It is no argument that modernizing at any institution is a learning curve. In this month's Top of Mind podcast episode: "From Butler to Enabler: How IT Services Empower Teaching and Learning," Alison Robinson, associate vice president and deputy CIO of the Division of Information and Technology Services at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, joins host, Elizabeth Farrell in discussing this curve; specifically, the role technology teams play in enabling teaching and learning. For Robinson, enabling and supporting mean two different things, and the difference represents that change in modernizing your IT organization. Your IT department can serve as either a butler—you need a tool, and I'll bring a tool—or as a partner—specializing in service management.
It is no argument that modernizing at any institution is a learning curve. In this month's Top of Mind podcast episode: "From Butler to Enabler: How IT Services Empower Teaching and Learning," Alison Robinson, associate vice president and deputy CIO of the Division of Information and Technology Services at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, joins host, Elizabeth Farrell in discussing this curve; specifically, the role technology teams play in enabling teaching and learning. For Robinson, enabling and supporting mean two different things, and the difference represents that change in modernizing your IT organization. Your IT department can serve as either a butler—you need a tool, and I'll bring a tool—or as a partner—specializing in service management.
Hello, and welcome to the October episode of Tambellini Group's Top of Mind Podcast. I'm your host, Liz Farrell. In this episode, we're talking about the role technology teams play in enabling teaching and learning. And I couldn't think of a more perfect guest to discuss this with Alison Robinson who serves as associate vice president and deputy CIO of the division of information and technology services at California Polytechnic state university in San Luis Obispo. Now, Alison has served in this role at Cal Poly for nearly four years, transforming the institution's IT division to a modern service-based model, leading an ongoing cloud transformation, and spearheading the move to a new cloud-based LMS system. These are just a few of the areas where Alison has a lot of expertise having served in various technology leadership roles at the Universities of Maryland, South Florida, and Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Welcome, Alison.
Speaker 2:Hello, thank you for having me. Looking forward to our discussion.
Speaker 1:Yes, me too. Thank you so much for joining us. Before we dive in, I wanted to kick things off by setting the scene. Can you tell me just a little bit about your role in your institution?
Speaker 2:Sure. Cal Poly is approaching 22,000 students at our campus. Our motto is Learn by Doing, so we have a very hands-on engaged, pedagogy for our instruction. We have been named Best in the West, by U.S. News and World Report for approaching 30 years now. And, as an organization, we, um, just recently centralized our IT on campus. So we're a comprehensive enterprise IT organization, or we're growing into one at least. My role as associate vice president and deputy CIO is to run IT operations for campus. I came, as you mentioned, about being a cloud-forward campus and transitioning from our old kind of structured—by the technologies we serve—into an IT service management organization. And, we take a look at people, process, tools, and data to do that transition from those old structures to service management organization.
Speaker 1:That's great background. And I want you to tell our listeners a little bit more about this it service management model, because it's so relevant to what you did with the LMS systems. I was interested when you, when I initially proposed the topic of this podcast to you as supporting teaching and learning, you had said, I don't think that's the right way to describe it. It's more like we're enabling teaching and learning. Can you explain the difference between a supporting and enabling?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. So I think the difference between those two represents that change in modernizing your it organization. Um, I've done a version of this at three different institutions. It looks a little different each place because it's a framework, not a checklist. But I had once read research where it talked about, you know, the IT as a butler-of-service to campus as a model of IT thathas to go. It has to be about partnerships but it comes to the table with business. And the business is what needs to happen, and IT is how. And it's a dialogue and a partnership back and forth about how you make that happen. There may be things that the business wants, but technically it isn't possible until perhaps another project needs to be done. And that's the understanding of, you know, where do we want to get and how do we get there and that partnership of making that happen. Um, so, you know, I try and resist that being the Butler and I need a tool and we bring a tool. We try and look at this as, as you know, what are we trying to accomplish here? As a matter of fact, when you're becoming a service organization, the number one most strategic question, and what you do is who do you serve and what are they trying to accomplish? And I work with my teams on this and before they are more oriented to service organizations, I'll get things like tools like Linux. And I'm like, hmm. I mean, other than researchers, Linux is often a tool we need to provide service. It is not the actual service of what we provide and that's usually convert a little confusing to people. So I like to use the analogy of when you go into a restaurant, probably most everything on that menu, a spatula was used to make sure that could be delivered to you, that your hamburger could be delivered to you. But nowhere on that menu does it say spatula. So we need to separate those tools we need to provide what's on the menu. In our case, in IT, our menu as a service catalog. So that's one of my first focuses as well. If faculty and staff come to us and say,"Hey, what can I get?" Like our menu—our service catalog—should be easy to understand, common language, templated, clear as to who can use it, how you get it, and how it's supported. So those are usually some of my first focuses in these efforts to modernize and become a partner in it rather than a butler.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So then I'd like also when we had previously discussed that analogy, you had said, you never see spatula on a venue. You see beautiful descriptions of the foods you're getting and the ingredients, but not the tools that were used to make them then and taking that approach towards, towards faculty or any other groups you work with on campus is so important because of the, they don't necessarily need to know the work behind the services that you're providing, just how they're going to get them, as you said to goal. Um, so you had told me when you started at Cal Poly, your initial focus was moving the data center off premise and onto the cloud. And the second was creating the service model. So the IT don't regard themselves as these butlers or who are fulfilling wishes. And, but once those transitions were in hand, you had turned your attention to Cal Poly's LMS system. And can you talk a little bit about what you found?
