Week 2: Lowering the costs of IT in education! Discussion started!

Virginie has kindly invited me to contribute to this discussion. I hesitate to do so, because I have almost no direct experience of Africa (limited to two weeks in Pretoria), and I strongly believe that Africans need to control and develop their own future. All I can do here is share my experience that comes from working in over 40 different countries, and from being very old.

In reading through the excellent discussion following Tony Carr's provocative posting, I was struck by the relatively little emphasis given to technology costs, yet the costs and in particular the cost structures of different technologies are a major driver of the use of technology in education. In particular, I want to focus on information technology costs, and how these are passed on to the end users, in particular, students. This topic in fact deserves a whole book to itself, but let me limit the discussion to two different contexts for end-user costs: campuses and the home.

First, university campuses. In most developed countries, the institution bears most of the costs of physical infrastructure for teaching. Many institutions now have large IT infrastructure costs, in terms of networks, equipment (computers, etc.), and software (administrative systems, learning management systems). In a large North American research university, the IT budget often exceeds US$10 million a year (if everything is counted, including decentralised services). Furthermore, large campus-based IT operations require highly skilled, locally-based IT technical staff, who, when they actually exist, can usually earn a lot more in the private sector.

Now here's the question: if we were building a university from scratch, would we be investing as heavily in IT infrastructure on the campus? Indeed, would we be investing so heavily in bricks and mortar, if students can access knowledge at any time and anywhere? In particular, in the age of cloud computing, I suspect that we would see a number of different strategies. One would be to outsource key components that are not 'mission-driven'. By this I mean the mission of a university is teaching and learning, not accounting. Accounting may be 'mission-critical', but if it can be securely and more cost-effectively done outside the university (more cost-effectively because of shared services), then the university can free up resources to focus on its core activities. This is not far-fetched or trivial. Over 50% of a large university's operating budget goes on non-academic activities, such as heating, lighting and maintaining buildings, grounds maintenance, sewage, etc.

As one example, many universities in developed countries were almost bankrupted when they tried to install commercial financial, student service and human resource software systems in the 1990s. Now a group of universities in a consortium known as Kuali <http://www.kuali.org/. has just rolled out a collaboratively-designed, open source software system for university financial operations, with student services software to follow shortly (Jaschik, 2009). This is (more or less) free to partner institutions (there are of course in-kind development, as well as maintenance, costs). The same thinking could be applied to learning management systems. Does it make sense for every university to manage its own Moodle or Sakai software maintenance and development - why not share services, with each institution's own' brand' maintained within the overall structure? The downside of this is that we still do not have clear business cases that spell out the advantages and disadvantages of shared services, so the risks are still not clear, but the potential benefits are great. The main requirement though is a willingness to collaborate and share, rather than directly compete, with other institutions.

Second, costs to students. One of the main costs to students are textbooks, which students usually have to buy themselves. These textbook costs are now exceeding over $1,000 a year for most students in North American universities, so it is not surprising that a number of universities are moving to devices such as the Kindle, which allows students to access text books electronically. Some departments in some institutions now expect students to have their own laptop or notebook computer, but in most cases, these institutions are 'going with the flow', in that students have already purchased laptops for their own use. Nevertheless, there is an assumption in most higher education institutions that students will cover their own technology costs. When students have low incomes, this is a major barrier to the use of technology for teaching and learning.

Consequently, we have seen a lot of effort going into low-cost computers, such as the One Laptop per Child program. However, perhaps a better solution - and one more environmentally sensitive - is virtualization. This allows up to 10 terminals to be driven by one standard computer, at roughly US$60 a terminal, compared with $100 or more for a notebook (see Eisen, 2009) - and uses far less electricity, another substantial cost in many countries.

However, this ducks a more important question: why do students need to use computers on campus in the first place? The answer of course is cost - they cannot afford not only the computer, but the cost of Internet access. And here we have a real paradox. Internet charges internationally are usually in inverse proportion to the average domestic income - in other words, the poorer the country, the higher the telecommunications cost. (One example, Mexicans pay 10 times per hour what Canadians pay for high-speed Internet access). This is not just a question of volume - there are after all 10 times more Mexicans than Canadians in a country that is smaller geographically. The simple answer is: lack of competition. Canadians can choose between separate telephone companies, cable companies and satellite providers for their television, telephone and Internet services. Mexicans have to go through a variety of companies but all owned by the same conglomorate.

In Africa, many more people have access to mobile phones than computers. There are some very interesting experiments in using mobile phones for distance education at places such as UNISA. However, although the technology of mobile phones and laptops is quickly converging - see the iPhone - costs of services as well as hardware are such that the extensive use needed for study purposes makes the cost still prohibitive as a main form of delivery. Thus the communications costs as well as the hardware costs must be lowered.

Governments have an important role to play in bringing down telecommunications costs, but unfortunately they are often the main impediment. As in Mexico, governments often see telecommunications not as a national resource for development, but as a cash cow for taxes. However, in a knowledge-based economy, where a knowledge worker can work anywhere and a knowledge industry can grow from nothing to a major world player (e.g. Skype, designed in Estonia), you cannot compete if your telecommunications costs are 10 times those of your direct competitors located in another country. Nor is price control the answer - this just drives away suppliers. Open markets and open competition under a strict set of rules to prevent monopolies and unfair competition are needed, and this is a role for government - provided that it is independent of the main companies providing services. Unfortunately too often government is the telecommunications provider.

Another role for government is as a major telecommunications customer. They can use their negotiating power to reduce costs through open competition. Thus in British Columbia, Canada, the provincial government in the 1990s sent out a request for proposal for a flat-rate government network connecting all schools, colleges, health centres and government offices. Thus a school in the most remote part of the province would have the same Internet access at the same cost as an inner city school, through price averaging. Several consortia of commercial companies bid for the contract (worth almost $100 million a year). One was chosen and created BCNet, which has now been operating very successfully for the last 10 years. However, it was dependent on on open, competitive bidding process.

It can be seen then that the costs of information technologies are a main factor in the development of technology for teaching. Nor are costs just technical. They are determined by ideological and political factors as well as by improvements in technology. One of the many challenges for Africa is to find a way to lower the costs of information technology to gain the benefits of increased access and higher quality education that comes from its use.

I'd really like to hear from you about how this is being or could be done.

References

Eisen, H. (2009) Green Teach: Canadian virtualization technology delivers computer access to millions of students in Brazil Backbone June/July

Jaschik, S. (2009) The Next Open Source Movement Inside Higher Education, July 6