Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)
Vice Provost Julius Zelmanowitz Presentation
Vice Provost Julius Zelmanowitz, Academic Initiatives, UC Office of the President
Thank you for inviting me to present here, I’m truly honored. Let me begin with a few words about myself and my role, and my title with the University. In real life, I’m a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In my virtual life, I’m interim Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives at the Office of the President of the University. And I’ve been doing that for seven months, so I’m very much in a learning mode, in a position for which nothing in my prior experience has really prepared me. The two chancellors of University of California, Berkeley this morning gave me a tremendous amount of confidence by relating to me that chancellors are similarly unprepared professionally for their duties.
The coordination of instructional technology at the University is one of the functions and responsibilities of my office, and one for which I am very much in a learning mode. You almost certainly know, but it bears emphasizing, that the University of California is a 10-campus system, and those of us within the University know how different the campuses are, how differently they orient themselves towards research and instruction, and what a unique personality each campus has. So to borrow from an metaphor used this morning, taking an academic initiative from a central system-wide location in the University of California is like moving 10 graveyards. And furthermore, I come to this position with a bias. I’m a campus person, I’ve not yet been completely brainwashed to a system-wide perspective, and I really do believe that some of the very, very best and most creative ideas occur on the campuses, principally with the faculty of the individual campuses. So to me, "system-wide academic initiatives" is still something of an oxymoron.
What I thought I would do for you today is to give you examples of some of the initiatives that are in my portfolio. And you will see, as we go through them, that they have arisen from different locations. Some of them are the ideas of campuses or of faculty within campuses. And then the job of my office is to leverage those to system-wide initiatives and to give them more visibility and prominence than an individual campus can, because they are of importance to the entire system. Others do occasionally respond to strategic thinking centrally, in which case my function is to create beachheads on the campuses and to convince campus administrators and faculty that these are good ideas. In the course of doing that, the ideas tend to get transmogrified quite a bit, but that is still a function. And the third source of academic initiatives that involve technology comes from serendipity, events that occur that are not really under the control of the University, but to which the University has to respond, typically quickly, in order to take advantage of a perceived opportunity, without strategic or careful planning in advance.
A new responsibility of the University, or at least a very recent responsibility of the University, is the state. The Governor of the State and citizens of the state have thrust upon us much greater responsibility for the quality of teaching and learning in the K-12 sector, and particularly in the high schools of California. I don’t have time to go into the politics behind this, but the University, which has traditionally played a rather modest role in this arena, has now found itself with much greater responsibility and much greater expectations from the politicians and the people of the State of California. One of our campuses, in this case the Santa Cruz campus, had been thinking for some years, strategically, about the creation of a virtual high school. That dovetailed very well with a mandate from the state to make advanced placement courses more available to the students of the state than they currently are. We are also experimenting with the delivery of AP courses. To be candid, our experience so far has been mixed. A lot of hand-holding is required with high school students, even more so than with university students. And we realize that there is a huge burden to have on-site monitoring and mentoring of high school students that are attempting to learn at a distance. This has come on very quickly, which is an important point. The initiative actually began in November of 1998. In January of 1998, which is the spring semester for high schools, we had 50 students enrolled in a pilot; in the fall of 1999, we had 100 students around the state, in about 30 high schools in seven counties of the state. We had 100 students, still a very small number. This spring 2000, the third semester of the experiment, we have 200 students. And as Secretary Nybler could tell you, in another 10 years, we will be offering AP courses to more high school students than there are in the State of California. This is very much an experiment in progress, it has very strong budgetary support from the state, and high expectations for the University.
One of the most exciting academic initiatives of the University is the California Digital Library, which is exactly what the name implies. It is an on-line library of the University of California. At the moment, it has very robust journal holdings electronically, over 5,000 scientific and humanistic social science journals, I believe; it has access to many, many databases; it has access to the Library of Congress; and we are building, with grant moneys, new archives that don’t currently exist. For example, we have a grant from the Library of Congress to digitize all the archival records of the Japanese internment camps in California during World War II, one of the projects for which, as a public service and as a service to scholars, we seek grants to digitize important archives.
In terms of cost, a digital library for a consortium of universities, or for a system like the University of California, and, I would think from my experience in Europe, for a consortium of national universities within a nation-state, a digital library makes an enormous amount of economic sense. In terms of the student population of Berkeley relative to the total population of the University of California, the entire University student population is, say, roughly five Berkeleys, but the cost of our digital subscriptions to journals costs us roughly two Berkeleys. So for twice the price of what Berkeley alone would have to pay, we can have access for the entire University. So there’s a very good cost-effect leveraging factor here.
I have to caution anyone building a digital library that publishers don’t have standard models for contracts for site licenses of this kind, and the University is also really pioneering in the education of publishers. We have a lot of leverage as a large system, and we have many, many contracts with scholarly societies and commercial publishers. For a while they were very idiosyncratic, without many common unifying factors, but we’re trying to have these contracts and site licenses converge.
