Freeconomics, Freeware and Productivity Paradox in Higher Education

Freeconomics, Freeware and Productivity Paradox in Higher Education

ByJay HettiarachchyProfessor of Computer Information Systems
Ferris State University
Big Rapids, MI 49307

Abstract:The impact of Moor’s Law that says the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years has resulted in freeware available on the Internet in an unprecedented way. Freeware programs, including Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flicker have globally pervaded social, business, and personal activities—and perhaps education – in powerful and compelling ways. While there are proponents as well as opponents who whole-heartedly embrace or totally shun these new trends, the reality is that the impact of freeware on people today is significant. The presenter will address the issue of “productivity paradox” created by these trends in today’s higher educational institutions.

Introduction:

While computing and processing technology have doubled almost every two years within the past 40 years,  humans on the whole have certainly not kept up with this doubling trend -- not in processing power of their brains,  not in the speed with which they work with their brains, and certainly  not in micro- miniaturization of their physical composition or functions. Whereas these same technological developments and the opportunities that they have provided have enabled business enterprises to grow almost exponentially, as demonstrated by  Wal-Mart, Google, Microsoft, Dell, Twitter, and Facebook. There is little doubt that the primary contributing factors for such growth is the potential of the Internet and the falling prices of processing power, storage capacity, and computing infrastructures with enormous communication networks that enable the sustenance and processing of massive amounts of data and information essential for the efficient running of these business operations.

Our primary interest in this paper is education, in particular higher education, where the impact of the Internet , the World Wide Web, and innumerable freeware programs available on the Internet  are continuously transforming not only higher education’s  superstructure but also the deeper foundations on which higher education has been built by educators for centuries.

A closely integrated function of the education industry is its “productivity” or the ultimate result that students are to gain from going through the educational system. Although there are no set criteria or standard bench markers to identify and/or measure productivity in education, an attempt will be made in this review to at least stimulate educators to conduct classroom research that will promote an understanding of the challenges as well as possible responses that lie ahead for all educators.

Freeconomics, Freemium and Freeware:

 “Buy one get one free” is a popular business model that many business enterprises use to attract customers.  Another frequent marketing tactic is to give free food samples at supermarkets. Most shoppers like to eat free samples even when they do not intend to buy those products, and even when they do not know whether or not the food samples they happily consume are harmful to their body.

Freemium is a term that has been coined to label a similar business model that offers basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced special features. This business model has gained popularity within the past few years with most start-up companies that offer a variety of services for free on the Web.  A few examples of freeware and freemiums available on the Web are Facebook, MySpace, Classmates, Pandora, Flicker, and Skype. The most popular free email servers are Gmail (Google email) and Yahoo.   Freeware is on the rise and novel forms of freeware are introduced by entrepreneurs almost daily at a rapid pace. Smilebox.com, lulu.com, hulu.com, housingmaps.com, programmableweb.com, innocentive.com, istockphoto.com, evreryblock.com are a few randomly selected examples available for free.

In addition to being at no cost, these freeware programs are convenient to use and allow multiple ways of interaction among people through the exchange of video clips, notes, text messages, creative writings, etc.  In particular, MySpace and Facebook seem to satisfy a basic desire of people to virtually stay connected with many people at the same time. Unlike email, most social networking sites allow subscribers to interact with hundreds of people with whom they can share their stories and interests. This type of freeware apparently helps most people to stay connected with others without having to spend money to exchange ideas. They have the opportunity to express their inner deep feelings to others openly, using many different forms of media, such as Wikis, YouTube video clips, Lulu video clips, creative writings, and photos. It could be as simple as someone posting that s/he is tired today, or s/he had scrambled eggs for breakfast, or s/he would like to stab her eye with a sharp weapon. Ironically, someone can respond to such postings by indicating that s/he is partial to the posting by clicking a “like” button! Apparently, such sharing of video clips and the comments from friends or fans seems to give the senders as well as the receivers a great sense of satisfaction and ownership of the work that they publish on their own walls.

