Automation Chimera: Education Is Not Management

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Opinion

Automation Chimera: Education Is Not Management

7/2/2008

By Trent Batson

The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, security systems, utilities management systems, CRMs, business information systems, and other enterprise systems.

Automation: What's Good for Management is Not Always Good for Learning

But systems thinking and the drive to automation -- no matter how good the systems are for campus management -- create problems on the academic side. Human learning, because of individual differences in learning style, in pace of learning, in what clicks, because of the social aspect of learning, and because our understanding of learning can be distorted by quantification, is not amenable to automation.

Central computing often sets expectations on a campus for how computing should work, because administrators hope that a large investment in a large system will solve large problems, because of the influence of vendors who work with IT staff on campus to gain profit by creating automated monoliths, and because all faculty want to make their jobs easier and are therefore prone to embrace the promise of automation (we once thought that word processing would automatically improve student writing). Therefore, educational software becomes over-engineered and over-built.

Why Does Automation Work for Management Software?

Enterprise systems on campus succeed because a core group of people use the systems day after day and so know how to use the systems. Educational systems built like enterprise management systems don't succeed because faculty and students usually don't ramp up to that same level of skill and expertise, nor should they have to. Faculty may use a CMS or ePortfolio system in one course but not another; students may use them only occasionally. It is hard to deal with a large automated software system if you don't practice every day.

An even more fundamental problem with educational software built as an enterprise system is that no one chooses to use them for fun. This kind of system does not connect with the social energy around using interesting applications. They are the equivalent of very large textbooks.