One thing I see a lot of in my job is that the central IT is frequently late to the party when it comes to procuring software services to provide to campus. This usually happens when departmental IT units across campus aquire licenses of new or trending software that does a superior job at fulfilling that college or department’s need over the centrally supported equivalent. Here are some examples
Example 1: Zoom over Blackboard Collaborate
Zoom has been used by various departments across campus for many years. Now there is a central effort to consolidate these licenses and provide the entire campus with a Zoom license pending the retirement of the Blackboard Collaborate service.
Why is central IT late to the party in this case?
First here is some context, Zoom provides a superior web conferencing experience in online synchronous classes, but it also provides the added benefit of web-conferencing outside of the Learning Management System. Unfortunately for Blackboard Collaborate, central IT cannot provide two web conferencing services to campus, and the Zoom campus-license costs significantly less than that of Collaborate. A side-by-side comparison of the features of Zoom and Collaborate will show that these two software services work just about equally well, but Zoom is superior with how it handles sharing video. This seems to be the deciding feature in this case.
So, campus departments have voted with their dollars and invested in Zoom, and that explains why Central IT is late to this party.
We could not have known that 1) Zoom would be the industry leader for web-conferencing and 2)that it would be cheaper.
This brings about the point of this post: should it be the job of Central IT’s to anticipate and respond to the future needs of campus?
I would say yes, but I am not sure how it is possible.
Example 2: Instructure Canvas Pilot
This academic year (19-20) we are providing campus with a pilot of the Canvas Learning Management System. This is by the request of the provost, but for years there has been a groundswell of support around campus to switch to a new LMS, particularly Canvas. Indeed, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is one of the last Blackboard LMS schools in the Big10.
So again, why is central IT late to the party in this case?
The answer is complicated, but the short answer is that the current eLearning industry demands a SaaS infrastructure. Our Blackboard instance is taken down twice a year for upgrades, and we have a weekly maintenance window in case we need to take the system down for emergent security patches. If we weren’t piloting Canvas by the request of the Provost, we’d be looking at something else. Indeed, we should have a plan to pilot other services, but to my knowledge no such plan is in the works.
How can we anticipate and respond to future needs with more agility?
This is the question that needs to be answered. We certainly don’t need to wait until we are out of date and providing software to campus that people are using because they have no other options. The departments that are fortunate to have their own IT and eLearning budgets will not wait. It’s important to keep in mind that for something as central to the student experience as the LMS, it makes sense for departments to not acquire their own systems.
The LMS is an ecosystem after all, that touches 40,000+ users. In the realm of the LMS, it’s Central IT’s job to be very un-sexy. We must provide a stable environment with little to no downtime. Even though it’s not a SaaS offering yet, Illinois Compass 2g is a pretty darn reliable service.
As we progress into this new year I’m going to be thinking about ways that Central IT can not only respond faster to the needs of campus, but anticipate those needs. What can we do to identify trends and provide services, or pilot services, so that we’re not always late to the party?