Invest to lead: keeping up with technology challenges is enough to keep any IT director busy, but Wesleyan's John Meerts sees cutting edge opportunities for small to midsize colleges—especially his - IT Infrastructure

University Business, Dec, 2002 by Tim Goral

UB: Is the weak economy affecting these plans?

MEERTS: No, not all that much, frankly. We are a tuition-driven institution so the only thing affected by the economy is our endowment. There is a reduction of funds available when the endowment is down, of course, but the university has made the choice to continue to spend the money it needs to fund its operations. I think the impact of the economy is there overall, but it's not directly felt in IT. There may actually be a positive side to the poor economy, too, because we can finally hire people that we can afford. That's true for some of the vendors as well, because they are a bit more willing to deal right now, to give better prices.

UB: How do you handle internal marketing when you identify a particular technology solution? How do you persuade the senior administration to spend, say, $100,000 to ultimately save $50,000?

MEERTS: I think the traditional return-on-investment argument that lives in the commercial market space isn't as easy to make in education. You can't say "Well, if we do XYZ solution we're going to make that many more widgets and therefore we're going to get our money back." That model works less in education.

I feel that in our environment and in higher education in general, we are "done with the plumbing"--the networks are up, the servers are up, the e-mail and the Web servers work. Most of our environments are relatively stable. They need some maintenance to stay up and operate correctly, but it's not the situation we were in 10 years ago or even five years ago when the environment was relatively fragile. Things weren't working all the time--they would go down. The administrative systems weren't in place and in those times, many of us were running off homegrown solutions as opposed to ERP systems like Peoplesoft or SCT Banner. Now, many of us are at the point where those things are stable and working. So, the goal now is to infuse technology into the classroom. We've been making a lot of improvements in this area.

UB: How are you doing that?

MEERTS: If you visit Wesleyan, you'd be amazed at the types of things that faculty routinely use in the classrooms. There are, of course, projectors and computers, but also DVD players, video systems, sound systems, touch panels that control the lights and close the blinds--all fairly sophisticated. We've also added course management systems such as Blackboard and WebCT that help faculty put content on the Web or at least interact with their students.

The makeup of the student body is changing. We are getting groups of students that are, as we like to say, the Nintendo generation. They come to college with high expectations about using technology in all aspects of their experience on campus, not just recreational, but in their learning as well.

We are also starting to see faculty that are part of that generation. That sets the stage for a fairly intrusive or deep-seated change in how faculty will teach. More and more, they will teach with technology, and will use technology inside and outside the classroom to communicate ideas and concepts. The old model of the Socratic teacher standing in front of a blackboard with a book in one hand and a piece of chalk in the other is fading. They are now bringing content into the classroom they couldn't bring in before.