grundyhome.com

Higher ed loves conferences (as do I). My boss has been live-tweeting the AMA Higher Ed Marketing conference for the last day or two. We’ve sent people to eduWEB Conference, South by Southwest Interactive, CASE, EDUCAUSE, RubyConf, RailsConf, and plenty of others.

But these things cost money – travel, registration, food, per diem, etc. And they take time – sometimes you can’t afford a few days away from the office. For that matter, conferences aren’t the only way to learn and develop your skills.

Create a Plan

Seems obvious, but it’s not clear what a professional development plan includes. Doing a search brings up some great resources, including this guide to professional development from EDUCAUSE.

But I’m looking for something simple – something concrete. And I should be able to do this every year. So I’ve worked up a rubric that follows a basic process. I’d love your feedback, as I’m hoping to put this into practice right away.

1. List the skills needed to do the job.

I think these fall into three categories: core requirements, secondary requirements, and professional skills. Core and secondary requirements make up your job description. Professional skills are those abilities that aren’t necessarily part of the tasks you do, but are crucial to your success. They might include public speaking, project management, written communication skills, etc.

2. The employee rates himself/herself.

Next, the employee has a sense of what his/her strengths and weaknesses are. These may only be perceptions – but perceptions have a strong influence over how the work is done. Lack of confidence or over-confidence can lead to poor decisions.

3. The supervisor rates the employee.

The manager must also rate the employee’s skill levels. Sometimes employees do not see opportunities the way the manager does, or are not fully aware of their strengths. Ultimately, the manager is responsible for directing staff to develop in ways that improve performance and serve the department.

4. Prioritize the skills based on the ratings.

If you’re an 8 out of 10 for a core skill, but a 3 out of 10 for a secondary skill, the priority may be to improve the secondary skill because the benefits will be more noticeable. This is subjective, but it is the step that provides focus for where to invest professional development time and money.

5. List specific steps to improve.

Of course there are plenty of conferences, but you should also look to other ways to develop your skills. Depending on how you learn best, you might consider taking classes, reading books/blogs (self-teacher), finding a mentor (a la apprenticing), doing pro bono or test projects (practical application), presenting to someone (learning through teaching), etc. A combination of these is probably best, but it will depend on the skill, the employee, and unfortunately, the budget available.

Collaboration is Key

This isn’t a top-down, manager-drive process to change employees. This is a collaboration between the employee and the supervisor. It should serve the needs of both. By providing professional development, the manager has a more effective, efficient, and generally valuable employee. For the employee it creates new professional opportunities and should translate to merit-based pay increases, promotions, etc. It should be a win-win.

Sample Professional Development Plan

Professional Development Plan Rubric (Excel) or as a Blank (PDF)

So how do you manage your professional development? Any tweaks to this process? Please share in the comments.

In pushing social media on campus (including an institutional blogging platform to hold personal/professional blogs), the question arises: Who owns this content?

I want to explore a few scenarios. Please post to the comments and share your own opinions on these.

1. You post to your personal blog on company time, using a company computer.

On one hand, it’s your personal blog – so it’s unlikely to be an issue because your employer probably doesn’t care about it. But if it’s related to your work and may provide value, the company might care. And the “during company time on company equipment” thing seems to lean toward your employer.

2. You tweet during work hours.

Who doesn’t do this? Do your personal tweets become the company’s property? Again, kind of a moot point given that the employer likely doesn’t care.

3. You post to a personal blog on an institutional platform, regardless of time or equipment.

This depends on the policies of the institution. Institutional blogs are likely to be the company’s property, but personal blogs using the employer’s systems seem like a grey area.

During Work Hours

This is the part that really bothers me. Every night, I do work for my employer. My work hours don’t stop at 5pm simply because the banks close – I’m on email, IM, and often do work because it needs to be done. How do you define “work hours?” What about those increasingly rare days when I work from home?

My perspective (which likely conflicts with that of my employer) is that my job isn’t defined by work hours. It’s defined by meeting the requirements of the position – with a somewhat elastic goal of 40 hours. Realistically, I spend far more than that to get the job done. My presence in the office from 8-5 doesn’t mean the job’s getting done, and my absence doesn’t mean that it’s not.

As a result, it is common for those of us in this situation to take a long lunch, exercise, or leave early. In exchange for pushing our “work hours” outside of 8-5, we expect flexibility during the 8-5 workday. So how does this affect our participation in social media? If I spend 30 minutes blogging during the day, but 30 minutes working at night – is this an even trade?

I’m curious to hear what you think. Have you ever had a “that’s our property” issue with your employer?

Note: This is hypothetical and theoretical. I don’t have any specific issue I’m dealing with at this time. Oh yeah, this post was written during work hours. * gasp *

This week I presented to our team at AgencyND about Mobile – what’s the deal and what’s coming. I call this the Mobile Horizon, as a nod to the Horizon Report which aims to inform higher education about the future technologies and their implications. Mobile is all the rage, and for good reason. View the presentation to learn why.

