| | December 20138CIOReviewIncreasing The ROI Of Technology In EducationAt Microsoft Corporation [NASDAQ: MSFT] James designs and implements strategies & programs which assist in improving the capabilities and utilization of technology in education. Microsoft has a market cap of 313.88B.By James Garner Ptaszynski, Ph.D., Senior Director, World Wide Higher Education Microsoft CorporationWith the calendar year winding down, Robin considers what her priorities should be for the coming New Year. It has been almost five years since she traded her teaching role for that of a CIO, and while she believes she has accomplished a great deal, her TO DO list always seems to be getting longer. The budget cuts of the last five years have subsided but it will be many years before her budget is back to where it was. In the meantime, the list of requests for additional capabilities continues to grow. She is constantly torn between using her resources to maintain existing core infrastructure versus providing new capabilities such as expanding wireless access, adding mobile capabilities, or support for such disruptive innovations as MOOCsI have been fortunate to have traveled to over 40 counties to visit educational institutions and to speak with hundreds of presidents, provosts, CIOs, teachers and faculty members. While there are some issues that are idiosyncratic to certain parts of the world, surprisingly, many are the same. There is consistent angst among CIOs to carefully balance the needs of their existing systems with the addition of new capabilities vociferously promoted by their community. I find that often lost in this cacophony are those systemic issues that, if addressed, would significantly improve the effectiveness of their institution's IT spending and improve the satisfaction across a wide range of customers. One such issue is helping educators better integrate technology into instruction. While it has been over 30 years since the introduction of the PC into the classroom, aside from the use of PowerPoint and the increasingly reliance on learning management systems, most classrooms I visit are not too different from those that I taught in during the 1990's or when I myself was a doctoral student in the 1980's. According to the 2013 Campus Computing Survey, four fifths (79 percent) of CIOs surveyed report that "assisting faculty with instructional integration of information technology" is a very important institutional priority over the next two to three years. As a single data point, this is not all that damning, but the fact that this issue has been the top, or one of the top three, issues identified by university CIOs since 2000 indicates that there is much more work to be done in this area. Similarly, a 2012 Presidential Perspectives Survey, illustrates that while more than 55 percent of university CIOs surveyed rated the effectiveness of their campus IT investments to support on-campus instruction as "very effective," only a little more than 40 percent of the university presidents and chief academic officers (provosts) felt the same. This difference in opinion between CIOs and their academic colleagues may primarily due to the lack of evidence illustrating faculty integration of technology, in a meaningful way, in instruction.It has been my observation that, while deciding upon what technology to adopt, deploy, maintain and how to pay for it is difficult, the most difficult aspect of technology adoption is how to drive and support the behavioral changes needed at the level of the individual faculty member. Too often, CIOs believe this to be the responsibility of the chief academic officer or the campus faculty development center. I believe though there needs to be a much more active partnership between James Garner Ptaszynskiopinionin my
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