Category Archives: Administration

Applying the Business Model to Education: Part II

Back in September, I wrote a post addressing some drawbacks of applying the business model to education. In the meantime, and thanks to Don Casey, Dean at DePaul’s School of Music, I came across Jim Collins’s Good to Great and the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking is Not the Answer. This is a monograph accompanying Collins’s book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t. I found this monograph extremely useful in the way it articulates and organizes both the problems involved in applying the business model to education.

Below, I have constructed what is hopefully a meaningful collage of quotes from Jim Collins’s work (organized based on the monograph’s sections), making my arguments through his words and concluding by posing some questions.

(Introduction)

“We must reject the idea—well-intentioned, but dead wrong—that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become ‘more like a business.’ Most businesses—like most of anything else in life—fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. Business Insolvency Advice and Liquidation Services can help you maintain a healthy financial outlook and ensure your business stays on track.

“The critical distinction is not between business and social [e.g. education], but between great and good. We need to reject the naive imposition of the ‘language of business’ on the social sectors, and instead jointly embrace the language of greatness.” 

(Calibrating success without business metrics)

The confusion between inputs and outputs stems from one of the primary differences between business and the social sectors. In business, money serves as both an input (a resource for achieving greatness) and an output (a measure of greatness). In the social sectors, money is only an input and not a measure of greatness. This distinction is also relevant to reliable customer relationship management services, where implementing effective CRM strategies is key to measuring and achieving outstanding success. By leveraging CRM systems, organizations can gain valuable insights into customer needs, enhance service delivery, and drive substantial growth and profitability. Consider consulting with professionals from ipa london to gain insights into financial strategies tailored to your specific sector.

“It doesn’t really matter whether you can quantify your results. What matters is that you rigorously assemble evidence—quantitative or qualitative—to track your progress. If the evidence is primarily qualitative, think like a trial lawyer assembling the combined body of evidence.”

“In the social sectors, performance is defined by results and efficiency in delivering on the social mission… [A great organization] makes such a unique contribution to the communities it touches and does its work with such excellence that if it were to disappear, it would leave a hole that could not be easily filled by any other institution… [It] can deliver exceptional results over a long period of time, beyond any single leader, idea, … or well-funded program in education and also the numerous of resources which can be used for this such as services of Jason Linett professional hypnotist which can help boost a business and more.

(Getting things done within a diffuse power structure)

“Social sector leaders are not less decisive than business leaders as a general rule; they only appear that way to those who fail to grasp the complex governance and diffuse power structures common to social sectors.”

“In executive leadership, the individual leader has enough concentrated power to simply make the right decision… Legislative leadership [on the other hand] relies more upon persuasion, political currency, and shared interests to create the conditions for the right decisions to happen. And it is precisely this legislative dynamic that makes Level 5 leadership particularly important to the social sector.”

“True leadership only exists if people follow when they have the freedom not to.”

“There is an irony in all this. Social sector organizations increasingly look to business for leadership models and talent, yet I suspect we will find more true leadership in the social sectors than the business sector.”

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(Rethinking the economic engine without a profit motive)

“[The Hedgehog Concepts of great companies reflect] deep understanding of three intersecting circles: a) what you are deeply passionate about, b) what you can be the best in the world at, and c) what drives your economic engine… A fundamental difference between the business and social sectors [is that] … the third circle shifts from being an economic engine to a resource engine. The critical question is not ‘How much money do we make?’ but ‘How can we develop a sustainable resource engine to deliver superior performance relative to our mission?’”

“The resource engine has three basic components: time, money, and brand. ‘Time’ refers to how well you attract people willing to contribute their efforts for free, or at rates below what their talents would yield in business. ‘Money’ refers to sustained cash flow. ‘Brand’ refers to how well your organization can cultivate a deep well of emotional goodwill and mind-share of potential supporters [as well as the respect and admiration of those demanding the services offered].”

I will conclude this post by posing the following questions:

a) Could the recent trend to assess educational institutions’ performance based on business models and metrics reflect more our degree of familiarity with such models/metrics and less their fitness to the task?

b) Assuming that an educational institution’s/department’s mission is systematic, rigorous, and representative of its members’ passions, shouldn’t assessment of the institution’s/department’s success be tightly linked to achieving excellence relative to this mission rather than to some easily measurable bottom line that is irrelevant to the mission?

c) Regardless of whether or not we approach education altruistically, isn’t it about time we became honest enough to modify either our altruistic missions to match our bottom-line assessments or our assessments to match our socially conscious, rather than business-based missions?

