The conference began and ended with plenary lectures to all 6,500 attendees. The last was a surprisingly parochial eulogy of American higher education, and the first was a fairly irrelevant piece by columnist Dave Barry. But one quip from Dave struck me as an interesting insight into computing. Dave has two dogs, one large and one small. The large one is his main dog and the small one is his backup dog -- in case the main dog goes down. This joke led me to reflect on how far we all still must travel to reach a point where computing is fully integrated as a part of everyday life in higher education. Instructional technology support professionals have a major part to play in this very fundamental transformation on our campus, it seems to me.

Several themes emerged during the sessions on technology in teaching and learning. Many speakers talked about collaborations between groups of institutions, often imposed from above by a legislature or other governing body. It remains to be seen if these conglomerations can achieve worthwhile economies of scale -- there are some cautionary tales from hospital mergers. Nobody asked what lessons we could learn from the health care industry, but let's not forget that "those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it." More interesting to me, and relevant to our situation in Davis, was talk of more spontaneous, less ambitious, collaborations between institutions and between units on a single campus. For instance, the University of Minnesota presented an excellent example of collaboration between a central instructional technology unit and specific colleges on their campus.

Along somewhat similar lines, in a multi-campus context, UC's Office of the President (UCOP) is looking at ways to facilitate collaborations in instructional technology among its various campuses. For instance, UCOP is establishing a virtual Teaching and Learning Technology Center, which will publish a Webzine (a magazine on the Web) and offer a grant program aimed at developing instructional technology on the UC campuses. The call for proposals is likely to appear quite soon and will focus on planning grants for inter-campus collaborations and supporting collaborative projects. If you have colleagues at another UC campus with whom you would like to get together, or do a project, look out for this call.

I was disappointed that many presentations described new initiatives without much formal evaluation of their success or failure. On the opposite side of the fence, one pair of presenters spent half their time on heavy, but general, criticism of all previous "research" in the area of instructional technology. However, they had no solution to the issues they raised, except to call these studies "evaluation" rather than "research." Fundamentally, I believe the authors were objecting to researchers trying to draw broad general conclusions from modest datasets and practical research designs. I believe much of the work that is done is valuable if the conclusions drawn reflect the circumstances of the study; the problem comes in over-generalizing the results. The challenge is to identify important questions, or hypotheses, that can be rigorously addressed with the research subjects and plans that are available to the investigator or to define what conclusions can be drawn with adequate confidence from any particular study.

On a different day (fortunately), I presented the current state of research at UC Davis on the use of online course materials in large courses on campus. We have already confirmed that student learning with online course materials is as good as, or better than, face-to-face (F2F) lectures, as measured quantitatively by examination scores. The new research asks more sophisticated questions such as: "What is the quality of learning, both F2F and online?" By quality of learning, we mean the degree to which students are able to demonstrate performance beyond reproduction of information to higher cognitive levels such as application, synthesis, and analysis.

Many faculty members are concerned that UC Davis' continuing move to larger classes and reduced interaction between faculty and students is making it more difficult for students to acquire higher level thinking skills. The research is aimed at comparing the extent to which F2F and online course delivery facilitate learning at higher cognitive levels. UC Davis is also addressing the role of learning style in the success of online learning and carrying out a sophisticated cost analysis of the two approaches.

In spite of being scheduled at 8:15 on the morning after the big party, and a network crash (not my fault!), there was good attendance and considerable excitement about our project. In many respects, we seem to be actually doing what many others are just talking about. For a detailed description of UC Davis' Mellon-funded project, go to the slides from the talk (viewable on Internet Explorer only) or the proceedings paper.

Many different approaches and rationales for online education were presented, from mere survival in the face of dropping enrollments, to an opportunity to offer education to a wider variety of learners, to a desire to improve on-campus education. A more specific distinction of the type of learner being targeted would help focus our discussions. The EDUCAUSE leadership currently focuses on top-down approaches, which it calls "systemic change." These are ways in which campuswide administrators can effect major changes in culture and behavior that spread throughout an institution. EDUCAUSE suggests, sometimes explicitly, that the bottom-up approach, in which individual faculty do their own thing, is not scalable. The National Science Foundation, which shares the concern about scalability, has coined the evocative term, "Lone Ranger," for these isolated faculty projects.

Personally, I think that systemic change will not occur solely through administrative fiat, at least in the University of California (although good top-down initiatives can be embraced by the campus, as MyUCDavis appears to be doing). Conversely, an individual faculty project can sometimes be developed into a scalable product (the course management system WebCT is an example). As both a Lone Ranger and a campuswide coordinator, I feel that success will come from a convergence of the bottom-up and top-down approaches.

Here at UC Davis, we have facilitated a bottom-up track to the use of instructional technology in course delivery epitomized by the Summer Institute on Teaching with Technology (SITT), which was a pioneer program and is still one of the best of its kind. We have also created an excellent mechanism for developing and implementing campuswide policies through the Academic and Administrative Computing Coordinating Councils (AC4 and AdC3, respectively). We are in a great position to guide these tracks to a fruitful meeting place where the advantages of both can be realized. If we are successful, then our experience could, at the very least, make a valuable presentation at a future EDUCAUSE conference.