The multimedia-enhanced interactive social networks seem to be capable of providing great satisfaction to the users who are in control of the way they want to entertain themselves. While television is a passive method of entertainment, the satisfaction users receive from social networking seems to be far greater than participating in the one-way entertainment that television provides.  Even more importantly, the friends and fans on social networking sites meet in the virtual world of entertainment for free!

With free social networking available, millions of people all over the world are conveniently connected 24/7 without having to communicate via email or expensive phone services. With Gmail freely available, users are able to switch back and forth between Facebook and Twitter; most other forms of email services may be minimally used or discontinued altogether by many  Gmail users.  Further, social networking services like Facebook  seem to provide a “one-stop-shopping service” to busy people,  enabling them to check on updates about their friends all over the world by spending a few minutes or as much time as they want.  This may be accomplished at their convenience, perhaps while doing other work, when attending a face-to-face class at a university, while listening to a sermon at church on Sunday, or when having a meal with family and friends in a restaurant!

Another attractive feature of the new social networking services is the availability of instant gratification. Facebook users who keep checking their walls have the satisfaction of knowing that their friends have either clicked the “like” button or have written notes on their posts by clicking the “comment” button.  To return the favor, the original sender will also be happy to share observations to the responses received. This process seems to go on in an endless cycle -- building relationships with new friends.  Obviously, social networking service companies have found a niche by providing a wonderful and innovative opportunity to people who are constantly bored or need continuous stimulation in their lives.

“Farming” and “Mafia Wars” are other features that attract users to free social networking sites. Not only do these game players find immense satisfaction when playing these games, they also seem to take great delight in sharing their successes with fans and friends by publicizing their stories on their Facebook walls. Seeing such successful “farmers,” their friends and fans bestow recognition by clicking the built-in “like” button or by writing short comments without having to learn HTML or XML coding. The success of their “farmer friends” entices others on Facebook to brag about their successes. This activity demonstrates how people are attracted to doing things easily and conveniently while deriving great satisfaction by doing so interactively. Gaming, faming, and warring on these social networks seems to be almost “contagious.” Only time will tell if people will ever get bored doing such things.

“Virtual stalking” is another past-time of social networkers. Social networking has provided an opportunity for fans to interact with the celebrities they admire. Similarly, people who have similar interests tend to gather in social networks. They establish friendships, share photos and videos, and exchange creative writings, and get together in “meet up” groups in restaurants.  Sending invitations to friends and fans to join in for lunch or dinner at popular restaurants and publicizing who will be participating in the meet ups, is gaining in popularity.

Cloud Computing:

Doubling of computing power every 18 months since the 1960s has paved the way to “Cloud Computing”, a new model that completely changes how most business enterprises build and run information systems and business applications. Cloud computing essentially relieves business operations from having to build, maintain, and upkeep computing infrastructures, hardware and software platforms, and business applications by outsourcing those services to service providers who provide such services over the Internet – similar to utility companies providing electricity, gas, and water.

Following are a few of the major services that cloud computing service providers perform: 1) provide software as a service (SaaS),  2) provide computing platforms as a service, and 3) provide the entire computing infrastructure as a service. Some of the major players in the cloud computing service industry today are Salesforce.com(CRM), Google(Goog), NetSuit(N), Taleo(TLEO),Concur Technologies(CNQR), Amazon.com(AMZN)-EC2, Mocrosoft(MSFT) –Windows Live,Terremark Worldwide (TMRM) –The Enterprise Cloud, Salesforce.com(CRM)-Force.com,NetSuite(N)-Suiteflex, Mosso – Mosso, a division of Rackspace, Metrisoft-SaaS Platform, International Business Machines (IBM), and SAVVIA (SVVS). These companies charge their customers a subscription fee and in return host software on central servers that are accessed by the end user via the Internet.

Evidently, cloud computing is becoming a more efficient, effective and economic way of managing computing resources throughout the world. In this review, our focus is on how cloud computing impacts on the education industry —in particular higher educational institutions.  Although no clear benchmarking standards for gauging productivity/quality in education exist, the current wave of disruptive technology (especially Cloud Computing) will cause a remarkable paradigm shift in higher education in the foreseeable future as outlined in the section below.