Speaker 2:When I arrived, we were using an open source LMS that was being hosted on-prem. The equipment was aging. It was also heavily modified. So part of the cloud questions, you ask yourself, there's a lot of questions when you work with me. Um, one of the questions you ask yourself when you're moving the data centers, first and foremost, do we even need to do this anymore? Well, with an LMS. Yeah, we did. Secondly, doesn't have to be on-prem to be able to provide some things, have caching issues, for example. And it's just, it's not fast enough to be in the cloud and has to stay on campus. Certainly the LMS is not one of those situations and that's been well proven because there's many LMSs in the cloud to be had now.The third question I asked is what we're using today. What's best for us today and looking forward. So will it take us into the future? And honestly, there were some questions about whether this was the best thing to be for the campus to be using. So I, I run the, um, operationally run the governance groups for campus, and there's a learning or research work group. So we talk with them about, do you think this is what we need today going forward and started that conversation there. And, and they were interested because a number of, of the faculty that were in that committee had used other tools like Canvas before and said, that was a good question. We should explore that. We know that students have much higher expectations to engage with the LMS mobiley, for example. I mean, I've seen students on their phones doing math work, not reading, like actually doing. I couldn't, of course. I'm Gen X. So, I have very different expectations around mobile engagement in the LMS. And all of us are concerned about accessibility and there definitely on the market now, things that are far more accessible. So we took a look at the gaps between what they like and what they currently have. And, the answer was maybe it doesn't serve us as much, but see, let's explore this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think that, you know, often now in the post March, 2020 era probably seems like the most obvious thing in the world to move from an on-premise to cloud-native LMS system, for those issues of, you know, secure security, scalability, and just the general ease of use and updates the functionality. But you started this process, as you mentioned earlier in fall 2018. And even today, those advantages and benefits, um, aren't necessarily understood by faculty or other instructors. Um, so how did you go about working with your peers on the other side of the fence to determine what direction that they wanted to go in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so again, the governance group was one of my primary places to work. There's also a Center for Teaching and Learning Technology Group that supports faculty and what they do. Very, very hands-on. They're almost, if you look at it in tiers and supportive IT, they're more tier one and directly engage with faculty. So it was important. They have membership on this faculty committee as well. And so there's a well-rounded, um, discussion of, of a change here and the impacts. And is it important? So we literally there, I said, is it meeting your now needs now, now and will into the future? And it's really important to ask that second question, because is it meeting your needs today? Yes. Right. People were functioning on it. I wasn't having an outcry from campus to say time to change LMS, but I knew I had technical risk in aged infrastructure and fear of some of our stuff's starting to fail, not sure that it would continue to scale as more faculty came on board. So I knew from a technical perspective, we had to look at something. So, but when, when you asked that second question about, and will it take you into the future that starts changing the focus and with systems as big as this, you really do have to look into the future. And, when we got done with exploring that question as a faculty governance group, they said, yeah, we should look at something different. And they, they were interested in replacing the tool, but they were also interested in, you know, the, the new features and functions, the people process tools, you know, how would this modernizing the environment? And they were very interested in that.
Speaker 1:You had also mentioned there had been some pushback to that, even though you had a lot of people on board, um, you know, when you were asking those questions about will this take us into the future? Can you talk about a little bit of that, the skepticism around that?
