For the past three months, our office has been engaged in the first stages of a long-term research project, examining digital education trends at educational institutions comparable to the University of Oregon. After a test run with seven initial questions–which we used to write up our summaries of the University of Washington and the University of Colorado–we developed five revised questions to guide the scope of our inquiry:

1. What services does this institution’s Extension unit provide to campus partners?
2. Where is digital education housed? Are there separate units for online learning and blended or hybrid courses? Are technology and pedagogy combined or separate? How much of this effort is centralized?
3. What structures, formal or informal, are in place to encourage pedagogical innovation on campus? Is there any effort to centralize such activity?
4. Where are instructional design and instructional technology housed? What pathways exist to guide faculty to instructional technology services? Is access to instructional technology support uniform across different faculty groups at the institution?
5. At what administrative level are digital education initiatives, endorsed, supported, or made a fundraising priority? For example, does the institution count, encourage, or otherwise track student enrollment or participation in digitally-inflected (hybrid, blended, tech-enhanced F2F) courses? What institutional investments have been made in hybrid and/or blended learning?

Armed with these questions, we used lists generated by Academic Extension and Information Services to come up with a list of 26 initial comparators: a combination of AAU publics, PAC 12 peers, selected OUS institutions, and schools across the nation with similar IT resources and demands.

• Arizona State University
• Auburn University
• Colorado State University
• Indiana University
• Iowa State University
• Oregon Institute of Technology
• Oregon State University
• Portland State University
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of California, Los Angeles
• University of California, Santa Barbara
• University of Colorado
• University of Connecticut
• University of Iowa
• University of Massachusetts, Amherst
• University of Michigan
• University of Missouri
• University of New Mexico
• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• University of South Carolina
• University of Tennessee
• University of Utah
• University of Virginia
• University of Washington
• Virginia Commonwealth University
• Washington State University

After writing up reports on all of these institutions, we have begun to identify trends amongst our peers, notable case studies, and ideas we might deploy here at UO. One chart we developed demonstrates what we see as the common units most universities are instituting in order to better serve digital education initiatives:

This diagram doesn’t correspond to any individual university–each institution is organizing itself slightly differently. But it begins to articulate what building blocks are most often in place at institutions that are successfully developing both technology-enhanced on-campus learning and online degree programs. You can easily see from this what a complex web of relationships needs to be in place to get going!

In addition to thinking through organizational models, we have begun articulating emerging trends we see in our data–and sharing this information with interested parties on campus. We began sharing early findings on an informal basis at the beginning of March, but ramped up our efforts for a March 10th meeting of the University’s Educational Technology Advisory Committee:

It is our hope that our research can be used to foster open and collaborative discussions on institutional cultures–what ours is, what we would like it to be, and how we can get from “what is” to “what could be.” In other words, we want to ask what is fast becoming a quintessentially UO question: “what if?”

The next phase of our research project will include a deeper analysis of selected institutions, with an idea towards generating usable case studies that we can put forth as models for discussion and debate amongst the UO community. We are particularly interested in…

• the guiding principles of the University of Michigan’s Digital Education and Innovation initiative,
• the new faculty support desk opening at Portland State University’s Office of Academic Innovation,
• the “Techstarter” online community at Iowa State University,
• and the coordination of services provided through Colorado State University’s Instructional Innovation hub,

…among others.

While we will be spending the first week of spring quarter in DC, hobnobbing with our colleagues in online, continuing, and professional education, we look forward to expanding this research into a core feature of our first annual report (to be issued in June of this year), and we hope the University of Oregon will find inspiration in the variety of exciting approaches we have found amongst our peers. Searching for this data was a little bit like hunting buried treasure–the results were rarely predictable, but always worth the effort.