Edu-Communism
I was just wondering what would happen if the Big 10 schools shared all their IT functions?
Thinking about what we had to do to reinvent the Computer Building to handle our current computing needs makes me think that we are quickly going to reach a point of diminishing returns trying to support a higher demand for computing services. Any new services we add will just get piled on to the heap without more people to run them, and building larger buildings will eventually become undoable.
What if the Big 10 had one LMS (whatever that may be). Wouldn't this make sense to have it all exist in a Big 10 cloud? We could not only share IT resources, but we could also share students. Crazy? Maybe. But, maybe not. Let's say Astro 101 at PSU only had 400 seats per class and we had 2 sections full plus another half section full. Would it not be cost-effective to accept students from Michigan, some from Iowa, and some from Northwestern into the PSU class? If the class were entirely online, this could be seamless for the students. They would login to their LMS and take their course as they did any of their other home-campus courses. There would certainly need to be some revenue-sharing model, but I don't think that would be very difficult to work out. And I don't think there should be any question that the credits from one school are not as good as those of the other.
This would not be limited to the LMS, either. Look at streaming video, for example. If this were a shared resource, we could have Quicktime, Flash, and Windows Media all within our reach. Is there any real advantage to having our own silo for such services? It's just web-delivered video, right? So let's just take the best of all systems and create one good one for everyone in the Big 10.
Look at software, especially lab-delivered s/w. Couldn't we get a sweet deal on packages from Adobe if we were buying 11 times the amount? Everyone could get updated as easily as we can update our own campus, too. One eleventh of the overhead.
You would still need local IT tech people to handle the day-to-day problems, but I can't think of too many IT functions that couldn't be shared across the board either. Help Desk, E-mail, wikis, blogs, and even admissions functions could be shared and just separated as to the choice of college. What exactly is so different among the Big 10 institutions that we could not share these resources? If Facebook and Gmail can handle the world in the cloud, why can't the Big 10 do this as well? Maybe the world's colleges could share their resources. Eventually. I'm just being realistic in thinking that we could start somewhere, and a reasonable place to start might be with the affiliations that we already have in place.
I don't think the current IT model is sustainable in the longrun. Call me an "edu-communist", but I think that this idea might be the next logical step in trying to feed the ever-growing IT monster.
Pat, spouting such communal sharing and savings might get you labeled as an education "re-distributor"! :) I agree with the overall concept. The technology and capabilities are all going in that type of direction and the ability to make this work will become increasingly clear. I'm not sure it will happen in our working lifetime but probably just after. The model you describe is similar to the ones that midwestern farmers have used for decades: called co-ops. Yes, it is a form of shared community resources. But don't try to tell them they are practicing communism!!
I'm just trying to organize our community. ;-)