Driving Higher Ed Institutions to an Enterprise Approach

By Barbara Ross

Since its introduction in the 1990s, e-learning has grown rapidly at post-secondary institutions around the world. At leading colleges and universities, nearly all students take at least one course with a technology-supported component. As e-learning enters its second decade, many institutions find themselves at a critical juncture. With the use of course management systems continuing to expand, and course, program, and institution-level activities dependent on technology for success, many institutions have outgrown their current approaches to e-learning.

For many institutions, linear expansion of e-learning—adding a program, a person, or a larger server to an existing model—cannot scale to meet current needs or future demands. Moving e-learning to an enterprise level requires institutions to re-think the way they currently support technology-enhanced instruction. Adopting an enterprise approach to e-learning results in systems and processes that are powerful, reliable, and, most of all, flexible enough to support all stakeholders and provide benefits across the institution.

Are you outgrowing your current approach to e-learning?

With the expansion of course management systems, many institutions are pushing the boundaries of their e-learning systems to accomplish their goals. The following are common signs that you may be outgrowing your current approach to e-learning:

Scope of e-learning activity is consistently underestimated. Many members of your administration would be surprised to discover how much teaching activity occurs online—and how many faculty members and students feel the impact of e-learning on a daily basis. It’s often difficult to ensure access to funds necessary to support continued growth while ensuring delivery of consistently high-quality service.

It’s difficult to maintain quality of service. You need to replace or add to your system servers frequently because you can’t keep up with the growth of system usage. Students are dependent on the system to get their work done, and have no tolerance for variations in availability or performance.

Multiple e-learning systems are in use. Some of your professional schools or even individual departments maintain their own e-learning systems because they want to emphasize their own brand and maintain administrative control, even though it would be more cost-effective to centralize.

Inefficient content creation and usage persists. You suspect that certain types of core content are recreated many times, wasting time and storage space. It’s taking you and your faculty members longer than it should to assemble course materials. More important, your already overtaxed system is being unnecessarily strained, compromising service levels and adding to system overhead and expense.

There’s no clear policy on the security of learning data. The university priority on data security has gone way up, but there still isn’t an effective policy about the security of learning system data—or at least not one that has been implemented fully.

Learning outcomes fail to be evaluated. Your institution is unclear about what students are doing in the online learning environment. There’s no process to proactively assess the impact e-learning is having on educational outcomes, making it difficult to substantiate the value that e-learning is contributing to your institution.

If your institution is experiencing one or more of these symptoms, you should start the transition to enterprise e-learning. Systems and processes that may have worked well during early periods of limited student and faculty usage may not be appropriate to meet the demands of a full-campus e-learning implementation. Even if you predict you won’t run into serious problems for another two years, you need to start planning the transition now in order to have your new systems and processes in place by the time you need them. If your institution fails to create the infrastructure to handle the inevitable growth, it will be much more difficult and disruptive to meet institutional needs in the future.

How is an enterprise approach different?

An enterprise approach to e-learning is developed to respond to the fact that it has an impact on the teaching and learning experience of every instructor and student throughout the university. The symptoms explored above are generally the result of rapid growth of e-learning without formulating a strategy to address the following four critical components in achieving success.

Institution-wide strategy and participation

The first component required is a commitment from senior administrators to use e-learning as a means of achieving the university’s strategic goals. But commitment from senior administrators alone isn’t enough. Institutions also need to expand the circle of influence to achieve much greater cross-functional participation. Balancing the autonomy and collaboration between the diverse academic and administrative constituents will be critical to achieving success in implementing an enterprise-wide e-learning strategy.

Mission-critical service level

The student's and faculty's demands and expectations of technology heighten and change as technology becomes an increasingly vital part of their daily activities. In a model that expects every student and instructor to be served by e-learning technology, the standards for reliability, up-time, and user support will skyrocket. Institutions must seriously evaluate what level of service is required at their institution, and design their technology solutions and processes in order to meet those higher standards.

Institution-level content strategy

An enterprise approach acknowledges that the development of electronic academic content is almost always the largest investment in e-learning. To minimize expenses of academic content creation, institutions must proactively define mechanisms for content development, sharing, and reuse, as well as implement technology solutions that improve and streamline these tasks.

Proactive measurement of learning effectiveness

With increasing amounts of e-learning activity comes detailed quantitative data about student activity during the learning process. Enterprise approaches capitalize on this new asset by developing institutional processes for a regular cycle of measurement, analysis, and change that are designed to continuously improve educational quality.

How can you encourage institution-wide strategy and participation?

Enterprise e-learning begins with a strategic commitment to support technology-enabled instruction across an entire institution: the academic enterprise. At a high level, academic officials recognize, accept, and promote e-learning as critical to institutional goals pertaining to academic achievement, student service, revenue enhancement, cost avoidance, or competitive differentiation. E-learning is deemed to be a mission-critical activity, complete with executive leadership and funding that reflects its importance to the success of the institution.

Attaining a single, seamless e-learning experience for both students and faculty requires a strategy of close integration among the academic departments or schools and administrative units. A smart enterprise approach balances autonomy and coordination in order to achieve cooperation from the many units affected by the choice and implementation of the e-learning system. As the importance and breadth of e-learning initiatives grow, leaders must bring new influential players and constituents to the table in order to be successful.

