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The most interesting edtech story of the week has to be UMUC’s plan to spin off its IT department into a separate for-profit company. (See The Unbundling University).
The new company, to be called AccelerEd, will be made up of the 100 or so professionals who work for UMUC’s Office of Information Technology.
This moves follows the previous spin off of UMUC analytics unit into a for-profit company called HelioCampus.
UMUC President Javier Miyares, quoted in the IHE piece, explains the decision to spin off the IT department in this way:
“We believe that if you look at higher education, there is a core -- what you teach, who teaches it and how we teach it,” Miyares said in an interview. “That is the existential, essential core of the university. Everything else are business processes that do not have to be run in the traditional way within the university.”
It is worth reading George Kroner’s take on UMUC’s decision to spin off its IT department - Losing Focus on the Mission: What’s Happening at UMUC. George is one of the smartest people in edtech, and he clearly cares about UMUC. George writes:
"There is a significant level of risk for an online university to outsource its entire IT function to a separate entity. UMUC already relies heavily on adjunct faculty and outsourced recruiting and student support. While I have always had concerns about the risk and fairness inherent in these decisions, the IT team runs the technology that powers a fully-online university. There is no UMUC without an online classroom. Any impact to IT’s ability to execute reliably will directly affect students. As a separate entity, there will be even fewer ways for the university to hold this organization accountable, especially considering that the university itself, in a circular way, will be its ultimate owner and financier."
From what I can figure out, I have to say that I agree with George’s concerns.
It seems odd to me to think that the learning professionals who collaborate with faculty on course development and teaching are not “core” to the mission of the organization. Online learning is particularly collaborative and team based. If anything, I'd think that you'd want to bundle all the educators (including the technology educators) who work on the online courses and programs more tightly together.
A central competency of any institution offering online, low-residency, or blended courses is instructional design and educational technology. (One could argue that this is a core competency in 2017 for residential-only programs as well). The learning technology professionals who work on courses are not only "supporting" the faculty, or following an algorithm for how courses are created, but are rather engaged in a process of creative collaboration with their faculty partners. In the world of online learning, this collaboration necessarily involves pushing the state of the art of course design and online teaching forward.
In online learning, there is not a place where teaching ends and technology starts. How do you separate the two?
At the same time, I’m curious to learn more about the reasoning of UMUC’s leadership in making this change.
I could see how creating a separate edtech entity will make it easier to understand, and account for, all the direct and indirect costs associated with online learning.
My hope is that UMUC commits to thinking about this IT unbundling as an experiment - and is willing to share what the institution (and AccelerEd) learn in the process.
I also hope that the professionals who make up AccelerEd get a voice in this discussion. How does this change look to them? What are they excited and what are they worried about?
Finally, it will be interesting to follow-up with UMUC faculty. What will it look like from their perspective to collaborate with colleagues who now work for a for-profit?
What do you think about the unbundling of technology from the core of UMUC?
