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resources | hopper, 1996

Educational Academic Projects on the Electronic Frontier:
How Can they survive and thrive there?
 
Mary E. Hopper, Ph.D., Visiting Scientist (Expected to Start Jan. 97)
Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

[Submitted to Spenser Foundation 1996.]

Introduction
 
The goal of this research will be to determine how the managers of educational academic computing projects on the World Wide Web (WWW) obtain the resources they need to support their work. Particular attention will be given to comparing the degree to which different approaches depend upon external resources over time. Better descriptions of approaches for supporting projects could improve the chances that new projects using the WWW will establish an adequate stake for education on the electronic frontier by surviving and becoming soundly entrenched in the developing infrastructure.
 
It is clear that large grants may not be the best way to support projects on the WWW, although the majority of well known projects in the past were supported by the US. Department of Defense (Office of Technology Assessment, 1988), the computer industry or other groups (Committee on Academic Computation for the 1990's and Beyond, 1990). At this time of fiscal frugality, it is unwise for the academic computing community to unquestioningly leave itself in the hands of groups intent on balancing budgets. In addition, past projects developed with grants often produced demonstrations that achieved critical acclaim among experts, then faded from existence or receded to niches to be used by small audiences. Participants from well known projects indicate that there have been critical organizational issues preventing academic computing projects from prospering (Trollip, 88; Stewart, 1989; Landow, 1989; Kemeny, 1990), but systematic studies of these "behind the scenes" issues are difficult. For example, one of the goals of EDUCOM's "101 Success Stories of Information Technology in Higher Education: The Joe Wyatt Challenge" ( Boettcher, 1993) was to capture some of the resource issues of information technology projects in higher education, but the goal was declared "too ambitious" because the information was "not sufficiently detailed or consistent" . If critical organizational issues do not become widely understood and addressed, new projects on the WWW could meet the same fate as earlier projects and forfeit their stake in the global electronic infrastructure.
 
Some complex organizational issues were documented by a qualitative study of a few key projects that emerged during a wave of funding in the 1980's. The study, performed by the author of this proposal, examined how issues from older projects became intertwined with unique problems that emerged in distributed computing environments (Hopper, 1993). Interviews with 19 key participants and information from documents were used to analyze the relationships between the educational goals, technical characteristics, and organizational contexts of these projects:
 
The following projects, organizations and participants were the focus of this study:
 
Project: ESCAPE (HyperCard and HyperNews)
Organizations: Educational Research and Information Systems (ERIS, Purdue)
Participants: Hopper, Lawler, LeBold, Putnam, Rehwinkel, Tillotson, Ward
 
Project: TODOR (BLOX) & Mechanics 2.01 (cT, Athena)
Organizations: Athena and Academic Computing (AC, MIT)
Participants: Bucciarelli, Daly, Jackson, Lavin, Schmidt
 
Project: Physical Geology Tutor (AthenaMuse)
Organizations: Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI, MIT)
Participants: Davis, Kinnicutt, Lerman, Schlusselberg
 
Project: Context32 (Intermedia, StorySpace)
Organizations: Institute for Research and Information Scholarship (IRIS, Brown)
Participants: Kahn, Landow, Yankelovich
 
[See the Switchboard for further information.]
 

 
While there was relative agreement among participants in the study about educational and technical issues (Hopper, 1994), the factors related to organizational contexts were more critical than had been anticipated. The question which drew the most attention, but resulted in the least consensus among participants was the following:
 
"What were implicit or explicit support policies within the organization(s) which had an impact on courseware projects?"
 
Participants focused on the challenge of obtaining resources on a continuous basis because projects were characterized by event driven delivery and modification going on simultaneously and ended with the discontinuation of either process. Development and delivery were complementary and interdependent because when projects were not used, they fell from disuse to "unusability. Authors needed to acquire the resources upon which regular delivery and maintenance depended, so they established approaches for obtaining and managing information, technical, human and financial resources (Hopper, 1997). The dilemma was to find approaches to overcome the inherent lack of existing support for academic computing projects across the curriculum.
 
