A tweet by Brian Lamb today reminded me of a blog post that’s been gestating for a while and that I really ought to try get out of my head, if only for my own sanity.

Trigger Warning: It might be about digital transformation, which is simultaneously a very useful concept and complete and utter BS dependant on what you are reading or who is talking at you.

Most IT departments operate with risks and expectations such that WordPress represents an endless series of problems. A WP multisite is a garden that needs constant attention.

I believe learning technologists should run the platform. Sadly, they often aren't positioned to do so. https://t.co/VPdfA7CEYP

— Brian Lamb (@brlamb) May 13, 2022

I’ve written a few things already about why we need learning technologists with more technical skills because computation and data handling are pushing their way into many more subjects changing the ideas we have about what learning technologies are, and because we need to retain the capacity to develop learning technologies beyond what the market provides* otherwise we tend towards genericisation and homogenisation as a best case, and utterly cede control over what education is at the worst. I’ve also got an as-yet-unwritten blog post about how the lines between learning and teaching, research, and public engagement technologies are thin, possibly even non-existent. Show me the hard lines between those things and I’ll show you any number of graduate students blogging their research work in the open just for starters.

Brian’s tweet sparked a number of comments about the constrained roles of learning technologists, as well as examples of productive and generative relationships with IT depts, based on mutual trust and shared responsibilities. I want to build to this and return to what I’ve written above in the context of digital transformation because I think it can provide a useful framework and rationale to hang some of my thoughts on.

There are any number of definitions of digital transformation out there, many of which are mere digitatisation pigs dressed up in buzz-phrase lipstick. The most compelling ones I’ve seen though are those that describe using technology to do different things than have been possible before, and in doing so, radically reshaping organisational culture and process. This kind of digital transformation embraces multidisciplinarity and prioritises investment in people and process as much as investments in technology, and it blows away the notion that technology is in and off itself transformative. These notions of embracing multidisciplinarity and investing in people are significant because I believe one of the cultural challenges that lies at the heart of digital transformation within higher education is how to transform IT departments from being sole-suppliers of technology into being enablers of a digitally fluent organisation.

To truly embrace digital transformation means thinking about where digital fits in every area of activity in an organisation and it becomes impossible at that point to contain all the required expertise within an IT department. Actually, not just impossible, also insane. To scale up digital in any sustainable way involves broadening the amount of digital expertise across an organisation and developing many different kinds of digital competencies within different areas of domain expertise. A pretty common example in most organisations these days would be the idea that expertise in digital marketing and communications technologies and techniques resides in the marketing and communications department. In higher education specifically the idea that libraries might contain specialist digitial and information literacy expertise is also no longer surprising. You may also have heard about  research software engineers and carpentry courses.

Embracing digital transformation at scale is deeply uncomfortable though beacause it requires switching control for trust, and doing more of that investing in people and working together stuff. Where the buck ultimately stops with IT departments, or where the IT department sits under a CFO as some kind of cost centre to be managed, that  rubs right up against organisational cultures.

“Most of digital transformation is simple and obvious. That does not mean that it is easy. Getting it right means getting stuck into the foundations of the institution; the incentives that shape behaviour, the unspoken rules of the game. That is quite a bit more involved than just building a website.” (Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the strategy is delivery)**

When I talk about switching control for trust, I’m not talking about blind trust. I mean tackling that organisational culture mentioned above by creating new ways of working together bounded by shared policies, standards, and procedures, and through working together in cross-cutting teams, building the understanding and trust that we all as colleagues are working to similar ideas of professionalism and mutual respect. One of the comments on Brian’s tweet describes a great relationship between an IT security team and a learning technology team where shared standards for detecting and acting upon security issues are being applied. Working relationships between colleagues are positively enhanced by the sense of mutual trust that builds up, and that’s then something that can be built on. Really interesting things can become possible in that kind of environment. Institutions with mature learning design processes might look at some of this stuff about working in cross-cutting teams with a variety of expertise around the table and recognise it immediately too.

