AcademyOne designs, develops and hosts innovative websites, portals, mobile applications and widgets for all education providers, including higher education, government agencies, high schools, vocational schools, corporate universities, and a variety of specialized organizations and consortiums. The company powers a shared education cloud bridging distributed data systems with loosely coupled technologies.
From the beginning of my post college career and employment journey I have been involved in several “technology integration” projects. Perhaps it was the timing of my graduation in the early 1990’s during the dawn of the great Internet Age or just simply being a student of philosophy and my desire to find employment in areas that furthered knowledge by employing new and creative methods and processes to expand and develop knowledge.
ReplyDeleteMy job at AcademyOne has brought me closer to that desire than in any of my previous jobs. Here I am in immersed in an entrepreneurial environment that is naturally very much engaged in business and marketing strategy but simultaneously focuses its entrepreneurial eye on higher education delivery and administration. This is my first position in working for a “for-profit” entity. I’ve worked for public and nonprofit entities such as the Corporation for National Service, two post-secondary institutions, the City of Philadelphia, the State of Pennsylvania, the School District of Philadelphia, the United Way, and the Department of Defense among others.
I find it interesting that in my career the work of furthering knowledge, expanding opportunity and access and reinventing education delivery has occurred most directly in a for-profit, entrepreneurial entity.
Another important observation I have made in my career is that many times organizations that introduce information technology to their business processes will simply use that technology to replicate existing paper or machine based processes. Post implementation, stakeholders will inevitably wonder why nothing has changed except that maybe they’re producing the same results quicker.
To illustrate here are some examples from higher education. We move from a paper based admissions, enrollment and advising systems to web based systems. We enroll more students faster, we advise them regularly on schedule and more students graduate on time. Great news right?
Did we expand learners’ knowledge? Did we improve curriculum? Did we strengthen faculty? Did we advance pedagogy? Did new and innovative relationships emerge? Did learners and faculty further social, intellectual and economic development?
Do we even have the means or agree upon the standards to measure these things? If not why not? And let’s get started.
Another common example. We replace brick and mortar facilities with online classrooms and course libraries. Again moving everything flesh, paper, plastic, wood, concrete and slate to cyber, avatar, online, web based, silicon and dot.edu. But again what have we fundamentally changed?
I am not arguing for or against web-based streamlining of administrative systems nor am I stating a position in favor of or opposed to online learning. What I am saying is there is so much more for us to try, to change, and to experiment with using technology, especially information technology.
Now is as promising a time as ever for looking at information technology in education with new eyes, and having higher expectations from it and demanding more. Not being and automotive engineer doesn’t prevent us from imagining our dream car. Not having a degree in software engineering or computer science should not prevent society from expecting and demanding more sophisticated and broader applications of information technology.
Commenting of the status of higher education in the United States, President Obama in his February 24th, 2009 address to Congress said, “In a global economy, where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity. It is a prerequisite. Right now, three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma, and yet just over half of our citizens have that level of education. We have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized nation, and half of the students who begin college never finish. This is a prescription for economic decline, because we know the countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow. That is why it will be the goal of this administration to ensure that every child has access to a complete and competitive education, from the day they are born to the day they begin a career. That is a promise we have to make to the children of America.”
I believe imagining new uses and applications for information in higher education and across the entire education continuum – from cradle to grave will be an integral piece of keeping this promise.
Since the beginning of time perhaps technology was imagined and employed to save time, energy and resources as fundamental as human life. These are very basic uses and interpretations of technology and information technology. We are well beyond flint stone, wedges, pulleys, levers , assembly lines and punch cards.
After two-years of observing and engaging in educational entrepreneurship at AcademyOne, I can only imagine and hope it is the case for entrepreneurs across the globe that actively orchestrating technology for invention, creation and discovery of new knowledge frontiers is an everyday business.