Speaker 2:You know, it's interesting because I have certainly had technical projects with pushback. This did not, this project did not feel like that. I had some good questions that, and that's fair. It's always fair to question. For example, you know, people didn't understand the magnitude of the equipment it takes to run this, you know, the question was, could we just buy a new server? And so I knew that I had a gap between people's understanding of what it took to run this versus the reality of what it did. So I said to the CIO, you have you have a problem with, I do a little bit of videotaping in the, in the data center. So I literally walked in and you go through a door and it goes from me talking to you all of a sudden, this rush of the air conditioning and all the electrical, and went in and said, you know, this, this is what we're talking about is the infrastructure that's aged. And this is why I'm asking us, will this take us into the future? Because these four racks of equipment with all the lights flashing and backups and duplication and, you know, the humming of the ups and the air conditioner, I said, this infrastructure isn't needed if we move to the cloud. So this is a great time to ask, do the work, to get new equipment here, do the work, to move it to the cloud, or take time to look for a new LMS, but even moving it to the current to the cloud meant there was going to be work. Changing systems meant there was going to be work. I asked which work is more productive for you. And so I guess that resonated, I understand it got a little more airplay on campus than I had expected. Um, but at the end of the day, um, we, we came forward and we started with that in the fall of 2018. And I believe we got funding. The summer of 2019 was when we started the implement procurement implementation process.
Speaker 1:I love that creative approach of let me go in sort of be this, this Gonzo journalist and in the, the surveyor server room, showing them physically with that involved. And as you mentioned, it seemed to resonate and sort of went viral in its own way on campus, which I think shows sometimes you need that visual just to, um, make it clear to people. And it seems like after that you got, um, but the approval and the buy-in from everyone who may have just been asking that question, like, why can't we just keep the system and why can't we just keep it, build more servers or buy more servers or anything like that. But then, so since you had started that, um, can you tell us where you were at when, when the pandemic hit and this process?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Cal Poly is on quarters. And so when, when the pandemic hit for us in terms of many semester schools, we're well into the flow, probably somewhere around spring break, we were actually transitioning from our winter quarter to our spring quarter. So, you know, I was very lucky actually to get about two and a half weeks to make this transition. We had had a small, very small beta group in the winter quarter, and we're going to make it a little bit bigger in the spring quarter, but as we rolled forward, everybody go home and we're going to do this from home. I worked with leadership on campus and said, if you're going to use an LMS, I want you to go ahead and use Canvas, not our past system that is eventually going to go away. And I'm not sure it's going to scale to the size we would need between you and me and everybody in this podcast. It would've never taken the whole load. Our on-prem, would've never taken the whole load of demand for LMS. So we went from a couple hundred people in the Canvas LMS beta group and provisioned. I think the number was around 27,000 people into canvas, all the courses, all the enrollments. And so no one had to ask. It was just there. And we got that done. I mean, that didn't take two and a half weeks. That was, that was tech that was done. We just had the change to parameters to the entire enterprise and, and made that happen. And so we were ready to go for spring quarter with every course that was being offered on Canvas.
Speaker 1:What I think must be particularly vindicating about that is it sounds like asking that question of, you know, not only is this working for you now, but will it serve us in the future, puts you in a great position to be well prepared for this time because the future abruptly became the present. But instead of gradually adding more beta testing groups, as you mentioned, you had to add about 20,000 users. How did that go?
Speaker 2:Like, I don't know if you heard him of theft snap of the fingers, honestly, that, you know, we're enterprise and a service organization focuses on automation because automation makes things happen consistently and gated at the time it is supposed to happen. So we had built the integration to move the course information from our student information system into canvas. We just had to do that at a bigger scale. So, you know, it wasn't like we sat down and began creating that process. That was something we built as we implemented, um, the, the LMS and it was ready to go. Yes, I like to say, you know, there's professional knowledge and experience meets serendipity, right? Well, the timing was perfect. The story could have been very, very different, but just with how things went forward and driving that future forward, looking not currently, but future, what do we need to accomplish? You know, opportunity met preparation and it was a good thing.
