Impact of the Cal. State Univ. Strategic Plan on Instructionrs & Ed Tech

A few days ago, the California State University System released its new three-year Strategic Plan. As the largest university system in the United States by student enrollment, it is not surprising that the Plan seeks to emphasize course flexibility for students (e.g. more easily transferring credits among our 22 campuses; more easily enrolling remotely in courses at other campuses) and simultaneously emphasizes faculty pedagogical exploration and innovation, particularly in the realm of educational technology.

Strategic objectives involve:

1. create flexible learning pathways
2. enhance resource sharing and coordinated talent deployment across universities
3. achieve exceptional [faculty/staff] retention rates that drive outstanding student outcomes while enabling flexible deployment of talent and resources across the system
4. leverage alumni to support student career advancement

Together, objectives 1-3 combined suggest that we're going all-in on ed tech and asynchronous/remote learning (and maybe also less hiring, as the system wants to leverage its experts that are currently distributed across our campuses?) The Plan asserts that students

"demand flexible learning pathways that accommodate work and family responsibilities. They seek career-relevant skills that can immediately be applied in the workforce. They expect seamless integration between high-quality in-person and digital learning experiences."

Some goals aligned with the objectives include:

• "Launch a Technology Innovation Center designed to incubate educational technology solutions that advance technology-integrated teaching and innovative pedagogies."
• "Enable 25% of students to access courses and programs across universities through seamless technology integration, faculty and student exchange programs, and other collaboration vehicles"

The Chancellor's Office concludes that essential system capacities to build include:

• "fundamentally strengthening the Chancellor’s Office capacity to lead system transformation and coordinate implementation across all universities." (read: more administrators?)
• "Build comprehensive faculty development infrastructure to support educators in adopting new pedagogies, integrating technology, and designing experiential learning opportunities" (read: more investment in faculty professional development - hopefully!)
• "Develop systems and incentives that enable faculty, programs and resources to be shared across universities" (read: more work and less hiring?)
• "Build capacity for piloting, evaluating, and scaling innovative educational technologies that enhance learning experiences and support diverse student populations and learning modalities."
• "Establish and operate the Technology Innovation Center to support faculty experimentation with emerging technologies while building systemwide capacity for responsible evaluation and implementation of new educational tools and platforms." (read: more fiscal investment in ed tech)

Given that the CSU system just (hastily) rolled out a deployment of ChatGPT to all faculty, staff and students in the system over the summer, I hope that the last two bullet points hint at initiating and continuing efforts to explore the ethical use of AI in higher ed.