If higher education is to avoid a painful death in the coming decades I have a relatively simple plan: create an R&D process.

Add it to the Strategic Plan

Executive leadership, the board, deans, and officers of the University must be aware of this effort. The goal isn’t survival – that’s playing defense and it’s easily compared to a number of industries that resisted change. The goal is to thrive in this shifting environment and create lasting, positive changes to the way your institution will do business in the future.

Form a Center for the Future of Higher Education

A number of Universities have established centers, institutes, or commissions dedicated to studying higher education. This seems like a logical place for the conversation about the future of higher ed to start.

Institutions should create such a center (or direct an existing one) for the purpose of studying how changing cultural forces act on higher education, the implications for the future, and ways to adapt to such change. These centers should aim high, but produce meaningful research to be applied in a real world setting. One excellent example of this is the University of Michigan’s Millenium Project, which states:

“Rather than being simply a think-tank where ideas are generated and studied, the Millennium Project is a do-tank where ideas lead to the actual creation of working models or prototypes to explore possible futures of the university.”

The Center should be staffed or led by visionaries, higher ed leaders, faculty, etc. They should ask questions like “what might higher ed look like in 50 years?” and “what if we weren’t able to charge tuition to attend our school?”

Create a Workshop to Test Prototypes

It doesn’t do you any good to have a theory about how to adapt. Ideas are worthless until they’re put into action. But ideas aren’t guaranteed to pay out – they are far more likely to fail than succeed. This department (or an extension of the center, if you like) must be empowered to develop prototypes based on the work generated by the Center.

Like any good skunkworks operation, the Workshop requires talented and creative people. This also requires funding and the understanding that not all projects will pan out. Fail early and fail often must be an acceptable motto for this crew.

Establish a System of Accountability

On one hand, there’s academic freedom and the usual liberties afforded such pursuits in higher education. On the other, there’s some urgency: we’re facing (if not already in the midst of) a looming crisis. Accountability is important if we’re to benefit from such investments in our future. This means setting reasonable goals and measuring projects (as well as these departments) against them. This might be as simple as setting goals for a project, and pulling the plug if it doesn’t perform within the agreed parameters. I’d expect such a system to include the usual accountability for centers and faculty: publications and grants.

Don’t Be Afraid to Do Something Crazy

Rather than play follow-the-leader and mimic the models of other Universities, challenge the Center and Workshop to explore bold, new approaches. Not many Universities consider mergers and acquisitions, but it’s not unprecedented. How about alternative residential experiences? Or developing more customizable degrees that cross the traditional boundaries of colleges, schools, and departments?

The Future is Wide Open

Nothing I’ve written about here is ground-breaking. But few schools are attempting this. And even fewer are investing appropriately. While a new building may cost $50 million, it has a very specific and limited value to the University. Compare that to the potential cost of being ill-prepared as higher education evolves and shifts. For a school with an operating budget in the hundreds of millions, or even in the billions, the opportunity is worth the investment.

It’s a hot topic. It’s been a hot topic for over a decade now. The dramatic societal and cultural shifts that have come with nearly ubiquitous technology and connectivity have permeated every facet of our lives. We’ve seen how this shift has had dramatic effects numerous industries including music, newspapers, banking, and retail.

The factors that have affected industries don’t simply alter the industries; these factors change the consumers, who then drive the change to industry. With the music industry, increased bandwidth forced the music industry to offer alternatives to buying an entire album for the sake of a single song. Ideally, this would have happened naturally; instead, recording companies had to adapt or watch music piracy continue to grow. The industries shift, and some players are winners and many, many others are losers.

Higher education is at a crossroads; the availability of information and a consumer-centered culture has produced a generation of students who demand more control over their own education.

What Does Traditional Higher Ed Offer?

Is sitting in a classroom for 4 years, listening to lectures, taking tests, reading textbooks, and getting drunk at frat parties the most efficient use of our education dollars? I think not. Dan Croak, A Completely Different Model for Higher Education

What’s the advantage of a traditional undergraduate experience? Is it the campus life? Access to faculty experts or equipment? The strength of a diploma – either the degree or the name on it?

These advantages aren’t so impressive once you throw a hefty price tag on them. The cost of education has outpaced inflation more than 2.5 times and it’s not slowing down. So cost has become a major factor for many students, opening the door to cheaper alternatives and forcing many traditional institutions to compete on financial aid.

Is Traditional Even a Good Education?

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. Albert Einstein

How valuable is the education we provide? In industries such as computer science, vocational programs or certifications can be far more valuable in the job market. Occupations are being created faster than colleges can provide majors or even courses. Yet a non-specialized liberal arts degree (e.g., philosophy, literature) can be a very difficult credential when job-seeking.