I have two more slides. One of the links takes you to archives that are accessible. This slide gives you an example of some of the archival collections that can be accessed through the California Digital Library, and the next slide also continues this list. I should caution outsiders that, at the moment, access is through identification of the server as a University of California server. So you can get into the Digital Library, and you can view those collections that the general public can view, but if you’re looking for your own field, you may find proprietary journals are blocked to you unless you’re coming in from a University server. So anywhere on campus, you could access everything in these collections, or almost everything, but you couldn't from Sweden or Norway. And we will soon move to a password protection, so that our own students and faculty can access from off-site, which they currently cannot do unless they use a proxy server at a University site.
To move on, a very recent initiative is the University of California Television Broadcasting. This is a good example of serendipity, in this case prompted by federal regulations. The United States government, through the Federal Communications Commission, mandated last summer that direct broadcast satellite services make 4% of their broadcasting channels available for public service broadcasting. The University had been thinking for many, many, many years about the wisdom of having a University of California television station. And each of our campuses has some programming, which typically is put up on local cable broadcasting. The University of California at San Diego, however, has a low power TV station. That put us in the position of entering the competition to be one of the 4%. Because of commercial consolidation, there are really only two direct broadcasting companies in the United States now, Dish TV and DirectTV, and they each have between 300 and 500 stations. So 4% of that means there are somewhere between a dozen and twenty stations available for public service broadcasting. Furthermore, many current broadcasters, CSPAN comes to mind, qualify as public service broadcasters. So the competition for a broadcasting slot was really for very few new slots that would be made available.
Leveraging the San Diego ability to be on the air and to provide robust broadcasting that would meet federal requirements in a very short order, we prepared an application for a TV station. We were awarded it on December 20th. On January 7th, the federal deadline, we began broadcasting eight hours of programming, plus 16 hours of information, just words scrolled across the screen about all kinds of issues. There’s our station number up, it’s channel 9412, a number we would like to reduce somewhat. But the 9 signifies the public service, I think, on this particular provider. Furthermore, in going through this commercial broadcaster, we get to them through a satellite from which anyone with a dish can get our broadcasting for free without going through the service provider satellite.
This came upon us so fast that we really didn’t build it into our strategic thinking about academic initiatives. We’re really forming the governance and the planning as we speak. We do think we can use some of the broadcasting time, for example the wee hours of the morning, to meet some of our mandates for impacting K-12 education, so teacher training courses and other instructional materials could be broadcast during non-prime hours. We will create a governance structure to decide policy that surrounds the programming we create.
Moving on to something of more direct interest, perhaps, to this group, President Atkinson believes that the time is right for some coordination of instructional technology developments on the campuses. The situation right now in the University could be best described, as I think it is in many universities, as being in the ‘let one thousand flowers bloom’ stage. The people who use that metaphor probably forget what happened to the one thousand flowers in China. But the question remains, is the time right for some coordination of what is happening? In particular, within this university system, that means helping the faculty who are engaged in the introduction of new technologies into their teaching, helping them leverage their efforts across campus boundaries. This, I believe, is actually a proper role for a system-wide administration, not to create yet another office of instructional development, an 11th system-wide office, that’s the responsibility of the campuses. But we know from conversations that some of our faculty are finding all kinds of barriers to exporting their courseware or their course tools within the University of California, not to mention outside the University of California.
So we are planning, and my vision is to build from those faculty communities of interest across the University, perhaps by discipline, so that people can share their efforts and begin the process of thinking about using the instructional expertise of one of our faculties on one campus to improve the teaching in the same discipline at another campus of the University. It’s kind of a revolutionary idea even within a single university system, very much an experiment. We’re thinking of building a searchable database that would be a University of California catalogue of faculty efforts that the faculty could consult, and where community conversations could take place. This is not a new idea; it’s taking place on a national level in the United States. Engineers have built a needs database, housed here at Berkeley, that involves the national engineering community. But we may build a UC site, which then would link into national efforts.
Life-long learning at the University of California has traditionally been largely a responsibility of University Extension. And, of course, we have 10 University Extensions, each pursuing their own vision, each with their own unique character. Berkeley’s CMIL, Center for Media and Independent Learning, has a site that you can visit. There are nine other sites for the other nine campuses of the system. As previous speakers have mentioned, the question of commercialization of university teaching is one very much on everybody’s table. And I believe the time has come in the University to have a conversation about what the University’s position as a whole ought to be with respect to commercialization of its instruction. Now, Extension is self-supporting, but Extension is really not organized as a commercial competitor to the University of Phoenixes of this world. The University of California and each of the campuses of the University has a rather valuable trademark, and the University of California is the overarching trademark. So I think the time has come to begin conversations about collaboration in this effort, particularly as we consider the question of commercialization. I don’t know what the outcome will be. We may well decide that this is not the role of the University. But the conversations are beginning, as they are everywhere else.
I hope that despite the title, the Organization of Instructional Technology at Research Universities, I haven’t painted a picture of the disorganization of instructional technologies. But that’s the reality of the diversity of efforts and stages within the University.
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