Productivity Paradox in Education:

Productivity is a measure of the amount or number of inputs (capital investment, equipment, and labor) required to produce a number or amount of outputs.  In the business world “productivity” is a measure of output from a production process, per unit of input. Productivity of labor is measured by the quantity of output per time spent or numbers employed to produce the output. The productivity of labor could, therefore, be measured in terms of dollars per hour.

In researching productivity in education, the ideas expressed by Barry Bosworth are very relevant. The title of his article, “Productivity in Education and the Growing Gap with Service Industries,” reveals that education in the United States is economically lagging behind other service sectors in productivity. Is this a perception problem or is this gap real and widening due to the lack of valid measurement tools that educators should be using to measure productivity? Ironically, educators who are the innovators, researchers, and guardians of most educational disciplines, do not have standardized measures for assessing the progress and productivity of their own trade – the education industry.

To quote from Barry Bosworth’s article, “For example, we can document that many of these improvements [in the service sector] can be traced to the use of information and communication technologies. However, in the general expansion of services, one industry – education stands out as a notable exception. It is an activity that should benefit the most from the new technologies.” He adds, “Yet, the education industry’s own performance appears poor. Costs have been rising steadily, above the rate of wage increases, while labor productivity—in terms of students per teacher – has declined. A surprisingly limited amount of work has been devoted to measuring the output and productivity of education industry (Bosworth, P. 62)

Obviously, measurement of productivity in education is not as simple and as clear cut as in the service sector. Moreover, the perception of productivity of students could be much different from that of the instructors. Likewise, education administrators may have totally different perception of productivity in education. Accrediting agencies will have their own views and measures for productivity.

In the same educational institution, colleges and departments may have radically different ideas, concepts, and perceptions of productivity and quality. This of course, falls under, the rubric of academic freedom that most educators value. The difficult challenges of transferring credits between educational institutions, as well as the challenges faced by some state universities attempting to establish common course numbering systems, serve as examples of the immensity and complexity of the problems associated with establishing a uniform measuring system of productivity at state and national levels. Further complicating the issue of measuring productivity and quality of learning are the variations between private, for-profit, non-profit, land-grant and state-funded educational institutions. However, ignoring the fact that there is no valid and uniform measuring scheme for evaluating the productivity, especially at a time when the impact of disruptive cloud computing technology (Cloud Computing) is so widely felt in the “flat world,” will only make things more difficult for higher educational institutions to keep up with the rapidly changing world of their customers and stakeholders (i.e., the society at large). 

More than ten years ago, Richard N. Katz (1999) in his publication “Dancing with the Devil –Information Technology and the New Competition in Higher Education,” wrote “many of the readers of this volume may think that higher education’s relationship with information technology as a dance with the devil…many of us in higher education now wish that we could push the information technology genie back into the bottle, as this technology is raising cultural, organizational, economic, and even survival issues for which the questions greatly outweigh the answers” (p. xiii ).The same author, in a recent publication writes, “I continue to feel as if I am in Wonderland. The life of the mind is, of course, always filled with wonder, and higher education enjoys proximity to two renewable sources of wonder: young people and a mission of discovery. Immersion in higher education IT adds even more to the wonder. I suspect that careers in IT in higher education leave many of us feeling like we have tumbled to a pool of tears, the queen’s croquet grounds, or mad tea party” (Preface, p. xi).

Ironically, the period marked by the digital revolution was also the time when enrollment in universities and colleges started spiraling downwards and college tuition started spiraling upwards. The birth of Western Governors Open University and University of Phoenix began championing the cause of reaching out to under-served populations through online class offerings. While the stakes were high, almost all universities and colleges started following suit competing in this land of opportunity. The sentiments expressed by the author of “Dancing with the Devil” underlines the risks involved in this bold and adventurous journey started by the higher education administrators, information technology(IT) professionals and the early adopters of online education in higher education.  Unfortunately, according to Eduventures, a recent survey of 96 institutions indicated that “online programs are generally profitable. But despite the buzz around Web 2.0, the education they provide is still dominated by rudimentary, text-based technology…the underlying delivery model or pedagogical model hasn’t really changed much in the last five, 10 years” (Volume LVI, Number 10, p. A12). This report adds, “the Eduventure survey found that the widely used tools are email, online discussion that don’t happen in real time, physical textbooks, and Word and PDF documents that contrast with what you find on the programs of distance-learning conferences, where the talk is often about Web 2.0 technology that allows students to interact with the content or the provider in tangible ways. Those tools might be social networking platforms or Wikis or virtual worlds; innovation is really on the periphery in terms of the odd synchronous session, or the odd video clip, or the odd simulation” (Volume LVI, Number 10, p. A12). These observations by the very first attempt to bench mark online specific operational activities across a large number of colleges by a consulting firm appear to portray a very poor picture of the productivity of online education by most online programs of universities and colleges during the past 20 years.