The centrality of organizational issues such as resources was unanticipated, and full exploration of this was beyond the scope of the study. Descriptions of key resources and approaches to acquiring them were documented, but more work remains to be done to understand the approaches, along with their strengths and limitations. A more complete understanding can be achieved through in depth study of the variety of old and new projects now on the WWW.
 
Methods
 
This study will systematically document how a variety of academic computing projects using the WWW obtain their critical resources. The study will document:
 

 
Participants
 
The participants will be 30 project managers of established educational computing projects that are available on the WWW. Ten (10) participants from each of the following three groups will allow comparisons to be made across institutions and situations.
 
Group 1 Projects which were funded and promoted five or more years ago and have been ported to the WWW without obtaining large amounts of new external resources. Projects from a prior study will be revisited (Hopper, 93) and other well established projects like Perseus (Crane, 1990), which were not included before, will be included this time. Access to the participants will be facilitated through prior association and referrals.
 
Group 2 Projects in existence for five or more years which received little publicity or funding and have been ported to the WWW without obtaining external resources. These will be identified by reviewing documents describing successful projects a few years ago, then contacting their authors to determine if they can be accessed and used on the internet today.
 
Group 3 Projects which are new, popular and highly rated on the WWW, but do not depend on external resources like large grants. These projects will be identified at the time of the study through sources such as popular search engines followed up through inquiry by e-mail and telephone.
 
Data Collection
 
Data will be gathered through structured "ethnographic interviews" (Spradley, 1979). Participants recollections during interviews will be used to construct descriptions of the approaches used to support projects. Interviews are necessary to establish the type of relationship necessary to obtain information that the typical participant will not have the inclination to share through an impersonal written survey. The interviews will be electronically recorded, transcribed, edited and then divided into the "vignettes" which will serve as primary data. As the research progresses, the researcher may recontact participants to clarify issues and obtain more data. Published and unpublished documents will also be obtained before, during and after interviews. These will be catalogued and serve as supplementary data because they are easy to access for immediate follow-up data clarification. This will compensate for the limited access to data sources afforded by interviews (Borg & Gall, 1989). The researcher will also attempt to arrange to incorporate data from other surveys such as the "Joe Wyatt Challenge."(Boettcher, 1993) Finally, quantitative data regarding the "vital statistics" of the projects will be gathered (i.e. number of users, age of project, number of employee hours or amount of grants).
 
Data Analysis
 
A relational database will be used to store and analyze the text and numerical data. The database will include the researcher's working notes that will guide the data collection and analysis process. These notes will become more systematic as the data is collected and analyzed, and will evolve into a catalog of key themes cross-referenced to the data. The explanations provided by participants from their "expert" perspectives will provide the basis for "grounded theory" about key factors in the acquisition of resources for projects (Marshall and Rossman, 1989). When numerical data are available across projects, statistical summaries will be used to provide concrete support for explanations of how projects obtain and manage resources.
 
Summary
 
This study will describe different approaches for obtaining resources to support educational academic computing projects and document their strengths and weaknesses, such as the degree to which they depend upon external resources. The findings of this study will be disseminated to other projects through professional publications and presentations. Managers of educational computing projects will be able to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches when they are making their decisions about how to deal with their own projects and prepare themselves for the problems that are most likely to occur with their approaches. While the initial purpose of the electronic database will be to address the research at hand, it will be reusable and expandable. Thus, another outcome of this study will be the establishment of an initiative to longitudinally document the educational, technical and organizational contexts of projects. This resource would be used to study the change in the educational or technical nature of projects over time, in addition to providing information regarding their organizational issues.
 
© Mary E. Hopper [MEHopper] | MEHopper@TheWorld.com [posted 00/00/00 | revised 02/02/02]