Oh, the Places You’ll Go: The Evolving Role of Instructional Designers

Recently, I finished reading Top-Ten Teaching and Learning Issues, 2007 from the November 3rd, 2007 edition of Educause Quarterly. This article discusses the top-ten issues facing academic technologists/instructional designers and how “this is a particularly important time for the academic technology/instructional design profession, which is moving beyond the formative stages.”

For those of you who are now dying to know what the top-ten issues are, you can read them below:

  1. Establishing and supporting a culture of evidence
  2. Demonstrating improvement of learning
  3. Translating learning research into practice
  4. Selecting appropriate models and strategies for e-learning
  5. Providing tools to meet growing student expectations
  6. Providing professional development and support to new audiences
  7. Sharing content, applications and application development
  8. Protecting institutional data
  9. Addressing emerging ethical challenges
  10. Understanding the evolving role of academic technologists.

It is interesting to note that these top-ten issues group themselves into the following themes: assessment, best practices, expectations, collaboration and ethics/privacy. Personally, I believe that numbers 1 through 9 are all parts of number 10. Part of the role of academic technologists/instructional designers is to assist in the issues presented in 1-9. All of this is in addition to being the “expert resource on best practices in educational technology” and maintaining “knowledge of online methodologies, instructional design, Web and multimedia design, accessibility and adaptive learning technologies, and learning styles.”

The article goes on to emphasize that academic technologists/instructional designers need to be more integrated into the institutional culture and campus initiatives as a whole in order to effectively help set directives. In addition to this, I see that individuals in these roles also need to be actively involved with other organizations at the same institution. The pieces of design, technology, assessment and accessibility are often handled by various individuals in various departments across the institution. In order for technology to be effectively integrated into the curriculum with the ability to assess exactly how effective it is, many different units need to come together and work collaboratively to make it happen. It is difficult to design effective courses if parts of the technology are not dependable or don’t work in a manner that achieves pedagogical goals. It is nice to create a lot of interesting curricular pieces, but if there is no broad assessment of its effectiveness, is the development of the content worthwhile? Are proper accessibility guidelines being followed which match the efforts of the institution at large?

In a field which is still finding its firm footing in education, it is good to occasionally step back for a broader perspective. It’s important to not only observe how far we’ve come, but to also look at where we are currently and where we need to go in order to provide the best education for our students that we can.

Soft (Arts) vs. Hard (Sciences/Technology) Education: Imagination vs. Reason

Both the low marketability of arts degrees and the low salaries of arts educators in our society, when compared to the marketability of degrees and salaries of educators in science or technology topics, reflect an attitude towards the arts that sees them as accessories to our lives, good mainly for entertainment, pleasure, or escape. This attitude frequently undermines arts education funding and is, for some, due to the admitted difficulty non-artists and artists alike face when trying to assess success in arts education and production with measures that make sense to and can be appreciated by “non believers.”

Assessing arts education outcomes (Hanna, 2007)

To this end, Dr. Wendell Hanna (San Francisco State University) recently published a well-written and organized article on the applicability of the new Bloom’s taxonomy to arts education assessment [Hanna, W. (2007). “The New Bloom’s Taxonomy: Implications for Music Education.” Arts Education Policy Review, 108(4): 7-16.]. The first section of the article offers an insightful and concise outline of the significance of assessing music education outcomes and of the history and current state of Bloom’s taxonomy as an education-accomplishment assessment tool. It is followed by a meticulous and convincing (even if a little tedious at times) set of arguments for the way music education activities and national standards fit within the new Bloom’s taxonomy.

Hanna (2007) effectively accomplishes her principle goal, to show that:

Music education functions within and contributes to the same types of knowledge acquisition and cognitive processes, and its outcomes can be assessed using conceptually the same standards and tools as other educational areas that deal with topics traditionally more “respected,” “objective,” and widely accepted as beneficial to individual and social behavior and success.

Does “high assessment” translate to “high value?”