Some Concluding Thoughts:

Is the use of social networking freeware programs productive? Do they serve any productive purpose in an instructor-centered classroom? Although most of the social networks, including Facebook, could serve as socializing and communication agents, they may be an obstruction as well as a distraction to real learning in a traditional classroom set up. It does not make good sense for students to live in a residential college or university to take online classes from the same college or university. With no measuring system to assess the quality of instruction between online and face-to-face instructional methods, educators will continue to perform their job not knowing if they are productive or not at the end of the day.

While the secular educational system in the oriental world can be traced back to the Buddhist monasteries as early as the sixth century B.C .,  the Western universities and colleges are an outgrowth of medieval European monastic and guild life which later became the strongholds of learning. It took more than thousand years for these universities and colleges to be what they are today: 1) places with majestic buildings where faculty with vast knowledge as well as administrators and support staff live and work, 2) large libraries storing books, magazines and research materials, 3) students in residence halls with access to personalized teaching, the discovery of knowledge, and research, and service to the community.

The United States has the second largest number of higher educational institutions and the largest number of higher educational students in the world. The U.S. Department of Education reports 4,861 colleges and universities with 18,248,128 students in 2007.  Unfortunately, the cost of college education has been steadily rising while the enrollment trend has been slowing down.  The demand for affordable higher education is on the rise and online education has been selected by most colleges and universities as well as online universities like Western Governor’s University and University of Phoenix as the answer for affordable higher education for reaching out to under-served populations.

This is also a time when digital revolution is transforming the society in an unprecedented way. Today’s college youth have outgrown the television age. Most of them are highly connected to a variety of digital devices even while they are attending on-ground classes. James J. Duderstadt poses the question, “Can Colleges and Universities Survive in the Information Age? “ (EDUCAUSE, 1999, p.1).  Will the place-bound, brick-and-mortar colleges and universities survive in the competition for customers in the de-regulated broader open market of cloud computing?  The more resourceful universities and private enterprises (yet to be born), including book publishers may be successful competitors in this market.

References:

1 .  http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffpiu044.pdf, “Productivity in Education and the Growing Gap with Service Industries, Barry Bosworth

2.  Richard N. Katz and Associates, Dancing with the Devil, Information Technology and the new Competition in Higher Education, A Publication of EDUCAUSE, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco1999.

3.  The Tower and The Cloud, Higher education in the Age of Cloud Computing, An EDUCAUSE Publication, 2008.

4. The Chronicle of Higher education, October 30, 2009, Volume LVI, Number 10, p. A12, A12 “Online Education is Mired In Old Technology.”

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_in_the_United_States

6. Western Governors University Website:http://ocw.wgu.edu; University of Phoenix website: http://aptm.phoenix.edu/?channel=SRCH&psrc=googlebroad&keyword=phoenixuniversity&pvp_campaign=14210_0917_9_95&pvp_campaign_int=24310_0917_9_95&creative_desc=P138949738_Broad_Online-Branded-General_NationalBranded-Misspellings&vrefid=s138949738_3555922711_4561iuf9g3q501317

To eat or Not to eat out?

 Watch What You Eat

Author Jay Hettiarachchy

07/11/2006

Our eating habits are mostly cultural. Some of us have lived through the school lunch programs and college cafeteria days that have mostly laid the foundation of our eating habits. Grandma’s cooking has become a ‘line’ in food marketing. But, who has the time today to watch what they eat and do ‘grandma’s type of cooking when some of us do not even have time to eat!

