EDUCAUSE: Reflections on the First 500 Days

Citation

Hawkins, B.L. (2000), "EDUCAUSE: Reflections on the First 500 Days", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2000.23917aac.016

EDUCAUSE: Reflections on the First 500 Days

Brian L. Hawkins

Introduction

On July 1, 1998, EDUCAUSE was officially launched, creating a single organization to represent the community of professionals interested in the management of information resources and technologies in higher education. It was born of the union between Educom and CAUSE, two highly respected and important professional associations that brought to the table over 60 years of combined service to the information technology community.

The mission of EDUCAUSE is to help shape and enable transformational change in higher education through the introduction, use, and management of information resources and technologies in teaching, learning, scholarship, research, and institutional management.

EDUCAUSE has a proud past, but its two parents had different missions, different cultures, and different focuses. We are working hard to ensure that the best of these two heritages is preserved, while recognizing that the new entity needs to be more than the sum of its parts. The first year was spent trying to bring these two associations together, to create a synergy, and to work collaboratively in redefining the information technology and information resource management roles in the twenty-first century. The new EDUCAUSE needed to keep the major focuses of the two parent organizations alive and nurtured, while simultaneously trying to develop new programs that would unify and expand offerings to our membership. EDUCAUSE remains firmly committed to serving the historical constituencies of administrative computing emerging from CAUSE; the academic, networking, and teaching and learning communities emerging from Educom; and others in our broad membership interested in furthering the transformative role of information technology within our institutions of higher education.

The Biggest Challenge

The bringing together of these two organizations included a large number of key operational issues, including staffing, publications analysis, determination of dues, and many other factors. In addition, EDUCAUSE has needed to reassure its myriad partners regarding the durability of these important relations. For example, EDUCAUSE endeavors to expand its educational offerings by working in partnership with our affiliates, CUMREC (College and University Computer Users Association), NERCOMP (New England Regional Computing Program), NWACC (Northwest Academic Computing Consortium), and SAC (Seminars on Academic Computing). These relationships have been built to further the mutual objectives of EDUCAUSE and our partner associations. However, probably the biggest challenge faced by EDUCAUSE was to create a conference that effectively served the additional number of participants, since the unified conference would be approximately twice the participant size of either of the two conferences that had been sponsored by the previous organizations. The additional size had some advantages in the longer term, such as providing the leverage and resources to attract more and better speakers, and to have a larger and more complete trade-show area. On the other hand, there would clearly be increased logistical problems with the larger size, the most important of which was the challenge to provide the opportunity for people to connect and for communities to thrive and evolve in this much larger context.

The Program Committee for EDUCAUSE'99 took it as a personal challenge to avoid just expanding either of the current conference identities and instead wanted to create something new, and especially something that brought together communities and made a large conference feel smaller and intimate. This committee generated a variety of exciting new ideas so that attendees could avoid getting lost in this combined conference and faced with too many choices. The staff went to work trying to develop a set of Web-based resources that would make the conference feel personal to the attendees. What they created was a set of Web services that could be used by attendees prior to, during, and after the conference. These Web-based tools allowed the attendees to find communities of interest, constituencies, and sessions of interest in the much larger diverse conference, and helped the conference be relevant to both returning and new conference attendees. The outcome was a set of four "tools" that used the technology and an information-based typology to help members more meaningfully navigate the conference:

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  The Knowledge Pathfinder ­ The Knowledge Pathfinder allowed attendees to use key words to find sessions that matched their interests. More than a search engine, this tool is a value-added system that finds sessions based on words and concepts from a modifiable taxonomy. The system then matches the selected concepts with any relevant conference presentation, constituent group meeting, poster session, workshop, and exhibit booth. This system enabled the conference participant to tailor the conference to his or her own specific needs.

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  The Itinerary Builder ­ This tool allowed each participant to save, update, download, and print an individualized conference schedule before arriving in Long Beach. Used in conjunction with the Knowledge Pathfinder, the Itinerary Builder allowed people to pinpoint topics related to their specific interests and needs, adding or removing items as often as they wished, printing an easy-to-read version of their itinerary directly from the Web, and even downloading their itinerary directly to a Palm OS or Windows CE machine.

