Bit by Bit: Innovating at the Periphery to Extend Harvard's Core

Abstract

faculty instructional time is a critical resource at all universities, but particularly in a major research institution like Harvard. Operating on the periphery of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard’s division of Continuing Education is often at a disadvantage when attempting to recruit senior faculty. However, through its distance education program and its innovative use of technology, the Harvard University Extension School has been able to offer online some of the finest courses taught to the residential Harvard College students without making extraordinary demands on faculty. as a direct consequence the school is being repositioned from a peripheral role as Harvard's “evening school” for local area adults to one that is available 24/7 to a growing population of enthusiastic students around the world. as the program matures, it has gained visibility and high regard by a growing number of senior faculty and by the central administration. This paper describes how Harvard Extension School’s distance education model has evolved over the past ten years using the innovation life cycle methodology1, and illustrates how case studies inform the development of the program. ContinUing HigHer eDUCation review, Vol. 72, 2008 163 InnOVATInG AT THE PErIPHErY TO EXTEnd HArVArd'S COrE ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT Harvard University is decentralized, with authority distributed among the central administration and the 14 schools that comprise it. the president and provost are at the administrative core of the university, and if there is one unit that is its academic core, it would be the faculty of arts and sciences (FAS), which includes Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), and the division of Continuing Education (dCE), of which the extension school is a part. the degree of decentralization ensures a certain measure of independence on the part of the different schools; at the same time, for smaller units like DCe, it can mean operating on the margins of the parent institution. However, every unit of a major research university such as Harvard is mindful of its responsibility to maintain the school’s values in everything that it does, and a commitment to academic excellence is of primary importance. Established a century ago as an “experiment in popular education,” the Extension School was charged with using its resources to benefit the local Boston-area community by making it possible for nontraditional students to receive a liberal education. By maintaining a policy of open enrollment and affordable tuition, the extension school has remained faithful to President Lowell’s original vision. For the most part, the Extension School has reflected the orientation of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, offering courses primarily in the liberal arts. Comparatively recently, the school has introduced professional courses in disciplines such as computer science, management, environmental management, educational technology, and journalism in order to respond to student demand. With the advent of distance education technologies, the scope of President Lowell’s vision has been extended to include a global audience. DISTANCE EDUCATION AT HARVARD EXTENSION Although invited to do so, Harvard University did not take part in the higher-ed “dot-com” revolution of the 1990s in a meaningful way, at least not on a broad institutional level.2 This is perhaps due to both Harvard’s decentralized structure in which individual schools decide what works for them, and the fact that faculty are highly autonomous with respect to their teaching responsibilities. By the same token, individual units have a certain freedom to experiment with technology provided that they stay within their own budgets and do no harm to the Harvard brand. 164 ContinUing HigHer eDUCation review, Vol. 72, 2008 Harvard dCE’s mission contains a commitment to “experimenting and innovating with courses and teaching techniques that enhance the learning of non-traditional students.” Within dCE, the Harvard Extension School in particular has a tradition of embracing technology not only to improve and to complement the learning process, but also to make possible the delivery of its courses to what we today call “distance students.” Such efforts began in the 1950s, when the Extension School offered courses via educational radio and television, and continued in the 1960s when courses were presented via kinescope to US navy personnel on board Polaris submarines. During the fall semester of 1997, the extension school carried out a controlled experiment in which a computer science course—“Communication Protocols and Internet Architectures”—was offered to both local and geographically distant students who were unable to attend lectures in person.3 The format of that course remains as the template for the majority of courses offered since that time: the instructor’s lectures are recorded and digitized, and relevant materials (blackboard illustrations, slides, in-class video, etc.) are integrated with streaming audio and video for on-demand access through a web browser. An example from the “Communication Protocols” course is shown below; the PowerPoint slides on the right-hand side are synchronized with the audio/video presentation that appears on the left. InnOVATInG AT THE PErIPHErY TO EXTEnd HArVArd'S COrE ContinUing HigHer eDUCation review, Vol. 72, 2008 165 Building on this initial success, courses offered during the next five years (1997-2002) were primarily in computer science for the following reasons: broadband Internet bandwidth was extremely limited; our production and delivery infrastructure was crude and occasionally unreliable; and the computer science student pool, comprised mainly of experienced hardware and software engineers, could provide much of its own technical support and was accustomed to receiving feedback via email. Within a relatively short period, the distance education operation attracted attention. in 1999, a technology writer for the Boston Globe wrote favorably about the Extension School’s early efforts in a feature story, “Plugging in to the Electronic Campus.”4 internally, the central administration, through the Office of the Provost, funded a study co-conducted by one of the authors that centered on two questions: How fast should the program grow? in what ways was online education transforming teaching and learning at the Extension School? Evaluation results showed clearly that faculty and students received the program well, and the growing percentage of students who were participating exclusively online proved that Extension school students were becoming comfortable with teaching and learning in virtual environments. The report helped sharpen the vision for a multi-year process of strengthening the distance program by recommending that DCe focus on pedagogy and evaluation research, as well as continue to develop student-centered tools to enhance the online learning experience.5 By 2003, the production process had become more sophisticated, as professional videographers replaced part-time student help, and the production and delivery platforms were reengineered to become stable enough to permit scaling up. Administratively, the school developed a system for online course evaluations and a method for compiling distance education student demographics through online surveys. By that point, dCE was prepared to invest heavily in infrastructure and personnel. renovated space created a professional environment for production, research and development, and allowed for staff expansion. Between 2004 and 2007, these investments paid off in the form of a rapid increase in the number of online courses offered: InnOVATInG AT THE PErIPHErY TO EXTEnd HArVArd'S COrE 166 ContinUing HigHer eDUCation review, Vol. 72, 2008 InnOVATInG AT THE PErIPHErY TO EXTEnd HArVArd'S COrE THE HARVARD COLLEGE DISTANCE EDUCATION INITIATIVE As the IT production and delivery infrastructures became stable and sophisticated, and we learned that students and faculty were satisfied, the challenge was to attract more of Harvard’s senior faculty to take advantage of our increased capacity. Over the years, various Harvard College faculty had expressed interest in teaching for the extension school, but many felt that they could not afford the time to teach an additional course in the evening. In a brainstorming conversation we came up with a simple solution to this seemingly intractable problem: If Harvard faculty did not have the time to come to us, could we go to them? in other words, could the same course that was offered during the day to Harvard College undergraduates be offered simultaneously online to extension school students? to test this idea we sought a suitable faculty member, i.e., someone who was tenured, well-respected, and interested in expanding his teaching to new audiences using digital technologies.6 in the fall, 2000, Professor H. t. Kung, the william gates Professor of Computer science and electrical Engineering, agreed to offer his CS-143 course, “Computer networks,” to an online extension school audience. as a world-renowned authority on computer networks, Prof. Kung had been experimenting with distributed 1998-99