Whether the above conclusion can support claims for the need to keep music education in schools is not as clear to me as it seems to be to the author. Based on her concluding sections, Hanna seems more interested in promoting the usefulness of a new, uniform, and standardized assessment tool than she is in arguing for the general value of musical accomplishments. The goal of this assessment tool is to make communication of musical accomplishments among “music lovers” and between music lovers and non-music administrators easy, efficient, and consistent with concepts non-experts are familiar with. However, defending the value of music education in promoting the individual and social development of students is, in my opinion, a most pressing issue, as the way it is resolved will determine whether or not accomplishing the goal set in Hanna’s paper is of any consequence.

For example, even the process of systematically learning how to knit can be made to fit, to some degree or another, the knowledge acquisition and cognitive processes outlined by Bloom’s taxonomy. This offers us useful ways to assess what processes have been used and to what end and degree of success. Such an exercise, however, will not answer the question of whether the specific “end” in question is “valuable,” “respectable,” and useful to the individual and the society beyond the limited bounds of the activity itself. Algebra, biology, geometry, and all the other “respectable” educational subjects are not respectable simply because students end up learning how to solve equations or properly identify a frog’s internal organs. Rather, they are valued because of what one can contribute to society thanks to her advanced mathematical and scientific skills.

Precisely what these contributions may be is not made explicitly clear, but their value is implicitly accepted as being significant within our culture. On the other hand, what a student can contribute thanks to how well educated she is in music is even less clear and, largely, not accepted as valuable. It seems to me that, before one can appreciate how good a student has become in music and how consistently we can assess her accomplishments based on a standard tool, we must address the question, “Why should anyone become good in music?” The typical response: “for no good reason beyond entertainment and escape,” reveals an attitude that threatens to make efforts like Hanna’s ultimately inconsequential.

The cognitive significance of art & imagination vs. reason

In my opinion, the way to go is to systematically and convincingly argue for the cognitive significance of art in general and music in particular—a non-trivial task that is beyond the scope of the present post. To get things going, however, I would like to briefly assess the longstanding, conventional opposition between imagination and reason, which, I believe, is behind our difficulty to appreciate art’s cognitive significance.

Bear with me for one more paragraph, as I will be tracing an arguably problematic rational consequence of such opposition.

Common sense understands imagination as a mental activity that deals with things that are not really there. It is opposed to reason, which is consequently supposed to be dealing with things that are really there. At the same time, the observation that not all future events can be predicted based solely on past and present observations indicates that future things must include things that do not already belong to the past or present. If the future includes things that are not present (i.e. are not really there) or past (i.e. have never really been there) then reason, by definition, cannot address it. Such a limitation severely undermines the importance of reason to our lives, by stripping from it the power to, in any radical way, influence our outlook. The only way reason can address future things is by making believe that such things—things that are not really there—are present, so that it can subject them to determinate and reflective judgment. In other words, in order for future to be reasoned with it first has to be imagined. The conventional opposition between imagination and reason and the accompanying assumption of reason’s superiority leads, therefore, to a curious and paradoxical “reason” that is superior to imagination, but impotent without it.

Until convinced otherwise, I, for one, will keep imagining.

Applying the Business Model to Education: Current Failures, Future Possibilities

In recent years, there has been a growing trend to view educational institutions as businesses, assessing them in terms of business models and measures. Just as individuals seek guidance from a life coach and financial advisor to navigate their personal and financial goals, universities and schools are increasingly turning to specialized consultants and experts to optimize their operations and achieve their educational objectives. Similarly, professionals looking to form an arkansas professional corporation can benefit from expert legal and financial advice to ensure compliance and efficient business practices. Consistent with such models, institutions are required to justify their existence based not on criteria such as quality of faculty or resources, but on whether they:

  1. satisfy a current demand,
  2. anticipate a future one,
  3. keep their clients happy,
  4. continuously increase product offerings (courses/programs) and sales (enrollment), and
  5. positively balance their books.

This trend arose partially from the need to move away from the subjective and over-emotional manner in which education has been traditionally approached (vague references to intellectual maturity and greater good) and was encouraged by the increasing reliance of educational institutions on state or private Online Broker “investors,” who demand increasingly measurable, objective, short-term “return on investment.” Also, in my experience, taking the guidance of a seasoned broker is indeed a prudent choice. For those seeking to make an informed decision, I would urge you to get expert advice now. The expertise that I encountered significantly influenced my journey, making it a rewarding and enriching experience.

