Online Instruction As Innovation in an Educational Leadership Program

Case Narrative

Department chair Wanda Thompson returned from the last college executive council meeting with the dean for the school year sobered by some stark realities faced by the College of Education. Enrollments had continued to fall for the third straight year, and now even the Educational Leadership department had begun to feel the pinch. Although the department continued to lead the college in enrollments, student numbers had fallen off another 5% from the previous year, prompting serious reflection. Central City, a former Rust Belt dynamo, had fallen on hard times, and a historical decline in population had sped up with the shutdown or bankruptcy of many of the city’s manufacturing firms. As workers moved out of town, so did their children, the lifeblood of the area school districts. The cycle of decline had eventually made its way to the pipeline of aspiring school leaders flowing into the college. In her 30 years at the college, Wanda had never seen such a dire situation. While she still had a few years before retirement, thoughts of sunny southern beaches beckoned louder than ever.

At the meeting, the dean suggested several strategies to address the enrollment situation across the college, including the development of new programs and online models of instruction. As Wanda returned to her office, she reflected on the possibilities. Each morning as she drove to work, she saw billboards advertising online graduate programs not only at competing area universities but also at nationally franchised private for-profit schools. Although she had her own reservations about online versus face-to-face instruction, she knew that (apart from the economic downturn) part of the decline in her department must have to do with students being drawn to the perceived flexibility of these competing programs.

Moreover, seeing the billboard reminded Wanda of a conversation she had with her colleague at another institution during the most recent meeting of the state’s chapter of the national organization of educational administration professors. Wanda recalled that he had mentioned how the different colleges needed to come up with a coordinated approach to their programs to combat what he termed the online degree mills disguised as universities and to serve as a united front to the state office of education, which had recently announced plans to develop alternative routes to administrative licensure and was entertaining other ideas from private organizations and educational foundations to streamline the endorsement process, including using online and other distance learning modules. While Wanda felt ambivalent about her friend’s characterization of the for-profit universities (she had seen their students present some pretty sophisticated work at a recent conference), she nonetheless agreed that traditional schools of education like her own needed to collaborate more and communicate to the legislature that their programs continued to have legitimate value, whatever form they might take.

As Wanda stepped into the elevator, she caught sight of Charles Burch, the college’s director of technology. Chuck and his team had spent the last couple of years equipping the classrooms in the education building with computer carts and lecture capture equipment. A year ago, the college executive committee had asked him and other faculty and staff (including Joella Baker, a member of Wanda’s department) to form an ad hoc committee to promote ways to help faculty to become more innovative in their research and teaching with mobile and other technologies. Wanda held the door for Chuck so he could ride down with her, and after a bit of small talk, Wanda asked, “What do you think students in the college feel about online classes?”

Oh, they’re all for it, especially the ones just out of high school!

I’m sure. But what about grad students?

It depends. Some of the instructional technology students cannot understand why all our classes don’t have some online component. Others, and I’d say it’s the more seasoned students mostly, prefer face-to-face contact. There are exceptions, of course, but I think students have begun to expect us to know how to teach them how to work with technology in schools, including online courses. Schools want to know they have teachers who are familiar with synchronous and asynchronous learning models. Flipping the classroom. Podcasts. You know. All that stuff!

Wanda’s mind started to whirl as she exited the elevator. So many unfamiliar terms!

Wanda added an item reflecting the dean’s and Chuck’s comments to the agenda for the semester’s final department meeting, which she held the following week. At the meeting, she floated the idea of developing an online version of the master’s program as a means of boosting enrollments and staying current with trends seen at other institutions and desired by students. She asserted, “If we don’t offer students something in an online format, they’ll just look for it elsewhere.” Faculty members’ responses were mixed, running the spectrum from enthusiastic to skeptical. At one extreme, junior faculty member Joella Baker saw online instruction as an idea whose time had come. She and Chuck had recently attended a seminar where two high school chemistry teachers in Colorado shared how they had turned the lecture/homework model on its head using video podcasts (Schaffhauser, 2009), and Joella was inspired to try a similar move in her introduction to administration course.

At the other extreme sat George Mitchell, who, like Wanda, had many years in the department and had seen it all. As an associate professor looking to change rank, he was not ready to retool a teaching formula that worked for him and let him concentrate on his considerable research and advising loads.

If y’all want to get sucked into that quagmire, go right ahead. I just don’t think our students are ready to jump into webinars and all that. Maybe undergraduates, but our students tend to be older and don’t have the same need to try our every fad that comes along. We should focus on what works for our students and stick to that. Besides, have we considered stronger marketing for our charter school administrator program or developing a master’s cohort down at the satellite campus? We have other options that have worked in the past. Why the rush to a model we have never tested here?

