Lois Brooks (University of Wisconsin Madison) on Leading Through Change with IT Strategy for the New Student Demographic

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, podcast host Shauna Cox was joined by Lois Brooks to discuss the evolving role of IT leadership in higher ed and how to balance innovation with security. 

Transcript

Voiceover: Welcome to Illumination by Modern Campus, the leading podcast focused on transformation and change in the higher education space. On today’s episode, we speak with Lois Brooks, who is Vice Provost and CIO at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Lois and podcast host Shauna Cox discuss the evolving role of IT leadership in higher ed and how to balance innovation with security. 

Shauna Cox (00:02):Lois, welcome to the Illumination Podcast. I'm so glad you could join me today.

Lois Brooks (00:06):Thanks, Shauna. Thanks for inviting me.

Shauna Cox (00:09):Absolutely. So we're here to talk about the evolving role of leadership as higher ed is more than well aware now that demographics are changing, technology is advancing very rapidly. New technologies seem to be emerging all the time as we're kind of going into this new era, I'd like to say. So I want to kick off our conversation and ask you, how are shifting student demographics, including say, the growing present of non-traditional learners impacting the role of IT leadership in higher education overall?

Lois Brooks (00:45):Well, I'd go first perhaps to how it's impacting it. Before we talk about leadership, I think we need to think more broadly about the learner experience than we have in a traditionally place-based campus, things as really straightforward as perhaps these students learn on different schedules. So we need to change our maintenance windows. Perhaps they have different preferences for receiving information and for communicating and engaging with the university. So we need to think about our channels and our processes. Perhaps we need to think about our windows around holidays where non-traditional learners may wish to use downtime from their own jobs to accelerate their learning. So we may need support services for them. So we really need to think about meeting them where they are in their educational journey and managing their complex lives.

(01:36):We also need to, this is more of a leadership question, really connect with the delivery partners at our universities to understand if they're thinking perhaps about new tools for marketing to these students, new forms of student support, new forms of course delivery, different kinds of processes, different kinds of use of data. And ask ourselves, do we need to do more for them? Do we need new things for them or can we do more and different with what we have to tune our services that better meet the changing needs of the university to serve these learners?

Shauna Cox (02:10):Absolutely. And you've been in the IT CI role for a few years, and I want to ask you, how has the role of the CIO in higher ed kind of evolved over the last decade, and what leadership qualities do you think are now critical? They always may have been critical, but more critical now for leading through this period of transformation.

Lois Brooks (02:38):Well, I think there was a time a while back where it was kind of a movement toward thinking about it as plumbing. And we certainly do run a lot of core operations. All aspects of the university rely on it, so rest on our shoulders. But I think the role is much more now as we think about some of the grand challenges that we're dealing with and the expertise that we have developed in it. We know how to mobilize big efforts and see them through to completion. We have structured processes that drive efficiency, that minimize downtime, that provide high quality. We're really good financial strategists because it is expensive. So we need to be, over the past several years with the change in the workforce in people's modalities of working with industry poaching, a lot of our staff are offering in a more positive way, really good career opportunities.

(03:35):We've had to think a lot more about workforce engagement to drive retention, to drive job satisfaction that lead to high performing teams. And more recently since the pandemic, we've had to become experts at bimodal work, hybrid work. And so you think about all of the complexities that the university faces in our domain around perhaps navigating ai, the promise and the problems with AI or around changing the demographics of the learner, like we were just talking about. All of these require skills, the ability to think through things, develop financial strategies, mobilize, and see things through to completion. These skills that we've developed are really important for the university now. And what this means is that the CIO is increasingly at the table as a strategist for the university helping to move things forward. And what I think it means for us as CIOs is that we have to be engaged, we have to be people oriented first, and we really need to understand the whole business that we're in, the whole educational business so we can understand how to articulate and apply it to solving grand challenges.

Shauna Cox (04:48):And I think that alludes perfectly to the next question. You were talking about the technology shifts that we've kind of had to made in recent years and those challenges that still remain. So I want to expand on that and ask, as technology is rapidly advancing, what are some of those key challenges that IT leaders are facing in higher ed when it comes to driving institutional innovation, but at the same time trying to maintain student engagement and learning outcomes?