It’s not that education is all about landing a job – far from it. But many students enter college with the expectation of finding a job. Earlier this year, a recent graduate sued her school because she couldn’t find employment after three months.

With all of the intangibles, how is the quality of an education measured?

Resistance to Change

About eighty-five institutions in the Western world established by 1500 still exist in recognizable forms, with similar functions and with unbroken histories, including the Catholic church, the Parliaments of the Isle of Man, of Iceland, and of Great Britain, several Swiss cantons, and seventy universities. …These seventy universities…are still in the same locations with some of the same buildings, with professors and students doing much the same things, and with governance carried on in much the same ways. Clark Kerr, Postscript 1982, Change, 14(7), 23-31., 1982

What reason is there to change? Top institutions certainly don’t need to compete for applicants. But they must compete for the top students, top faculty, and research dollars. And while these institutions of inertia have survived for hundreds of years, innovative “customer-centric” options arise from the smallest competitors. It may not be immediately obvious, but threats to the status quo are already well-established. They come from empowered consumers who make demands—demands which are being satisfied by non-traditional models.

The Future of Higher Education

James J. Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan, heads up the Millennium Project, investigating the future of higher education and developing new models of pedagogy, research, and educational business. He writes:

“…in a single generation following the Civil War, higher education in America changed quite radically: From the colonial colleges to the Humboltdian research university; with the Land Grant Acts creating the great public universities with strong service missions; from enrollments of hundreds to thousands of students; the empowerment of the faculty. Indeed, everything that could change about the university did change during this brief period.”

What form will higher education take in 10, 20, or 50 years? It’s hard to say. Visionaries may paint a picture of decentralization, or of conglomerate collaborations. The residential model may be in jeopardy. A three-year degree may become the norm. Like science fiction, predicting the future is an exercise in imagination; yet many sci-fi authors’ dreams come true.

In 1998, Donald Hanna declared, that “institutions of all types will be more responsive and accessible to their customers, more adaptable in their programs, and more capable of change than they currently are.”

As I wrote in The University of 2030 the solution isn’t to accurately predict the future; the answer is to create a culture of adaptability, innovation, and tolerance for new ideas. So instead of working on what the future might bring, focus on what we can do today. Today, you can work on your culture for the future.

I recently looked at using Ning to power a private social network, but one little red flag was a deal-breaker. From the Terms of Service:

You hereby grant Ning, during the course of your usage of the Ning Platform, a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, sublicenseable and transferable right and license to (i) use, reproduce, create derivative works of, distribute, publicly perform and publicly display Your Content (a) for the sole purpose of operating and making Your Content available on the Ning Platform and in all current and future media in which the Ning Platform may now or hereafter be distributed or transmitted or (b) for our internal business purposes; and (ii) disclose metrics regarding Your Content on an aggregated basis for advertising, marketing and business development purposes.

Whoa! So anything you post to Ning is theirs to use as they wish, for as long as they wish? Oddly, Ning opens this section with the line: “Ning does not claim any ownership rights in Your Content.” And then it proceeds to trample that a bunch of ridiculous policies that amount to practically owning your content.

So What?

If you’re just talking about users and their message posts, that’s something you might get over. But what about using this as your own branded network? What about placing your logo or copyrighted imagery in there? In short, Ning would be able to use your logo without your permission. I don’t know about your school, but my employer has a department dedicated to licensing – we don’t let just anyone throw our mark around.

It looks like we’re not the only ones who noticed this, either. Duke University’s Duke Digital Initiative website is built in Ning, and it doesn’t have any official Duke mark or photography.

So what should you do?

If you really want to use Ning, you can either give in and just not worry about the implications of giving up some of your rights. Maybe it doesn’t matter – but if you care about your mark, photography, or other content you might need to design around it. You could build a theme that doesn’t incorporate any of these elements. This is exactly what Duke did, but I find it’s still a little unusual, and unnecessarily limiting.

You could also use any number of other white label social networking platforms to accomplish the same kind of thing. Is this the right thing to do? It depends on your needs.

Maybe white label isn’t that important: one could also point out that the 300+ million users on Facebook don’t already have accounts to your private social network.

In researching and writing an upcoming post, I came across this prescient quote from the President Emeritus of the University of Michigan, written in 1997:

“Who needs specialists in an age where intelligent software agents may soon be available to roam far and wide through robust networks containing the knowledge of the world, instantly and effortlessly extracting whatever a person wishes to know?” James J. Duderstadt, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks

If people want to do something great but don’t have the tools, support, processes, or resources, that’s an infrastructure problem.

If people don’t want to do anything great, or change at all for that matter, that’s a culture problem.

Infrastructure is easy to create, but costs money and takes time. Culture is difficult to change, but doesn’t cost a dime.

If you have the right culture, the infrastructure will follow. The demand will drive investment, and the money will come.

The smart investment is in building the right culture.