“Yeah,” chimed in Robert Gomes, another tenure-track faculty member. Robert was finishing his third year, and his contracted teaching load was due to double in the fall. “I can hardly get students to send me email attachments much less expect them to use discussion boards and whatnot.” Although Robert’s views somewhat exaggerated students’ technical capacity, others at the table agreed that they had had only limited success trying to get students to do more than basic word processing and email functions. They mused about whether the college should adopt a technology readiness requirement, recognizing that doing so might discourage some students from enrolling in the program and thus running counter to the enrollment goal. Wanda pointed out that the college’s technology resource center offered free classes to students and that faculty members could encourage students to take those classes. “Have we considered expanding our course offerings to bring in people who already work here on campus? We could do a master’s in higher ed admin without too much trouble, I would think.” Wanda replied,

That’s not a bad idea. We’d need to look into who has the right expertise or whether we have adjuncts who could fill in the gap. I’d be interested to see who in the dean’s office might want to take on a course. At this point, I’m willing to consider any options. On a completely different note, we’re leaving out the elephant in the room: the state standards. . . . We need to find effective ways to integrate technology literacy for administrators into our curriculum.

“Hey, now! I thought we had that covered with the instructional tech course,” quipped George. “Don’t tell me we’re going to have to sit down and go through the matrix again.” Everyone shared a collective groan as they reflected briefly on the reaccreditation process they had just completed last semester. The team had spent several working sessions coordinating how the state department of education standards for building-level administrators, including a specific technology strand, aligned with their courses. They had ultimately lumped the bulk of the technology standards together into a course taught by their IT colleagues. The state now required them to collect specific data and portfolio items related to student mastery of each standard.

As the conversation progressed, faculty members eventually agreed in principle that the department should venture into moving the master’s program online as one of several options to consider to increase enrollment, remain relevant to students, and address potential issues as they collected student data for the next round of state accreditation. As the meeting wound down, a major question came up relating to the appropriate approach to take. “What are our main goals here?” asked Joella. “If we want to expand our reach outside the metro area, we can’t expect students to commute all the way to the main campus for classes 2 or 3 days a week.”

“Right, and we can’t have some classes only online and other classes only in person if we expect to bring in distance learners,” noted George.

Robert responded,

Well, it seems like creating hybrid courses will be somewhat convenient for local students who might want to come down to campus on occasion, but we’re going to have to figure out how to bring in those who live too far away. I’m not sure we even have the resources in the college to do lecture capture or live streaming.

Evidently, he was not aware of the classroom upgrades Chuck and his team had made within the building.

“Live what?” chuckled George. “I think I’ll leave all that to the young guns.”

“We just upgraded a whole set of classrooms for lecture capture, remember?” noted Joella. “Also, we have a full set of resources at the satellite center.”

“There are a lot of approaches we can take to online instruction or distance learning, but I agree that we have to be clear and specific about what we want to accomplish here,” said Wanda. “Because we are trying to cast a broader enrollment net and get people into the program from further afield, I feel strongly that, at the very least, we really need to develop fully online sections of each class in the master’s program.” She paused to collect her thoughts. “We don’t have to do it all at once. What if we do a gradual rollout, say a couple of courses at a time, over the next couple of years?”

“I think I could get at least one of my courses online by fall semester,” Joella replied reflectively. This was going to be an intense summer, she could tell, but she felt excited to apply what she had learned at the seminar, and she knew she could count on support from Chuck and the technology committee. She might even be able to get some technology funding. “OK, good,” said Wanda.

So that buys the rest of us a little time to learn about the parts of the university’s course management suite we don’t already know and see what we’d need to do to change things over. It also gives us a chance to consider what we want to do with the charter program and building a cohort group down at the satellite campus.

“I’m still not sure this is going to work out . . .,” George muttered as the meeting closed.

Over the summer, Wanda finalized plans to roll out the online master’s program with full-time and adjunct faculty at a couple of meetings and by email. Starting fall semester, courses would roll out two at a time until all available courses in the program would have at least one online section. Joella received a laptop computer on loan from the college’s technology center equipped with a webcam and software to prepare podcasts. She participated in workshops on podcasting and the university’s course management suite offered by the university’s technology office. With the help of the college’s technology specialist, she prepared her lectures and uploaded them along with slideshows of course topics into the course management suite.

Fall semester arrived, and Joella taught the first two courses of the online master’s program. Wanda encouraged Joella to share her experiences at faculty meetings during the fall semester. The other faculty members listened with varying levels of interest as Joella recounted her adventures and frustrations of working with students at a distance. Although she experienced significant challenges helping students with a live interactive component of the course, she felt generally pleased with the results. She had serious concerns that the workshop and small-group portions of her course had not translated well into the online environment with the facilities she had available in the college. She also shared that all of her students came from the metro area; however, part way through the semester, one student had to seek employment in another state and was able to continue taking her course. She hoped that the time she had invested during the fall would make teaching the course easier in the winter, but she knew there was more to do.