Most of us eat on the run, mostly while driving what we pick up at fast food restaurants, drive by windows, while at work, in the hall-way going to work, in bed and many other strange places that the reader may want to include in this list. What about those folks who cannot be separated from food at least for a few minutes? All they do all day is eat, eat and eat more. There are some cultures in the world that are based on cooking and eating habits that they have acquired over generations. Their entire family structure and family relationships are based on the culture that has cooking and consumption of food at its center. I do not like to point to one culture and call it a ‘cooking culture’, I will allow the reader to do that; this is because I do not want to get into big trouble by finger pointing to cultures and cultural habits.

                                                                                                     

Agriculture is big business; manufacturing of food is even bigger business. Food science related research and instruction, not only help the consumption of better food, but has become a growing business and industry. We could add all sorts of other subsidiaries such as the transportation, retailing and all other industries, educational and research institutions and businesses that are heavily integrated with the production and consumption of food. People in the food industry believe that so long as people continue to eat they have a job to do.

So most of us eat to live, and some of us make a living by gaining employment in food production related industry, businesses in which we work, eat and spend a life time. There is nothing wrong with this. We work, we make a living, we eat, and we die after all.

Whereas in some countries people live in hunger due to lack of food supply in some other parts of the world people have plenty of food, and access to food almost within a matter of few minutes (assuming that they have the money to buy the chosen food); they have vending machines that give them hot or cold beverages, cookies, and even hot pizzas. Some food businesses seem to cater for the “spoilt brats” who do not watch what they eat. In this context, someone once said that “there are no bad foods, only bad eaters.”

Enough of ‘bad mouthing’ bad food eating habits; it is time to focus on good food eating habits. The writer is not prepared to make prescriptions as doctors do. The writer simply gives his opinions that he has gained through a life-time of consumption of food in few different parts of the world.

1.                  You need to pick your food before you eat it. Picking good food could be a life-long experience. One way of gaining this experience is by doing the mistakes yourself or reading that you gain by the mistakes others have made and quickly learning from those mistakes. You could learn the mistakes done by other people in two ways, a) reading books written by others, most of them will tell you how they became sick by eating bad food and how after picking good food before they ate them, they prevented bad things from happening to them, b) by watching how those who live close to you (family members, relatives, and friends) eat and how they are affected by their eating habits. For example, many of us have family members, relatives, friends, or co-workers who do not watch what they eat, and practically eat like ‘pigs’. They may set an example of the bad eaters who ‘live to eat.’ How many of such folks, die young just because they did not pick their food right and cultivate good eating habits? Another way of watching peoples eating habits and how those habits have affected their lives is by watching the shopping behavior in the supermarket food section. I do it whenever I do my food shopping. It has become a habit for me, and it comes for free. Some shoppers have their shopping carts overloaded with fatty food; they easily pay over $200 for their shopping. What is more interesting is the body shapes of those shoppers. No wonder someone said “you are what you eat.” Have you seen how people eat at all-you-can-eat restaurants? It looks like they have never seen food in their whole life. I guess those restaurant owners still make a profit margin by dealing with food that way; otherwise why would they be in business selling all you can eat food? On the contrary, there are the others who eat the right food in right amounts, and maintain healthy bodies that are virtually free from diseases. Like picking good food takes time and discipline, picking material written by others who have the right idea about good eating habits is time consuming. There are many good books written by researchers on good food and bad food. It is up to the reader to make his/or her bibliography of good books on good food and good eating habits. The more important thing however is the discipline that needs to be cultivated to practice good habits backed by research done on food. If the material that you read makes sense, read them. It is too late to start cooking broccoli and feed a person who is having a heart attack. It should have been done long time before that. You get the idea. One more thing. The irresistible temptation to over eat is a curse that bad eaters justify saying to themselves and others “oh, it is just once in a while.” You could do all the weight watching, but if you cannot resist the temptation to eat that dessert, you may eventually fail in life. That is where some folks will have to give all the money that they saved when they were young back to the hospital, when they are old. How sad for people who cannot resist their temptation to eat big desserts saturated with sugar at the end of a rich meal after a stressful day of work? If you do not believe me, just take some time to go to an all you can eat restaurant and watch how people eat there, especially how they consume their desserts. You will not be surprised. There are no bad foods, just bad eaters.

