Identifying and Assessing Peer Institutions
Prepared by: Charles Severance (csev@umich.edu)

This document attempts to begin to make a list of the institutions which seem to have an edge over the University of Michigan College of Engineering in terms of using technology in education. This list is by its nature incomplete and the analysis of each institution is also incomplete. Comments, criticisms, and suggestions are welcome at any time by sending E-Mail to csev@umich.edu.

Activities At the University of Michigan

• The Center for Research in Teaching and Learning - This is a campus wide resource to help teachers and learners. For exmaple, the CRLT can work with a faculty member to do an assessment on their course to find ways to improve the teaching and learning in their course.
• Um.Coursetools is a campus wide effort to provide base level web-based learning infrastructure to every course on campus. Cousetools is unique in that it can be used by every single teacher on campus without any special effort on the part of the teacher. This is accomplished by highly integrating the UM.Coursetools services into the business processes of the university.
• Center for Professional Development (College of Engineering) - This is a very strong distance education effort aimed primarily at the professional effort. CPD uses a wide variety of technology in the delivery of distance education from video tapes via FedEx to streaming video over the internet.

Types of Efforts

• Research-active faculty members in Computer Science and Engineering who view Educational Technology as one of their personal research areas. These faculty are writing grants, supervising graduate students, writing papers, and presenting results at conferences such as Frontiers in Education and ASEE. General theme areas include tool development, assessment and evaluation, human computer interaction, and others. Classic examples: Georgia Tech and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• A university wide activity targeted at getting courses on-line across all of campus often with a focus on new sources of revenue such as distance education students, high-school students, or adult learners. These efforts often come out of the CIO or Provost's office and have specific funding to assist faculty to put their courses on-line. Usually the central adminstration is expecting som sort of financial payoff for their investment. These are often called "virtual universities" or "UWOnline". Classic Examples: Michigan State University Virtual University
• Efforts which have grown out of the College of Education/Educational Technology efforts. These efforts generally are done by collaborating with an active teacher and doing education-oriented evaluation and research on how teaching can be improved. The CRLT and (formerly) Office of Instructional Technology at Michigan are classic examples of this type of effort.
• Especially in the Engineering field, Professional Development/Continuing Education services are well developed. Engineers graduating with a Bachelors degree quickly find themselves in need of a Master's degree with no time to go back to school full time. Often their employer will pay for their further education if it can be convienently delivered to the student without major interruption to their work. Enterprising schools have developed programs to meet these needs. Because there is revenue associated with the teaching of these courses, these activities are generally done quite well. Any field which has a significant continuing education component (Medcine is a good example) will also tend to have this type of program. The Center for Professional Development in the College of Engineering is an excellent example of this type of operation.

Peer Institutions

• Georgia Tech - This is a classic example of a Computer Science Department with Educational technology as one of its Foci. The ClassRoom 2000 effort is well known and well publicized. The faculty member involved is Gregory Abowd - he is well knwn and well published in this area. (Rating=1)

• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - The SCALE project at UIUC is also very well known. This effort is funded by a large grant from the Sloan Foundation and is focussed on studying asynchronous learning. The goal is to have a broad impact across thecampus and improve teaching efficiency. The effort has a significant effort on the UIUC campus and is well publicized at national meetings. (Rating=2)

• Stanford - The Stanford Center for Professional Development is an excellent example of using technology in distance and continuing education. Their location in Silicon Valley makes this a very natural effort. Stanford is viewed as a leader in technical innovations with some of the very first web-based video lectures in the world and the first with an on-line masters degree. This leadership was also driven by Computer Science faculty activities. The technology which is now Micrsoft Media Player was initially developed at Stanford by Anoop Gupta, now with Microsoft Research. (Rating = 2)

• Rensselaer - Rensselaer also has a strong Professional Development effort and provides 17 Masters Degrees in Engineering and Business to off-campus students. (Rating=2)

• Carnegie-Mellon University - There are a number of efforts going on at CMU. Many of the efforts seem independent without a campus (or even colleg-wide basis). CMU OnLine which is a "Virtual University" style operation supporting a limited number of courses. It was nice to find a page which acted as a ClearingHouse for the various Educational Technology Efforts. (Rating=3).

• Virginia Tech Online (Rating=3)

• Penn State's World Campus (Rating=4)

• California State System (Rating-4)

• University of Washington (Rating=4)