For the department as a whole, significant hurdles remained. First, enrollments for the winter semester online sections of Joella’s course had not risen by the end of fall semester, and no students from outside the metro region had enrolled for winter semester. Moreover, it appeared that George and Robert, the faculty members who were due to start their courses in the winter, had not finished their preparations, citing both lack of time and access to adequate training. Joella, although not disputing their claim, had never seen them at the training sessions she had attended. Robert seemed more excited about developing either the charter or higher education strands. Finally, it emerged during the course of fall faculty meetings that, other than listing the first two courses in the master’s program as online-only offerings in the class schedule, the only advertising for the new online program had been through word of mouth and through announcements on the department’s website.

It appeared that the dean’s initial push to increase enrollments throughout the college had not come accompanied with a budget to produce promotional materials and that each department was responsible for its own advertising. Wanda, citing Robert and George’s experiences and the apparent lack of interest by students outside the metro area, had begun to question not only whether the department as a whole was ready to move to an online-only model but also whether the college had the technical and financial capacity to support the dean’s proposal. She and the dean had spoken at length about the issue, but no concrete plans had emerged. The initial momentum that had led to the department’s decision to start the online master’s degree program had begun to wind down, and it was beginning to look doubtful that the new way of running the program would last.

Teaching Notes

This case was developed for use in a course on educational leadership or organizational theory with a focus on change in educational organizations. In this case narrative, data are presented relating to a proposed restructuring of an educational leadership program. Students must analyze the narrative, looking for information that helps them identify internal and external factors that lead to and inhibit change and innovation. In addition, students should identify issues faced by program-level leaders who must respond to the needs of leaders and followers as middle managers.

This case study has several features that make it applicable for various leadership settings. First, it speaks to the challenges that arise when trying to design and implement new programs. The case highlights the competing purposes that sometimes accompany proposed innovations, particularly those of a technological nature. In this case, the technological innovation of online instruction was seen as a means of responding to demands for increased enrollments at the college. All too frequently, however, innovation is interpreted as the development of new technologies to the exclusion of nontechnical new ways of doing things. Other nontechnical innovations, such as adding new program strands, developing new modes of advertising current strands, and implementing cohort groups at satellite campuses, could have been used to recruit new students. The challenges of implementing these alternative innovations might also be explored.

Second, the case emphasizes interpersonal and organizational issues related to change and innovation. Wejnert (2002) developed a conceptual model for examining the adoption of innovations in organizations that could be applied to this case. Wejnert proposed that the characteristics of the innovation, characteristics of the innovators, and the environmental context each play significant roles in the diffusion of innovations in organizations. In this case, the characteristics of online instruction, the readiness of different faculty members, and the drive to compete with other institutions for a share of a dwindling pool of students all played roles in the decisions surrounding the development of the online master’s program.

Third, the case explores institutional isomorphism and other responses to external competitors (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). DiMaggio and Powell described three ways in which organizations tend to behave like each other: coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism. They asserted that, rather than acting as an effective or efficient response to elements inherent in their organizational field, isomorphism serves to improve an organization’s image to outsiders. In this case, considerations for creating the online master’s program included concerns that the department appear to offer a program that would allow it to seem on a par with competing educational leadership programs.

Fourth, the case touches on issues relating to motivating and supporting followers to engage in innovations with high start-up costs. Support actors (e.g., technology specialists, offices of technology, the dean’s office, etc.) may play significant roles in either reducing the start-up costs or creating incentives that help technology-intensive innovations develop.

Fifth, the case draws attention to the roles of the people in the middle, such as the department chair caught between leading department faculty and responding to the dean. Work that looks at roles followers play in organizations may provide insight into issues faced by followers in the case. Kelley’s (1988) landmark work on followership represented a radical shift of perspective in the field of leadership theory by positing that followers play an integral role in organizational success. Chaleff’s (2002) model of leader-followership emphasizes the complementary roles leaders and followers play together in organizational stewardship and acknowledges that leaders and followers bear responsibility for fulfilling the core purpose of the organization. Wanda and department faculty members had opportunities to influence how the dean’s call to increase enrollments would be put into effect, and those opportunities can be explored in greater detail through the lens of leader-followership.

Discussion Questions

The following questions are organized by the topics described in the teaching notes:

Innovation and Programmatic Change

Adoption of Innovations

Institutional Isomorphism

Support for Innovations