The Red Balloon Project

Listen to George L. Mehaffy, Vice President for Academic Leadership and Change, AASCU, introduce the Red Balloon Project here:

Introduction to the Red Balloon Project from John Hammang on Vimeo.

And read this article from Inside Higher Ed about this Red Balloon Project.


And finally an excerpt taken from the AASCU web site:

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The Academic Affairs Meeting and the year-long Red Balloon Project will focus on a set of key questions. How can we:

Lower Costs

1. Maximize cost-effectiveness (either hold costs constant while increasing the number of students involved, or reduce costs)
2. Make programs scalable (increase the number of students served while reducing per-student costs)

Increase Participation

1. Create more effective student engagement. Engagement is the key to greater learning outcomes
2. Produce greater learning outcomes documented by a rich array of instruments and assessment strategies

Respond to the Challenge of Technology

1. Focus on the development of 21st century skills to create 21st century learning and leadership outcomes
2. Rethink teaching, learning, and faculty roles

"There is a good deal of discussion about the outcomes needed for a 21st century college graduate. However, absent from the dialogue so far is much attention about how we might reorganize our institutions to achieve these results. For chief academic officers, the core question is about how to create effective and long-lasting institutional change."
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Now that you have the context, I can make my comments.

I like this idea a lot. Can we really get "outside the box" without people kicking and screaming saying "we've always done it this way and it worked for me!" How far outside the box can we go? Will we spend enough time really getting our ears around our future students and those faculty and staff heavily involved in leveraging the technology in teaching and learning? Success lies in a stretch between what people will tolerate and how imaginative we can be!!

I'm particularly interested and curious about how to respond to the "challenge of technology." Most Provosts have had a teaching and an administrative career that didn't include a lot of experience in leading or leveraging technology, particularly today's technology. So is it possible without the experience, language, vision, and current skill set that has leveraged a lot of today's technology, can the conversation get out there far enough? How exposed are Provosts to the future students to know when or if their imagination is taking them far enough to meet the future on the mark? This requires LOTS of listening and a very open mind, not alone imagination when you consider today's student and the student soon to come to college.

And while the CIO has in the last 10 years made it's way in the organization as one of the top executives, can a majority of the CIOs speak to the instructional design processes of effectively leveraging the technology for teaching and learning? Being a techie myself and saying this affectionately, most of them are geeks but teaching and learning with technology requires a different dimension.

I understand that people can lead without being in the weeds of an organization; however, I really think that new formations of higher education organizations are key to making change in order to get more voices with experience in teaching with technology at the top or at least heavily involved in the top-level conversations. I don't know how to change the organization but I do know that "Academic Technologies" or rather "Instructional Technologies" have exploded in the last 10 years. Working within a large state university system, I can see very clearly how people who have been involved in these areas (or perhaps I should say the LACK of people who are available to support these areas) are frequently very dysfunctionally scattered across the institution and in very small numbers which makes big impact difficult. Dartmouth talked about their TRIP project whereby they brought together learning technologists, librarians, and media specialists to support the faculty as a team rather than scattered resources and individuals in different departments in different locations. You can read about this in the EDUCAUSE ECAR article, "Moving Beyond the Org Chart."

There is no uniform "SATO - Senior Academic Technology Officer" in higher education organizations (taken from the EDUCAUSE article "Rethinking Academic Technology Leadership in an Era of Change") to represent this still exploding area of academic technologies on campuses. Some campuses, for example, have NO instructional designers to support faculty in implementing technology in teaching and learning. Shouldn't a Provost recognize that hole in their organization? It seems so glaringly behind the times, about 5 to 10 years. And yet with budget cuts, who is going to create a new area to do this? And regardless of the growth in academic/instructional technologies, most institutions have cut uniformly across the organization rather than consider to hold steady or add support to this area. I understand that there is no money available but priorities and organizations can be changed without cash flow. Who will have the courage to upset the apple cart and "just do it!?" Get a SATO so someone near the top of the organization can focus consistently and over time on the key set of questions stated above in the AASCU Red Ballon Project.

-Kathy