Several years ago, when a school department I worked at was in its infancy, we realized we were having student-teacher communication issues. It wasn’t the style of communication that was a problem, it was the accessibility and speed. Our school’s Learning Management System included a communication tool that both students and teachers preferred to avoid (it reminds me of a lazy copy of Hotmail from 2001) and, when it was used, you often missed the message until the next day, which can be too late for important messages. The small group of our school’s leadership and instructors met to discuss the situation, assess limitations, and brainstorm potential solutions. From this meeting we identified that students required real-time communication with instructors outside of class hours, instructors needed privacy, and we would be moving forward without funding or support from the institution.
As with most post-secondary institutions, we would need to address complex internal systems before change could happen. Because our department was a small and new part of the institution, we often functioned in an entrepreneurial style to avoid these systems (Conway et al., 2017) rather than follow internal procedures. This made us agile in our adoption of technology for teaching, but also kept us outside of the internal systems that could support our work. In the case of our communication technology, we chose to move forward without involving any other departments in our process, including IT. Our feeling was that if we involved other departments, someone from every level of the institution would want to have a say in the process, thereby slowing things down to a point where we would be unable to help students in the short-term. What we needed was a tool that could be set up quickly to help keep our students learning and collaborating, not inter-departmental decision-making chaos that could slow progress to a crawl (Cormier, 2017). In that light, we saw our barrier as the internal processes that would slow things down and potentially result in the rejection of our plan altogether. This is not to say that our strategy was the best one, but it was the one that made me most sense at the time due to our lack of budget and time.
So what we needed was a real-time student-teacher communication solution that was affordable (free), easy to use (to avoid bringing IT in to support students), and could be easily managed by our team (again, to avoid outside involvement). Avoiding internal interference wasn’t difficult because all stakeholders were within our department, and those affected by the new technology would only be teachers and students. With these goals and limitations defined, we did what so many groups who want to stay under the radar do: we chose a tool and moved forward without a plan, hoping to refine as we went along. We chose a tool because it met our defined needs and that it was a common communication tool for the industry our students would be entering upon graduation. Our team set up an account, created domains for each course, and adapted our “plan” as we gained experience with the tool. Over time, we adopted naming conventions and established guidelines for student interaction, but the overall usage was open and adaptive based on the needs of each teacher. Some instructors used it almost exclusively, while others opted to avoid using it altogether due to concerns around work-life balance. The tool became a successful method of communication in our programs and, after using the tool for a few months, we discovered that other programs in our institution had been using the same tool without telling anyone. Eventually, our school couldn’t hide the tool any longer and the institution decided that our tool was not acceptable, and we would need to change to a different tool. In the end, our project was successful in that our defined needs were met on time and within budget, but there were issues relating to risk and quality that we would have addressed if we had done proper planning.
Because of our desire to stay under the radar and move quickly, we missed some critical issues. When it was discovered that we had been using this tool, we were informed that it did not provide the required security and that our agreement with Microsoft meant that we would be transitioning to Microsoft Teams. Though we saw our constraints as simply time and cost, we missed the constraint of secure communication and our institution’s software subscriptions. In time, our transition to Teams went smoothly, and our department was able to test it before COVID-19 brought it to the rest of the school. Despite our initial failings, our “do first, ask forgiveness later” approach gave us the opportunity to show the institution that real-time communication platforms provide a space for students to connect, communicate, and collaborate (Learning Technologies Task Force, 2014). Without this evidence, justifying the cost and internal resources to roll out a communication platform would have been incredibly difficult. I still use this method of trying new technology, assessing its effectiveness, and sharing it with others once its value has been proven. Through my experience in project management roles and getting my CAPM (Certified Associate in Project Management) I understand the need for a strong project plan, but as an instructor I feel that sometimes the planning can get in the way of actually helping students. The key is to understand the balance, and that only comes through trial and error.
References
Conway, R., Masters, J., & Thorold, Jake. (2017). From design thinking to systems change: How to invest in innovation for social impact. Royal Society of Arts, Action and Research Centre. https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/reports/rsa_from-design-thinking-to-system-change-report.pdf
Cormier, D. (2017, December 8). Our schools aren’t broken, they’re hard. Dave’s Educational Blog. http://davecormier.com/edblog/2017/12/08/our-schools-arent-broken-theyre-hard/
Learning Technologies Task Force. (2014). Strategic Framework for Learning Technologies. University of Calgary. https://www.ucalgary.ca/provost/sites/default/files/teams/1/final_lttf_report_gfc_june_2014.pdf
I see that your team considered the problem a tame solution with a rational and linear way to a solution. You could have made the problem wicked had you involved more stakeholders than necessary. I agree with your decision to keep the problem in communication within your department for this reason. I find it humorous that all the departments were secretly using the same communication platform! Great minds think alike.
Thanks, Emma. It is definitely pretty funny when you discover that a departments are secretly using the same tools, but it’s also a little frustrating that the organization’s culture can cause that kind of situation. It shows how the culture can have a huge impact on whether the organization fosters or stifles innovation.
We are in a similar boat as you David, at our institution.
We needed a way to communicate with students, and without clear guidance from IT support (they are overwhelmed with more pressing issues at the moment), we’ve had to improvise and use whatever technologies we can “just to make things work”. I wonder what will happen when the pandemic is over.
Will we still be able to use these technologies we’ve been using or will our grace period end and be forced to use some other technology? Like you say: “do first, ask forgiveness later”. 😉
I imagine there are quite a few in this boat right now. That might be the biggest challenge with “do first, ask forgiveness later” change… when someone finds out, you don’t know if your solution will be able to stay around. You can build so much around these solutions you’ve had to hide and then it might cause a lot of difficulty if you have to make major shifts. But it can also bring about some great innovation. Worth the risk, I say.