seen inside the Blackboard sites to the fruits of the “Investigating History” modules, they seem to work on the same tracks that the teaching of history has for some time. That is, a scholar/teacher provides materials and background for students to work through with guidance; as students do, they learn about the past and about participating in the historical project. These are sound pedagogical goals for any history course.

In other disciplines, blogs and wikis have upended traditional teaching methods and goals by empowering students with more accessible means to produce and disseminate knowledge. In the teaching of history, such empowering elements of the Web have been employed in this project to reinforce and strengthen one traditional model (while also enabling more robust discussions of visual culture due to the increased accessibility of images). Historians like those who presented at the conference sense that the future of teaching history lie in using technology to more vividly open up the worlds of the past to their students. It will be interesting to see if new technologies continue to reinforce traditional methods of teaching history, or if they challenge those methods. One example of how they might is here.

Finally, and fittingly, the last session I attended featured Famed Friend of the Institute James Groom, who offered his “Notes Towards an Open (Source) University.” Prof. Groom’s views have been well-represented on this blog, and though I urged him to rename his talk “Waging War on the Proprietary-Software University,” his diplomatic disposition clung to the more affirmative appellation. Groom’s presentation asked, in a way, why pay lots of dough for something mediocre when you can get something fantabulous for free? He presented and discussed a few cutting edge open source course management systems, showed how certain packages can be modified for use in the classroom, and asked the very important questions: why aren’t more folks exploring this stuff at a place like CUNY, and why is open source so underrepresented at this conference? The answer, it seems, was hinted at by one of the items raffled off at the close of the conference… Blackboard provided tee-shirts for the raffle! Drupal, WordPress, and Sakai ask not what they can do for you, but what you can do for (and with) them. Who knew the open source movement was so selfish?

(note: A few audience members were flabbergasted when the gentleman who followed James Groom, Florian Lengyel, Assistant Director for Research Computing at the CUNY Graduate Center, showed us that open source has recently become a more significant presence at the Graduate Center. See here.)