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  The Dynamic Registration List ­ This tool allowed attendees to find peer groups among registrants, narrowing the large list to a small group of attendees from like organizations and similar jobs. From the electronic registration list, participants could select colleagues based on the institution's Carnegie classification, the institution's size, the title of the participant, the geographical location of the participant, and other characteristics. They could then contact these people by e-mail prior to or during the conference and arrange meetings, exchange thoughts, and plan on ways to mutually leverage their conference experiences.

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  The Birds-of-a-Feather Signup System ­ This tool allowed attendees to see all topic-focused sessions and initiate a new session if they did not see one that matched their interest. The system allowed them to request a room and to create an electronic listserv to be used before, during, and after the meeting in order to exchange thoughts with this highly focused interest group. The new Birds-of-a-Feather sessions that were requested by attendees for groups could not have been envisioned by the staff.

With these tools, EDUCAUSE hoped to be able to make what we anticipated to be a large conference a little "smaller" for the participants. EDUCAUSE sent e-mail to all pre-registered attendees telling them about these new tools. In addition to the e-mail, the tools were highlighted on the association home page and on the conference Web site. These messages explained the tools to attendees with the hope that the participants could create views of conference data that made the most sense to them. These tools also were intended to allow people from a diverse community to feel that the conference was designed for them, facilitating both professional presentations and interpersonal connection before, during, and after the conference.

Some of the goals must have been achieved, as the EDUCAUSE conference in Long Beach had nearly 5,800 participants. Over 96 percent of these registered for the conference electronically, over a third created their itinerary prior to the conference using the Itinerary Builder, and 15 Birds-of-a-Feather groups were created and met in addition to the planned set of meetings. An enormous number of participants expressed their happiness with the Knowledge Pathfinder, telling of how it saved time and effort in getting the most out of this conference. For this initial unified conference, these new tools appeared to aid considerably in nurturing the sense of community in what is an enormously diverse set of professional interests.

EDUCAUSE is already planning for improvements and enhancements for next year to allow even further customization of the conference experience. We heard from a few librarians that there was not as much for them as last year at CAUSE, but there were actually more library-related sessions at EDUCAUSE'99 than the combined offerings of the two conferences in 1998. So we have begun planning for improvement of our Web tools, with the hope of creating "virtual track sessions" that participants could create with the touch of a button on the Web, well in advance of the conference. These tools helped, but we still have plenty of room to improve as we try to serve a large, heterogeneous, and often demanding membership in this new association. We were gratified recently to learn that the tools that were developed are the basis of EDUCAUSE being the recipient of the 1999 Technology Innovation Award of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE). Technology is transforming our institutions of higher education, and we are pleased that we can claim that it is also transforming the way we provide service to our membership.

Efforts of Special Interest to the Library Community

EDUCAUSE has been working on a large number of initiatives in the last year, but four of these may be of special interest to the library community and the readers of Library Hi Tech News.

Enriching Our Alliances

EDUCAUSE is actively working to expand its alliances within the higher education community, to strengthen those that we have established and explore new ways to work within other associations in the higher education community to achieve the goals of the EDUCAUSE membership. These efforts include working with the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the Washington office of the American Library Association, and the Association of College Research Libraries (ACRL) on issues which jointly impact the information technology and library communities. In addition, EDUCAUSE has been working with ACUTA, the telecommunications officers' association, on the upcoming telecommunications act; NACUBO, the business officers' association, on taxation issues; the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) on policy issues; and with the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) and many other presidential organizations on making the transition of advanced networking to the rest of our schools. We have a concerted plan and strategy to become better connected on a national and international basis. This new emphasis on alliances and collaboration is now ­ and will continue to be ­ a hallmark of EDUCAUSE in the upcoming years.