Speaker 1:And, there was another serendipitous occurrence that you had mentioned before about these virtual labs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we were working on it. You know, the power of cloud allows for you to scale. You consume the resources that you need when you need them. And so one of the things we were looking into was building up the virtual computer lab at Amazon Web Services, that's where moving our data center. And so we had had a beta that we had run with building out the virtual computer lab. We had worked with a couple of faculty members on some statistical packages that their classes used in kind of beta testing to see how this goes. So in, when we were all told to go home, I was in that leadership meeting and, and it was communicated to deans that if there's any aspect of a course where a student needs to come to campus to complete the coursework, we're not going to be able to offer that course. Well at a Polytechnic, you think of CAD and GIS and MATLAB, and all those kinds of technologies that enable a stem education. We're in a physical computer lab. And I said, okay, well, we've got this virtual lab and we tested it out with a couple of faculty member. You need software in that virtual lab to conduct class. You're going to need to let me know we're going to set up a process. We're going to reach out to you. I might need help some help with prioritization, but we're going to work on this. Now that two and a half weeks was hardly long enough to do everything, but we got the biggest demand things built in, in there and available, um, those that within that first week or so in that class, the classes had started. And so, yes, we ended up that, that technology saved us from having to cancel a number of classes. And of course that's important for students to be able to continue their education and graduate on time. That's important for the revenue streams of the university. And, um, so we, we were very, very fortunate that one was a little more nerve-wracking. We went from a couple hundred there to 7,000 as well. But at that scale, Canvas is well-tested at very large universities, this was something we built. So we're like, and we had to learn a couple of lessons along the way, um, students who had poor network conductivity, uh, they didn't have the best experience. Things could be jerky to almost too frustrating to work with. But if you had good conductivity, you know, that we, we used it, it was used heavily the whole time we were remote.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Especially being a, as you mentioned, uh, heavily focused on stem education with all those engineering courses and other things that require that type of software that the virtual labs allow. But I'm curious to hear about how this was for faculty, because they are being asked to embrace a lot of change quickly. And even though they understand why, um, it's not just a matter of scaling for them.
Speaker 2:Right. Right. No. And, and I have to say the faculty were incredible. They, they really stepped up to take seriously. The questions of is this the best of the future, the select it, when it came time that we went remote and we had to start using it, um, you know, we were just all in such a different place in life. It, it, it, it, there wasn't another option. We had to figure this out. So, you know, faculty were, we're working diligently. The whole world was demanding cameras at that time just to get them in and get them in the hands of the faculty and get they work to get it set up. Um, you know, when they first started, it was just, uh, getting used to being in front of the camera. Remember when there was no zoom, well, didn't use to that, to where we are now. And, and really I we've gone from, in front of a camera and just kind of trying to be comfortable too. I've got faculty with green screens behind them. It's like a little television studio. Um, we had a situation on campus where the provost enabled, um, those faculty that were comfortable, for example, for the, with the LMS to be in a lead role and support other faculty within their colleges and courses, and actually, you know, gave them the role and the expectation and a stipend to be able to support other faculty in this. People just really came together to figure out how to make the best of a very, very difficult situation. So I'm really proud of them. They, they, um, they grabbed it and they they're taking it next level.
Speaker 1:And I also understand you have a strong background in teaching. Uh, you had mentioned being one of the first, maybe even the first certified, computer science for...was it 405?
Speaker 2:It was a 405 license in the state of Wisconsin. I think I had to be one of the—maybe the top 10 in the state—to have had that license. It was very, very early on. So yes, I have both the technical I went on for my master's degree in computer science. So I have the content of computer science and I have the skills of how do you convey knowledge to another person? Like, how does that structure, what does that look like? And I think that's really served me well in my career in IT, because as a leader, you know, I have people and they need to deliver an outcome and you help structure what that outcome looks like. And you check along the way to make sure that's happening well, for those of you who teach, you know, I've just described curriculum, I've just taught assessment. Um, the finding outcomes, preparing students. And so those are some key, key things to teaching that served me well in it. And, uh, and so I know for example, the knowledge base and, and our service catalog, how important it is for those things to be written, not that other it, people can read it because that's not, who's reading those, it's our customers, it's an on a campus customer may not be the word, but really they are, there are faculty, there are our staff, there are students. And so to me, one of the first things in an it organization going into a service management organization is making sure you create this one front door to service and the information you need and the people who can help you are right there. You don't have to know who to call, or is it this number, or is it this email address, this number, this email address, this website, any one of those three will serve your needs. So that's a high focus on what, and what I, when I start undertaking these modernization efforts,