In this kind of world the role of the IT department might shift a bit to encompass running the commodity infrastructures that the institution depends upon (ERP systems, VLEs, email etc) as well as creating a number of the key operating procedures, standards, and associated education that enable other parts of the institution to embrace digital as more than mere users. You are probably seeing this already if your local friendly InfoSec team are rolling out digital security training, or you’re getting briefings on data protection and privacy from your data protection officer. Creating good awareness in these areas is usually foundational to building the kind of trust I’m talking about because it’s often where the stakes are highest for institutions.

If I circle back and start to think about digital education in the context of digital transformation, then the arguments are that we want to embrace digital technologies in order to do learning and teaching differently than we have before. What that means and looks like will vary wildly between disciplines and between institutions. What it definitely won’t be is the VLE as the pinnacle of learning technology, with some plagiarism detection and proctoring thrown in on top to create the illusion of rigour. In many cases it also won’t be possible to buy what’s needed or wanted as an off-the-shelf product via an RFP from an edtech vendor. For my own university it might mean building an AI powered virtual coop experience for business students. For somewhere like the Open University of the UK it might mean building the Open STEM labs in order to deliver practical work in a distance learning context. In many institutions it might be something as simple as setting up a flexible platform like WordPress Multisite and providing responsive support and ongoing development to enable a wide spectrum of open education practices.

What will also be absolutely necessary in order to realise this kind of digital transformation in higher education is to embrace the same shifts we’ve seen in marketing, comms, libraries, and research, and invest in developing the technical skills of learning technologists***, and then underpin that with infrastructure, standards, policies, procedures that enable innovation to flourish sustainably.

That we even continue to argue about this as a sector baffles me. Funding it might be challenging for many institutions, but the idea that we wouldn’t invest in specialist domain expertise in learning technologies because we’re having a turf war about what’s in or out of IT says everything about institutional culture and maturity of thinking about digital education. Any institution that simultaneously shows you their digital transformation strategy and then argues that nobody except IT gets to play should be looked at very sceptically indeed.

 

* Also read the very thoughtful and useful comments on this blog post from Tony Hirst, Pat Lockley, and Simon Buckingham Shum.

** I need to make a little space to wax lyrical about this book. It’s a very practical and open book about digital transformation with the authors drawing many lessons from their experiences running the UK Goverment Digital Service. Beyond being a source of good practical advice and mercifully free of much of the bullshit that pervades this space, it inspires hope in me that if digital can be done well in the civil service, then it might just be possible in higher education, because both are entirely weird and wonderful kinds of places to work. It also contains this really excellent example of why technology cannot be left soley in the hands of commercial actors, and is an excellent illustration of many of the ways in which choices about education are being dictated by platforms now too:

“Aligning the interests of the state, the personal sovereignty of individual citizens, and the global technology market will be one of the defining governance questions of the 2020s.

If national governments had not already realised that, in many areas of state activity, their freedom to act is constrained by the choices of these private companies, the pandemic spelled this out. The summer of 2020 saw a tug-of-war over contact-tracing apps. These apps were deliberately designed as a means to collect and analyse detailed data about the spread of the infection through a population, individual by individual. Collection of so much personal data by governments raised huge privacy ques- tions. Faced with pressure from many states, Google and Apple had a difficult choice. They did not want to lose the trust of their users. They did not wish to be the arbiter of which governments had sufficiently ‘clean’ human rights records and could there- fore be trusted to use their access to citizens’ personal data in good faith. They did not want to have to decide when and why such access should be revoked.

Normally fierce competitors, the two firms met behind closed doors to agree on a united position. They picked one, stuck to it, and left governments with a take-it-or-leave-it choice. Some launched contact-tracing apps that adhered to the approach mandated by Google and Apple. Other governments, including the UK’s, believing that this position would prevent them from building an app that delivered the functionality they needed, instead tried to circumvent Google and Apple’s strict control of their phones’ sensors. In June 2020, the UK government ditched their whole project to develop a centralised coronavirus app not based on the API provided by Google and Apple and reverted to a decentralised solution compatible with the American companies’ position. This capitulation followed similar moves by Italy and Germany.

*** I’m not mentioning Tim Fawns work on entangled pedagogy here either because that’s another whole rabbit hole and we’re slowly, slowly writing around it at the moment. Suffice to say it strengthens the argument for investing in learning technology expertise in many areas of the academy because it’s completely impossible to separate pedagogy and technology and anyone who says different must have their pants on fire.