Implications

Implementing an enterprise approach requires your institution to view e-learning as more than the province of the academic computing office. The e-learning environment should be steered by representatives from various groups across the institution, with executive-level guidance and the authority to make and fund e-learning decisions with an institution-wide impact.

As the criticality of e-learning becomes more apparent across the campus, dialogue opens up between the instructional technology unit and other campus entities, such as registration and records, library services, and assessment and institutional research. The systems used by each of these units—e-learning, student information systems, and library systems, to name a few—must be integrated for easy, cross-functional data transfer. Expertise among those who run those mission-critical systems must be leveraged and shared. Moreover, all future technology decisions in each unit should be made in consultation with the other units to ensure that processes and technologies continue to operate effectively across entities.

Institutions that implement effective enterprise e-learning solutions also track metrics about the usage of the system. Any enterprise approach requires regular reporting and evaluation of the volume of usage by faculty and students, as well as analytics about the types of activities and instructional modes preferred by users. These metrics are the basis for planning to meet service levels and to justify supporting the investment in e-learning.

Enterprise approaches rely on building the e-learning capacity on one core system to serve the whole university. This often requires certain campuses or schools to relinquish their own separate e-learning system. However, it’s important for these organizations to be able to preserve their unique characteristics and brands for the benefit of the students’ learning experiences. While these schools might cease to run their own servers, they should not lose specific online branding or programmatic control. Often, academic enterprise technology can serve to ameliorate relationships between the central IT unit and their diverse customers by enabling autonomy and support to more peacefully co-exist.

Getting started

For many institutions, committing to an enterprise-level approach begins with an accurate inventory of current e-learning volume, practices, and dependencies. Some post-secondary institutions begin with a strategic approach to online courses focused on revenue generation, cost reduction, or quality goals. However, for many other colleges and universities, e-learning has been “an experiment that succeeded,” growing without clear planning or high level administrative support. Removing the myths and establishing the facts can provide the critical boost required to gain executive commitment and achieve cross-campus communication.

How can you achieve mission-critical service levels?

When e-learning becomes vital to an institution’s teaching and learning strategy, the enabling systems and processes must be considered mission-critical. Hardware and software for e-learning should support a level of service on par with other major campus systems, such as student information systems. A system that affects all students and faculty and has a direct impact an institution’s primary purpose—instruction—requires 100 percent system up-time, good system performance (regardless of the number of concurrent users or network traffic), timely support services for students and faculty, and high data security.

Institutions committed to enterprise e-learning establish service-centered policies and processes, starting with a service level agreement, that enumerate obligations to users regarding system uptime, minimum performance at peak loads, backup and disaster recovery procedures, and help desk availability. The service level agreement will then guide the staffing plan and choice of an enterprise e-learning system.

One key component to achieving desired service levels will be to proactively plan for the expected growth, rather than reacting to growth after it has occurred. A pre-requisite to this will be projecting system usage and load over the next few years, given increasing numbers of users, increased system usage per user, and the ever-growing expectations of incoming students. This planning process will require bi-directional communication among all stakeholders.

Implications

An enterprise approach is characterized by formalized policies and procedures concerning maintenance and performance tuning, monitoring, and fail-over and back-up scenarios. Proper tuning ensures responsiveness during peak load times. System and application monitoring provide an early warning system for possible threats to uptime and provide data needed for capacity planning. Robust fail-over capabilities protect against hardware or software failures and maximize up-time in the event of a malfunction. Thorough back-up and disaster recovery plans that are frequently tested ensure that even if there is an unexpected event, contingencies can be deployed.

Another core component of an enterprise level strategy is the deployment of system administration best practices, such as virus protection precautions and the use of separate production and test systems. Separate systems ensure that adequate testing can be accomplished prior to launching patches, updates, or changes to the production system.

With an enterprise approach, institutions have the ability to add computing power as necessary to support rapid growth. The e-learning system remains up even when a server fails, and most maintenance can occur without taking the system down or disrupting service for users.

In transitioning to an enterprise e-learning strategy, many universities need to change their support approaches in order to support faculty and students effectively. They may need existing staff to take on new support responsibilities, either in other parts of the IT organization or within individual departments or schools. Enterprise systems open up the possibilities for greater distribution of administrative duties. Taking a completely centralized approach to e-learning administration can be difficult to fund and support, whereas an entirely decentralized approach can ultimately become too inefficient. The structure of your administration will likely need to be modified in favor of a more distributed model.

Getting started

Often, enterprise-level deployments require a high degree of cross-departmental coordination in appropriately managing integrations with authentication, portal, student information, and library systems. The relationships between these units often exist in the pre-enterprise phase, but informally or as accommodations, rather than as part of a planned approach. Having academic technology representatives at the table as an equal partner when major system planning occurs is critical to the success of an enterprise e-learning strategy.

How can you implement an institution-level content strategy?