Speaker 1:I think having that understanding of what it's like to be in a classroom and teaching, um, even your, your background, you had mentioned, you've done a lot of fitness instructing your Walker teacher, you, um, you know, you're telling them about the tools they can use, like, um, cameras that will follow their voice around a classroom when they're doing hybrid and other things. Um, and another particularly, um, important insight that you mentioned to me, um, is, is understanding the difference between the online and the in-person pedagogy, um, of teaching rather in, in those two formats. And can you talk a little bit about that because you, in addition to being impressed with the faculty, took the tools and ran with them. You also mentioned to me, there was more of a thoughtful, not just technical understanding that they developed in a lot of their classes where they, their approaches and utilization of the tools, and even the formats of lectures or other type of learning engagement activities to meet that remote environment. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Speaker 2:Yes, I am. I am a walker-teacher. I was sure that when we were looking for webcams and classrooms, that it was one where the camera would follow the teacher, because I'm one of those that cannot stand still when I teach. So, so yeah, that's important to understand how people work and make sure the tools that we have enable how they work to the, to the, to the greatest extent possible, um, in a classroom and all the different types of teaching and learning that occur there. But yeah, I mean, initially everybody was just trying, okay, I've got this camera, is it running? Can I get logged into Canvas? How do I upload this? How do I start? You know, it was very much that level one, just, how do you make these things work? And that's what we had. We didn't have a long timeline to work with, but then people started figuring out how to use these tools to meet their pedagogy. Right. I remember one of our faculty in the dance department, um, did a video that she shared out with university on good stretches to do. When you're sitting in front of the Zoom all day, how could you get up instead of step away and in a two-foot space, do these stretches, right? I mean...
Speaker 1:I need that.
Speaker 2:But they all started, you know, they started thinking of others too, and helping them that way. But, but as they got comfortable with, yeah, I know how to do this, and this is there. Then, they could start changing. Maybe not even—our quarters are 10 weeks. And so that first 10 weeks was really, you know, making sure you got the content delivered, but people started thinking from their pedagogy and how could I be more creative in doing this? You know, in some cases it might be all this work that you have to read or do research before you come to the online lecture. And then there's very specific modules that are executed to, towards that. Pre-learning, you're there, it's very dependent on the pedagogy of the faculty member, but they started taking it to the next level. Now some, are always still kind of courses being learned by doing, and hands-on, they may not have taken that time because ultimately, you know, the best for them is to be back in the room where they teach in that lab, wherever doing those things, and certainly understand that as well, because there's a level of, we have to make sure that students can continue in their learning.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, these are obviously issues that you've given a lot of thoughtful consideration to, uh, as both an it leader and as a teacher yourself. And I was very interested to hear what you said when I asked you about lessons learned or takeaways you'd like to share, you said to me, I'm not sure what I've learned yet, which is very different than what I've heard from other people. When I asked this question, can you elaborate on that for our listeners?
Speaker 2:The question is hard for me because, because what time does is it gives you, and we're not, we're not out of this yet. You know, it, it still is very much a very tactical existence and it's hard to be strategic when you, you don't know what the end is going to look like. Right. Let me give you an example. We, we started with, uh, a testing compliance program in spring for students who were on campus at the time. And, um, that compliance program was making sure that you tested within the guidelines of what was required, or you actually didn't have access to campus resources until you were back in alignment with the testing requirement. Okay, well, summer comes and it gets a little quiet on our campus, but fall hits. Well, what happened from the end of spring to the summer is vaccinations. At least the age groups of our students, it was far towards the end of spring before they could get vaccinations. So now we don't want to do a testing program for those that are vaccinated. So the parameters that program changed so that everyone who was vaccinated could be exempted from the compliance program right away. So we know for example, boosters could be coming. We hear everyone, we hear risk categories. We're not quite sure that program could change again with coming back to campus. There's a faculty and staff component to this as well. So, you know, the bottom line is, is we just don't know what's coming next. And we don't know when it will enter, or what the end looks like. I liken it to when football players are doing drills, they're always supposed to be on the balls of their feet so they can go left right forward, back wherever they need to go. And right now we are just still standing on the balls of our feet waiting to go left or right. We're just not out of it yet out of the stage. So I'm really not sure what I've learned. I've decided not to answer that because my learning keeps changing. I call you when I know.
Speaker 1:I look forward to that, but I think it's a very honest and insightful answer. Um, and so were all of your observations and experience shared here? I'm sure they'll resonate with many of our listeners. So thank you so much for sharing that, Alison, and thanks so much for being our Tambellini Group Podcast guest today.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:Well, that concludes this month's episode of Tambellini's Top of Mind Podcast. Don't forget to check out our other episodes, blogs, and resources at thetambellinigroup. com.