Enlarging Our Role in Advocacy

EDUCAUSE has taken a more vocal and public stance with regard to advocating in key policy areas in the Washington, DC, arena and on our own campuses. Without national policy that supports the use of technology, technology will never sufficiently penetrate our campus environments to have the transformational effect we have so long envisioned. We need to ensure that the advances in technological innovation and policy development are kept in sync, for when technology gets ahead of policy these innovations will be rejected. EDUCAUSE will actively engage in an advocacy effort on key issues for which we have specialized and unique abilities, or where our membership is unduly affected. In many other cases we will be involved in the education of key policy makers in governmental, educational, and regulatory arenas. EDUCAUSE will also conduct appropriate policy analyses as these are called for, and in circumstances in which we are uniquely positioned to do so, in support of our membership and key alliances in which we have become engaged. In all of these circumstances, we will actively act as a broker of information related to these policy issues, ensuring that the membership is kept informed through regular updates in our publications and through electronic communications, not merely reporting on the status of these issues but also explaining why a particular policy issue is of importance or concern to our campuses.

EDUCAUSE has been an active partner with the library community on a number of policy issues. We have recently focused our collective energies on ensuring that the new copyright laws being crafted for the digital age maintain the proper balance between the rights of the creator and the fair use rights essential for students and researchers to conduct their work. Ongoing actions include working with a number of groups and adding our signature to a letter urging Congress to adopt a narrowly tailored database protection bill that will protect databases against commercial piracy while preserving the public's access to data and facts that are part of the public domain and crucial for scholarly research. Currently the House of Representatives is considering a sweeping bill that would restrict the public's access to information and would impose unreasonable and costly burdens on research and education. Another issue in which EDUCAUSE is involved is petitioning Congress to amend existing copyright law to update the distance learning exemption for digital networks. Redefining what constitutes a "classroom" and expanding the exemptions of instructional broadcasting to include digital transmissions over the Internet will be essential in providing more students with equal access to educational resources. Our action supports the US Copyright Office's recent Report on Copyright and Digital Distance Education's conclusions that modest changes in existing laws are needed to ensure robust growth of distance learning.

Expanding Our Professional Development Program

Working with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), EDUCAUSE became a founding partner of the Frye Institute, a professional development program to create a new generation of leadership in the area of information resource management. The Frye Institute will initially be held June 4-16, 2000 at Emory University. The Institute is designed for individuals involved in higher education who aspire to more significant leadership roles in information management, including librarians, information technology specialists, faculty, and administrators. More information on this program can be found at http:// www.fryinstitute.org/

Extending Our Concept of Infrastructure

Many of the dreams that we talk about for this new world of the information age, including and especially the focus on distributed learning, presuppose that content is available in this environment ­ and yet by and large it is not. As I recently emphasized to the annual meeting of the EDUCAUSE National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII), there is an urgent need to attend to the information infrastructure of the Web. This is essential if either the residential learning or distance learning in a wired environment is to truly achieve the goals that are being espoused. At this time, the lack of adequate, organized, and authoritative information resources on the Web is one, if not the, major obstacle on the critical path to achieving this dream. EDUCAUSE is working collaboratively with library groups in an attempt to explore ways in which the higher education community can address some of these deficiencies. While all of this is in the early stages of infancy, it is an issue and concern that is firmly on the "radar screen" for EDUCAUSE.

Conclusion

The "honeymoon" for EDUCAUSE is over! The merger is complete! The consolidating is largely ­ if not entirely ­ behind us as an association. The hard work is now ahead of us in providing meaningful services, publications, education opportunities, and professional meetings to our membership. EDUCAUSE is committed to these goals as well as to creating cutting edge initiatives where opportunity arises and to keeping vigil on the policy front. In this rapidly changing and often chaotic environment in which higher education finds itself, technology is an important means to help address many of the challenges we are facing. We need to keep our eye on the ball and realize that we are serving the educational objectives of our institutions, and not lose sight of the ends while working diligently to improve the means.

Brian L. Hawkins is President of EDUCAUSE. hawkins@educause.edu