Investing in technology

Is investment in educational technology justified? Yes, providing it supports the improvement of learning outcomes and is not just for its own sake. Technology should enable scale and eventually lower the per-unit cost of education. It also can improve access, help students learn better, and help faculty and institutions assess their effectiveness.

"Technology is only helpful if we know what we want to do," says Lombardi. "The role of technology is to help people figure out better ways of doing what it is they want to do. But if they don't know what they want to do, or if the technology just adds cost and no efficiencies or improvements, it will be gee-whiz value, but not real or lasting value."

"The appropriate use of technology can increase revenue by accessing new markets, improving efficiency and effectiveness of educational resources, and gather and analyze data," adds Kelsall. "This data can be used to reduce the cost of regulatory compliance. Increased revenue while improving operating efficiency results in improved education economics. Further, data gathered through technology can be analyzed to determine behaviors that improve learning outcomes."

Investment in technology can come from a variety of sources; government funding; endowments; higher tuition and fees based on the belief that the technology produces higher utility or quality; and new savings from the technology itself, which is rare. Some institutions have succeeded in reallocating savings from back-end technology services realized through efficiency. As the cost of hardware, software and some administrative services comes down, those savings can be re-invested in learning technology.

"Educational institutions have to do a better job of carving out and protecting funding in their annual budgets that will be used solely for strategic investments in learning," adds Allen. "Private industry does this, of course, and it's usually called R&D. Whether the college or university is public or private, strategic investment money needs to be taken off the top of the institution's budget at the beginning and before budgets are given to schools and departments to develop. Institutions have the ability, if they have the will, to do some investment of their own. That's a function of leadership.

An additional source of revenue for investing in technology is the development of partnering relationships between academic institutions and private industry. Care must be taken, however, in selecting strategic partners; the cultures of industry and academia are so different that "pooling" efforts, says Lendo, can become counter-productive.

"Vendors sell generic applications while universities and colleges want specific applications that help them differentiate their products," adds Lombardi. "Vendors often sell products that require high costs to implement, and institutions, while buying these products, do not believe the vendors care about the users. Vendors are interested in extracting high margins from very low-margin university and college businesses. This lack of convergence in business models makes for poor relationships."

"There has to be a willingness for both to work together on projects that will facilitate the provision of educational services, the delivery of curriculum and student learning," says Allen. "I think more attention needs to be given to the student life cycle and the particular needs of the student in each phase of that cycle that could be facilitated through the use of new technology. The technology industry can't do this in isolation from educational institutions. It has to be a true partnership."