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THE OG Incubator from Ridley Scott’s Alien

What might Virginia’s higher ed institutions do in terms of experimenting with distributed, virtual learning? How can the Commonwealth encourage technology-mediated exploration, collaboration, and implementation amongst a wide range of faculty, technologists, and students from its 39 public institutions of higher ed? These are two of the questions I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. In fact, I talk about them to just about anyone who’ll listen. A couple of months ago I asked Joe DeFillipo and Beverly Covington of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), whom I’ve been working closely with on OpenVa for the last 18 months, what Virginia is doing at the statewide level in terms of fostering collaboration amongst its public universities and colleges. The question seemed worth pursuing, so we organized a discussion about that very idea a few weeks later.

Preparing for that discussion I was batting around  ideas with Brian Lamb and Grant Potter when I was up in Nova Scotia in June. I asked how they wpuld approach such a statewide initiative. And as luck would have it, both Brian and Grant have worked in higher ed in British Columbia since the late 90s early 00s and had a lot to share about the experiments along these line happening within the province over the past fifteen years. Brian Worked at TechBC during its short life (what a fascinating experiment it was), and both Brian and Grant were familiar with BCcampus given they’ve been working at universities within the province for years. After talking with them for a while about these province-level experiments, we agreed it made sense to talk at greater length with Paul Stacey, who was on the ground floor of both as they got up and running.

And given it seems that SCHEV remains interested in continuing such a discussion—which remains a very pleasant surprise for me—early last week Paul Stacey and Brian Lamb were gracious enough to join a call with folks from SCHEV to give us a better sense of what TechBC and BCcampus were/are, and how an experiment in the Commonwealth might benefit from understanding their separate and related histories. I can’t thank Paul enough for patiently taking us through both the history of these entities, including their different and similar missions, all the while providing a very thorough framework for Virginia to model itself on.

I took some notes during the meeting as a way to quickly outline TechBC and BCcampus, but also as a way to understand what elements the Commonwealth might pick and choose from to create its own, unique and relevant version for our particular needs.

TechBC

The Technical University of British Columbia was a pretty fascinating experiment wherein the province created a specialized university that was focused on creating students that met the needs of a growing tech industry in BC. What’s more, those companies were looking for more than just programmers, they were looking for thinkers who had a broad understanding of the technology, as well as the media/design and the business elements of the field. To meet this need they came up with a shared first year curriculum called Tech1 that all students had to take which exposed them to each of these three areas.

In this regard, the university itself was experimental, encouraging a wide variety of online delivery mechanisms based on the particular subject matter. Course content was framed in one credit modules that allowed students (and faculty and instructional designers) to experiment more widely across the three focus areas, and even remix between the areas giving students more options and possibilities. It was also a new university that provided no tenure and required its faculty to experiment with their teaching methods. Often promoting a creative, applied method that pushed the curriculum to have realtime applications in the business/tech world. And from what I understood, the interaction between the Media/Arts, Business, and IT focus areas were pretty fluid, and the entire school started to reflect a more dynamic, interactive environment where experimentation, exploration, and collaboration were part of the culture.

 BCcampus

Due to financial and political pressures TechBC was merged with Simon Fraser University, and the absorption of an experimental university within an established one squelched much of its experimental energy. That said, around the time of TechBC’s closure another provincial post-secondary education agency in British Columbia was established: BCcampus. What is it? Well I’ll let their about page answer that:

BCcampus is a publicly funded organization that uses information technology to connect the expertise, programs, and resources of all B.C. post-secondary institutions under a collaborative service delivery framework. We provide valued services to institutions, ensuring B.C. learners, educators, and administrators get the best, most effective technologies and services for their learning and teaching needs.  We provide an ICT infrastructure for student data exchange, shared services, online learning and distance education, communities of practice and online resources for educators.

This approach is interesting in that it tries to pool resources to enable seamless sharing of student data (i.e., a federated application process, transferring credits, transcripts, etc.), curriculum services (i.e., much of BC’s groundbreaking open education work with Open Education Resources), and shared services (i.e. province-wide contracts with vendor services as well as access to open source applications). What is compelling about BCcampus is how a model like this enables the province to scale resources to all its secondary institutions. What’s more, the laborious work of establishing credit agreements between schools in the region had been worked out well before BCcampus was established so they didn’t have to get muddled down in the negotiations between schools over which credit hours will transfer and which won’t. Rather, they could focus on creating open educational resources to make those courses that much more accessible for all.

The only thing in the neighborhood of this in Virginia is the recently established 4-VA project, but it’s hard to get a sense of its broader impact statewide. This project invested millions of dollars on teleconferencing centers at four large, research campuses (UVA, VA Tech, GMU, and JMU), exactly how this helps the other 35 institutions in the Commonwealth is not yet clear? It also has no clear vision along the line of sharing resources that can be created and distributed asynchronously at a statewide level. Virginia needs a project that begins to not only incubate ideas and possibilities, which is what the proposal shared below focuses on, but it also needs to deal with its ability to frame a broader vision for creating and distributing open educational resources statewide. I tend to see the incubator as an initial step is this direction.

Anyway, based on conversations here at DTLT with Andy Rush, Martha Burtis and Tim Owens, as well as ongoing discussions with SCHEV, we came up with some ideas for what an innovation incubator here in the Commonwealth might look like. Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention here that Brian Lamb’s ongoing support and encouragement for taking the work we do statewide over the last eighteen months has remained invaluable to me. In fact, over the last eight years he has quietly been the closest thing I’ve had to a mentor.

Below is a very rough first draft of the idea we submitted to SCHEV a couple of weeks ago. They’re reviewing and reworking it, but in the meantime I figured I would get it out here to give others a sense of what we’re thinking as well as to beg for feedback and ideas from any and all out there who are interested in turning some of what we have been playing with in terms of edtech into statewide experimental policy!

Click below to take the jump….

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