An enterprise e-learning strategy recognizes that electronic academic content is the largest investment in e-learning, and accordingly advocates policies and procedures to maximize the return-on-investment. To realize additional benefits from academic content, institutions must proactively define mechanisms for content development, sharing, and reuse—and implement technology solutions that improve and streamline these tasks.

Implications

Establishing clear intellectual property processes with faculty paves the way for the widest range of content reuse. Most reusable learning objects result from the development of fully online courses or degree programs. Often, these activities are funded by grants, release time, and so forth—when the intellectual property rights surrounding the content have been established in advance. Having a strategy to maximize the return-on-investment in the creation of exceptional online content is a critical element to an enterprise approach.

Some of the greatest ROI numbers in e-learning result from collaborations between institutions to offer educational programs in new ways. Content management strategies are critical to those initiatives because the creator of online content is almost never the only user or distributor of that content. However, this is a just one example of a general principle. Whenever a course delivers content that was created elsewhere, there’s an increased need for content management infrastructure.

Content sharing often occurs for distribution of content that’s important to university processes but that most people may not think of as learning objects. Examples of this type of content include learning style inventories, end-of-term surveys, guides on how to be an online learner, or the academic honesty policy. These resources often have only one current version; if this content isn’t managed properly, it will quickly become dated and create inconsistencies. Providing the infrastructure for managing and distributing such content objects can reinforce good online teaching principles and enhance student support.

Getting started

It’s easiest to share content when the intellectual property rights are established and understood. Enterprise content strategies frequently begin with a focus on distribution or reuse of content owned or licensed by the institution, including university-developed content, licensed materials, and repositories and test banks.

Clearly, there’s tremendous long-term potential for building learning object repositories that faculty can use to share content with each other. However, even without resolving all of the policy and strategy issues that are involved in such an endeavor, faculty have immediate needs for ad hoc content sharing to improve efficiency when working together. In an enterprise e-learning strategy, institutions aren’t just supporting the model of a single instructor handling all aspects of his or her individual course, but also the large multi-section courses that have multiple teaching assistants and instructors, team teaching of interdisciplinary classes, and so on. A content management infrastructure can greatly improve the efficiency of faculty and staff working together by enabling and restricting access to content in accordance with your organizational structure and roles.

How can you proactively measure e-learning’s effectiveness?

Enterprise e-learning is characterized by widespread usage among students and faculty. Such broad penetration gives institutions a new mechanism by which to assess student performance. Institutions have the ability to access and utilize detailed data that’s captured by the e-learning system about students’ learning activities and outcomes. This type of detailed quantitative data about how students behave during the learning process allows analysis to go deeper than evaluation of grade outcomes from traditional classrooms.

Data from an enterprise e-learning system, both on its own and when incorporated with data from other systems, provides a highly valuable input to formative and summative assessment activities. Teaching and learning can therefore be continuously improved through a cycle of measurement, analysis, and change, all of which is based on an assessment framework developed to effectively leverage the data collected by the academic enterprise system.

Implications

At institutions that engage in enterprise e-learning, the effectiveness of technology-enhanced learning is an issue of importance to the university as a whole, not just to the instructional design staff. This involves greater collaboration between the academic technologists who administer the e-learning platform and those responsible for departmental program management and review, academic assessment, and institutional research and effectiveness.

As part of an enterprise approach, institutions should develop a learning assessment framework to identify the ways in which student performance and activity data should be analyzed. Examining this data in light of other data sources, such as student records, may yield particular insights to improve teaching and learning and serve the institution’s overall quality goals. The questions that are answered with the data analysis are likely to be ones that respond to increasing accountability pressures, such as changing expectations of governments and accrediting bodies. The results of structured data analysis may also serve to ultimately enable the institution to improve its overall student outcomes. Some institutions may go a step further and invest in a data warehousing strategy for joint analysis of the learning system data with other data sources, such as student records.

Getting Started

It’s likely that longitudinal studies will ultimately be part of your strategy for measuring the effectiveness of e-learning at your institution, which requires capturing all relevant data as soon as possible. As you develop your analytical models, implement an enterprise e-learning solution that enables data collection and extraction from a wide spectrum of user activities. Even if you are unsure of the specific analyses you will need to conduct, the most extensive data collection will hold the highest potential for analysis in the future.

Bottom line

The move to deliver consistently higher levels of service and improved instructional outcomes via technology-supported education has become the norm among academic institutions. Whether driven internally by presidents, pro-vice chancellors, faculty and campus technology organizations, or externally by prospective students, competitors, and accrediting bodies, delivering e-learning through an enterprise approach requires the higher ed community to re-think our current systems and processes.

For most institutions, the transition to an enterprise approach will not happen overnight, but will require movement through a set of parallel stages that involve building a high-level vision and support, aligning stakeholder organizations, defining requirements and desired service levels, purchasing enabling e-learning technology, and measuring results for continuous improvement.

The rapid adoption of e-learning and its pivotal role in supporting institutional programs and goals has made the e-learning system an integral part of the academic enterprise, not something on the periphery of the institution’s mission. Institutions must take decisive steps toward developing a successful enterprise strategy that responds to growing student demands and expectations, provides a high level of service and support for all users, and drives the continual improvement of the learning environment.

Published: September 2004