Innovation

John Kao (2007) notes that every organization which seeks to be innovative has to both define innovation as the organization conceives of it. Likewise, it must also determine where in the organization innovation is placed—there needs to be a specific point which the organization can point to when asked where innovation is.  Higher Education has not only sought the idea of tradition (even where such tradition is a recent phenomenon, tradition makes it an easy way to avoid the challenges of innovation) to protect itself from innovation, its siloed structure makes any innovation created in one part of the institution difficult to spread through the organization.  Undoubtedly, many campuses have developed practices such as teaching and learning centers to help spread practices such as good teaching, these relate to innovations relevant to individuals and not to the organization as a whole.  The advantage of a Graduate School being the center if innovation is that even in traditional institutions, the graduate school is the academic entity which extends across the college in involving faculty from many disciplines, departments, or even locations.

One of the ways in which Kao highlights the ability for an organization to support innovation is through the creation of “skunk works.”  The term itself goes back to a division at Lockheed Martin which was charged with innovation, and was able to do so and do so quickly due to its autonomy and not being required to follow standard processes.  They report in at a high level, but also are required to have a smaller operating division in that the skunk works makes itself more agile by selecting high talent individuals who are committed to their projects and performing the work necessary to get the job done (Lockheed Martin 2011).  In short, all efforts are made to keep the projects agile [see AGILITY]. 

At SUNY—Empire State College, the School for Graduate Studies is the place in the organization where innovation should be highlighted.  The reasons for this are many.  First, as the entity within the college that offers structured degrees, the School can develop curriculum which assures faculty opportunity which, along with the growth enrollments it brings and allows the hiring of a more diverse faculty.  In this way, innovation feeds innovation.  Second, given the fact that GRAD is removed and different from standard ESC practice allows experiments to be conducted outside the standard and traditional practices of the college.  Finally, as students entering the graduate programs tend to be much closer to one another academically than undergraduate programs (mostly because grad as a 9 hour transfer cap and we do not currently offer PLA), we have a base line against which to measure programmatic successes.  More importantly, as there is currently a national discussion going on about the Master's degree and its place in society (as seen in the national push for Professional Science Master's degrees).  Allowing the School for Graduate Studies to serve as the center for innovation for Empire State College allows the graduate school of an open university bring its flexibility to bear and take the lead in this conversation.

Open Source

Much of the thinking about openness emerged from the open source movement in software. Unfortunately, some higher education institutions are afraid of open source software because of support fears and increased personnel quality and hence cost. Fortunately, the practice of using open sources is becoming much more common. There are three advantages to an institution using open source. First is the opportunity to customize in a way that out of the box does not necessarily allow. To have the appropriate support, an IT department not only needs people with specific coding and scripting skills; these people need to be problem solvers—creative and agile. Those same skills can be applied to responding to developing needs to allow a campus to remain cutting edge in meeting learner needs instead of waiting for a software behemoth to release its next version. Second, the open source models the best of education in its sharing. A campus that supports Open Office, now provides the ability to meet a software that does not cost students an excessive amount of money to acquire. Finally, in the challenge of budgets in the present time, the fact that even with the additional personnel costs, open source remains a more viable option financially for campuses.

Open source models the true principles for all we have discussed here in terms of opennenss. If we look at the standard model of the developer and tester, we have a closed model, but in an open source environment where people can contribute as well as receive, we have a bi-directional equal model. The developer and the user are the same person. In open education, the learner and the instructor are the same person. This requires a shift in not only the individual who would traditionally be labeled as the student, but also the individual who would traditionally be labeled as the instructor. While some worry that having infinite contributors can actually lead to duplicity, the opposite is true. As Eric Raymond Stevens (2002) notes about open source: “In practice, the theoretical loss of efficiency due to duplication of work by debuggers almost never seems to be an issue in the Linux world. One effect of a 'release early and often' policy is to minimize such duplication by propagating fed-back fixes quickly.” Compare this to a research world where people hold their data and projects close to their vests. Not only is duplication possible (and if one considers the common nature of the public discourse, likely—how many graduate students have been heard to release blood curdling screams when a new edition of a research journal comes out usurping the argument of their dissertation). If the data were public and open, the development would not only be faster, but the discourse and disciplines in and of themselves would benefit. The fact that such practice does not occur is not a result of ego, it is ingrained in structures. That research is an absolute necessity for tenure, promotion, USNWR rankings, NSF (which would be so much better if they had listened to Vennavar Bush) funding. In other word, the intellectual development machine is hindering intellectual development. Don't throw your hands in the air...pay attention and speak up! The issue is the fear of what about bi-directional relations. What if a 14 year old able to parse data performs an analysis that would get someone tenure in a postsecondary institution? Do we give them tenure (no), or does it mean that the system in not functioning and needs to be reexamined (yes). If the primary driver is replicable by those outside, why would that be the end. Research is a piece of a larger academic puzzle—we cannot reward for a single skill. Imagine if baseball gave awards for the fastest runner. Speed is a great skill in the game, but in and of itself, it is useless if someone does not have the good judgement of when to steal a base or cannot hit to get on base to be able to run. What about research devoid of contributing to the development of the world knowledge base as opposed to one's own ISI score.

Raymond Stevens notes that having more users actually results in better analysis in that you have more people looking at unix with varying interpretations and views—wouldn't it be great if the same were true of research data in higher education research. Wouldn't it also be great if we could do that in teaching as well. Having all learners become instructors would generate volumes, but the speed of development would allow the value of work to be filtered faster, and the quality work to be built upon even faster (see CROWD ACCELERATED INNOVATION).

As Open model does not destroy or mitigate the need for traditional models, whether we’re talking about software development, learning, or university structure—the open university does not make the traditional university redundant; rather it enhances it. Where openness differs, is that it is designed for rapid change and development. Eric Ray Stevens in Cathedral and Bazaard put the comparison best when comparing the cathedral (traditional) vs, bazaar (open) models for development; he argues that it: “resembles the relationship between Newtonian and Einsteinian physics—the older system is still valid at low energies, but if you push mass and velocity high enough you get surprises like nuclear explosion or Linux.”