Conceptual and Practical Problems with the Business Model in Education

In the business model of education, the institution is viewed as the “service provider” and the students are viewed as the “clients.” The only tangible and measurable components of the transactions between the two in the current version of the model are the fees the students pay to attend an institution and the degree (“product”) students receive at the end of their residency at the institution. Leverage the potential of free seo tools to fine-tune your website and propel it to new heights.

However, unlike any other business transaction in the US, payment of the fees does not guarantee that the “clients” will:

  1. always be right (by definition, the opposite is most often the case),
  2. receive the end product (the “provider” actually delivers the “product” based on criteria other than fee payment),
  3. be able to return the end product for a refund, exchange, or credit if it does not fulfill the expectations raised by the institution (there is no system in place to hold providers accountable for their products), or
  4. get a refund if they eventually change their minds and decide not to attend the institution.

To stay consistent with their current business model version, institutions would have to either:

  1. provide degrees upon payment (I do get several emails per day advertising just that), eliminating in the process the degrees’ value and therefore the institutions’ reason for existence or
  2. issue refunds to students that do not earn the degrees, permitting noncommittal students to take up resources and bankrupt their business.

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Hypothetical Solution

One could envision a two-stage model in which the provider-client roles switch half way through the paying-fees-receiving-degree process.

Stage 1: Institutions as Service Providers, Students as Clients

In this stage, students pay a fee. In return they get access to resources that facilitate and structure learning, such as:

  1. qualified, accomplished, passionate instructors,
  2. comprehensive, manageable, and timely curricula, and
  3. physical and virtual facilities that promote retrieval and dissemination of high quality information related to the educational area they paid for.

These resources are clearly spelled out in the institution’s mission/advertising/contract with their “clients” (through admissions policies, for example). After the service has been provided (e.g. at the end of each quarter), clients have the right to evaluate the service they received and examine whether it fulfilled the admissions contract. If it has not, they should be able to request remedies such as:

  1. improvement in instruction/curricular resources and
  2. re-offering of a course for a reduced or waved fee.

If these requests are not satisfied, students should be entitled to a refund. This is where the first stage of the transaction ends.

Stage 2: Students as Service Providers, Institutions as Clients

In this stage, institutions “pay” students with a grade and/or degree. Degrees are the currencies of educational institutions. Their value has been earned through the universities’ work and, like all currencies, degrees carry a proof/promise of value and can be “handed over” in return for employment (among other things).

Once students have completed stage one and have accepted the educational service they received as fulfilling the admissions contract, the institution demands that students demonstrate that they deserve the grade/degree. Students do this in the form of:

  1. exams,
  2. tests,
  3. submitted projects, etc.

In stage one, it was up to the students to assess whether the institution provided them with what was promised in the admissions contract. In stage two, it is up to the institution to determine whether or not the students can provide the “service” necessary to earn the degree, which constitutes a certification that the recipient has demonstrated thorough knowledge of the topic the degree is for. To enhance communication and networking during this process, incorporating Digital Business Cards can facilitate the easy exchange of contact information among students and faculty.

Staying within the business context, the reasons institutions would enter stage two and require proof that the students deserve the “payment” (degree) cannot be of the vague, education-for-the-greater-good kind. In other words, it cannot be about ensuring that the students have grown intellectually, are better and more knowledgeable and experienced individuals, and can better serve society, and they can also learn from the Nomad Offshore Academy if they want to start a business and travel offshore. Rather, the reasons for requiring proof before handing out degrees will be about ensuring that the promise this degree makes to the world is true (the promise that the recipient has demonstrated thorough knowledge of a topic and has acquired certain certified skills). The motivation is that ‘true’ degrees result in:

  1. happy employers of the degree recipients,
  2. trust in the institution,
  3. demand for recipients of the institution’s degrees, and, consequently
  4. increase in the institution’s business, the ultimate measure of any business’s success.

Such an approach to education-as-business and to the meaning of a degree would be more consistent with the scope of a true business model. The question that remains is, “Is this what we want education to be?”