The Transition from Ed-Tech to Tech-Ed

In an era of constant digital disruption, Gonick argues that the CIO’s role is more vital than ever. Rather than serving as a utility manager, today’s CIO must be a strategic architect who aligns technology investments with institutional mission and innovation. Drawing from Arizona State University’s evolution, he explains how strategic leadership in technology can help universities meet their highest aspirations and stay ahead of change.

Well, the central proposition is in the design of your leadership cadre. I think that for a lot of my generation of technology leaders, the assumptions were that you really had to have technical chops coming out of, you know, again, another era of technology, that you could talk, you know, bits and bytes, that you had this kind of lingua franca that no one, actually, in the rest of the senior administration knew. It was kind of like a secret language, but that, you know, every once in a while, you would have an opportunity to shed insight as to why this secret cult of IT was so special that the rest of the university needed to follow, you know, the pattern that is out there.

So the central the central goal is to, is into thinking about what kind designing what kind of IT leadership is appropriate not only for your institutional culture, but also for the moment in time of the evolution of your of your institution and, and the aspiration, of the institution going forward.

So for the first 30 years of educational technology, we had a model that we needed was to bring on leadership who could help the university design a technology experience that looks pretty much like the last 800 years of the way we taught it. It had to be the institutional centered model. It had to be the faculty centered model. It had to be something that would allow us to, you know, create a place to deposit your, like we used to do in the old days before technology. We used to slide our assignments under the door of a professor's office. So we needed to replicate the old model of teaching and learning into this ed tech era.

So we got the student information system. We got the learning management systems. We got all kinds of systems that allowed us to reflect the way the institutions were designed over the several hundred years at ASU. That's part of our legacy. But we're also mindful that at this moment in time, we're entering a new era, an era where it's not about ed tech1.0.,his idea of making the technology perform and be designed like the old schoolhouse. We're entering an era. Much of it is being driven by AI right now, in which we need to rethink everything about the way in which our technology is utilized. We no longer have to make it institutional, institutionally centered. We can make it absolutely learner and student centered.

We can make it learner and student centered. That is to say, we can let the data that we capture and the students actually move with the students. We have all of the systems that are out there. Universities have all kinds of discrete, siloed systems: a student information system, a learning management system, a place to do a degree audit, a place to do a career check.Those are all separate systems.

We think of ourselves as data rich, but actually we're very much intelligence poor. We really don't know much about our students, and certainly it's not about our students. It's really been historically about the institutions need, the professors need, the need to actually submit a grade. It's about trying to say, you know, the transcript is what we're capturing in the way of what students have learned rather than the journey of learning, having really no way of expressing that whatsoever.

So we're at a different moment in time. I call that moment in time, this transition from ed tech to tech ed, in which we have a new set of opportunities to not only deliver new technology, AI enabled technologies, but also to rethink the organizational model to support this new era where the student is, in fact, the center of the experience.

Their journey is what you build technologies to support, and the organizational model needs to follow in that regard, ASU has made a commitment for the last 20 years or more to be the model of a student centered experience, and now we are in a position finally in the technology community, as AI has now appeared to actually shed that historical, experience of that first generation of educational technology and evolve our approach so that students and their journey is at the center of the overall experience and get our organizations to reflect that new reality.