The mantra is the capacity that you develop to see yourself in the mirror carrying all that food inside your body. This is a powerful tool that you could use to resist temptation to eat food that you know are bad. After all, “if you don’t feel sorry for yourself who will?”

2.                  You need to spend time preparing the food that you eat. It does not take much time to prepare your food. It is simply a matter of choice on your part. Either you could give the control of food preparation to others who prepare your food to make a profit and allow them to control the preparation of your food or prepare your own food and enjoy doing it and eating what you yourself prepare and also keep the control of food preparation under your own control. I honestly think that you are the only person who cares about your health and the way you look and feel. The restaurant owners will greet and treat you well in order to make a profit for themselves, and don’t forget the tip!

3.            You need to have someone to eat your food with. In the busy world where we live today, some of us run our lives on a tight schedule. Our breakfasts, lunches and dinners are all scheduled in such a way that what I write here might seem like a sermon that someone preaches from an 18^th century pulpit. In our busy world, we mostly discuss business over breakfasts, lunches and dinners with our co-workers. We hardly pay attention to what we eat or the persons who we eat with, other than the objective of the business meal and the business relationship that the business meal would bring forth. Most of us tend to make business deals during such business meals; sometimes these meals for three or four business partners could run up to a $500.00 very easily. What does it matter when these meals come for free (paid by your employer) anyway? On the other hand, have you seen some folks eating meals all by themselves? Of course, some people may not be lucky enough to have a partner to share their meals with and some people may feel comfortable consuming their meals all by themselves— perhaps in haste and in anger.

4. Do not talk business or family affairs while having a good meal. That is one way to ruin your meal and lose your appetite. It would be far better to talk anything other than family affairs, work, or other people’s affairs, or business when enjoying a meal. Have you seen how unhappy some people are when they have their meals? I often wonder why some people are in such a big hurry to gulp their meals. Some of them give me the impression that they want to be done with the meal as soon as possible, like having sex in a hurry or as if they have a plane to catch the next minute. Eating food with partners who are talking business, family matters, and are in a rush to finish their food could be not only be damaging physically but emotionally to humans, especially when the food digestion process begins to take place in the mouth itself and the stomach does not have teeth to chew the food and the stomach secretions themselves will have to do the tasks of making the food digestible. Some of us ‘emotional wrecks’ could drive our stomach walls totally dry of digestive gastric juices. This may not happen overnight, but over long periods of time by unhappy and unhealthy ways of consuming food.

5.      Take time to eat your food. We all take our time to work, don’t we? Eating is about living, and there is a good reason to take the time to eat well, because eating is not an automatic function of the body like breathing. There is a reason for breathing to be automatic, that is if one does not take the time to breathe (or forget to breathe) for a while one will not die. However, not eating food will take quite a while for a person to die of hunger, while eating bad food in haste and in bad company and in anger will take even a longer period of time to kill a person.

6. Enjoy what you eat. If the food that you eat and the amount of food you eat make you feel uncomfortable, you are not enjoying your food. Always keep the balance between eating too much and too little because our life is about keeping the balance. Those who do not keep the balance in what they do are bound to crash or fall when they lose balance. As a little boy, I often wondered as to why and how Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. Was he too heavy or did he lose his balance on the wall he sat?

To sum up this discussion on food, someone said “eating good food in good company is like dancing with a partner who you are in love with.” Both the food that you eat and the person/s you eat the food with, and of course the environment that you choose to eat your food takes a long way towards giving you the real joy of eating food that helps you live – and live a happy and healthy life. It goes without saying that bad food, eaten in bad company in bad environments brings unhappiness and contributes to a shorter life that is full of diseases, most of them gained in some ways, by bad food eating choices that we make over a long period of time.

The reality in human situation is that whether we eat good food or bad food we have to die one day. It is a matter of choice that we have to die healthy and happy or die unhappy and sick surrounded by a bunch of very sophisticated machines!

Saying:

Those who live to eat love to eat