Lois Brooks (05:20):The big challenge right now for us is cybersecurity. The threats are continually increasing. The risks are high. When we do have a cyber security problem, it's deeply impactful to us. And so we have to protect our data and systems, but these protections we put in place can impede academic work. They can impede the business of the university. Sometimes something as simple as multifactor authentication is pretty straightforward. We all do that routinely now, but other safeguards we've put in place may make it more difficult to stand up a new research project or may a lot more time and effort to deploy a new piece of software because we need to make it secure. And so I think about walking on top of a mountain that you need to stay on top of the mountain, not expose yourself to risk, but not overbalanced risk against innovation and getting things done. So finding that right mix. And also want to add, we are seeing a lot more regulation, particularly in the research space that we must comply with to get research dollars. And they're important to protect our work, but they're expensive and they're complex, and we increasingly need to try to find ways to help the university be secure to do its work that doesn't impede our progress forward and does allow us to meet the requirements that are given to us.

Shauna Cox (06:46):And I want to talk about that mountain that you so nicely illustrated there. I think there's the other side of the coin or whatever phrase you want to use here when it comes to striking a balance because there's the students as well. So in an increasingly digital world, how can higher ed institutions strike that balance between implementing these new technologies at the same time ensuring equitable access for students? Because I think that has also been a challenge over the years, especially with the pandemic for students.

Lois Brooks (07:24):Well, I actually don't think those are different. New technology and ensuring equitable access. I think the opposite, that technology can lead to equitable access for students. You think about the ability with technology to do your schoolwork from anywhere on devices that might normalize any differences in the way we learn or the way we engage something as well known as a screen reader. But other things that are more new and more novel around the way we present information, perhaps think about inclusion in the sense of a student who may be reluctant to contribute verbally in a classroom, but would find an asynchronous learning environment, one where they have time to compose their thoughts and perhaps they're not being talked over to allow them to contribute more fully. And so the way we use these technologies of course matters, but I think that they can actually bring a lot more equity. The other thing I would add to this is that wholesale change can be challenging, but local innovation, innovating in particular pedagogies particular classrooms, gives us a place to develop ideas that are possible, that we can then understand what might go to scale. So when we think about, particularly at a large university like UW Madison, there's never a one size fits all for anything. But there are baseline technologies that can be deployed in new and interesting ways to help create additional equity in the classroom.

Shauna Cox (08:58):I absolutely love that. Thank you for highlighting that. And so you mentioned student preferences, and I think that alludes to the next question here. With the increased demand for more personalized learning experiences, how can a higher ed leaders use data and technology to improve student success and foster a more adaptive learning environment?

Lois Brooks (09:23):We have the ability to know in a lot of detail how our students are engaging, whether they're struggling with coursework or particular concept or with other issues. If students are using digital tools, we have the ability to know right away how they're doing and how much they're engaging. But we also need, well, I'll back up and say we also know other things about our students, whether they've been visiting with their advisors, whether their bills are late, whether they're eating regularly, if they're a meal plan, we need to connect dots in ways that help us support the students, but don't invade their privacy. Understanding that a student may be missed a few meals when is struggling in a class will be really helpful to engage that student. But it's also frankly kind of creepy to call them and say, Hey, we've noticed these couple things about you. Do you need some help? And so we need to think about how to navigate that privacy landscape. How do I allow our students to opt into services or to have frankly, more information about themselves to see how they're doing and how they're progressing related to their peers so they can practice more self engagement, more self-care or seek help when they need it. 

We also need to be open to a more adaptive environment that might require us changing our processes, changing our calendars, changing our modes of assessment that many of the ways of doing business we've had in place for decades or perhaps more than a century. And so thinking about do we need to think differently about a whole university engagement with a student, a whole person engagement rather than office by office, that allow us to have a different kind of inside, a different kind of relationship that allow us to flow data in ways that aren't creepy and don't invade privacy, but do allow us to do a better job for the students.

Shauna Cox (11:20):And I want to look to the future here because obviously we're in this transformative space and we're moving towards a new, and I know it's recycled so many times, but a new era of higher education. And so looking to the future, what do you see as the most pressing priorities for IT leadership in higher ed?

Lois Brooks (11:59):Okay. So the most important pressing priorities for IT leadership, I think it's what we've been talking about is really helping the university navigate the complexity that we have, whether it's navigating the promise and the peril of ai, both the ability to do deeper analytics, incredible science with artificial intelligence, and the questions about repeatability, quality, where our data goes, helping people navigate that, like we spoke about before, this idea of how do we use data for the good but don't invade privacy is a complex conversation that we can help navigate, helping manage all the emergent federal requirements versus the cost and productivity of those. I think the IT leadership is increasingly needed to help navigate, to help guide our way through this, to help find and see both sides of every equation stay up on top of that mountain. And because we in IT work with every part of the university, we work the academic campus, the student service campus, the administrative campus athletics, we work with the whole university. So we are really well situated to understand the needs and implications of technologies broadly and help gather the right people together into conversation and lead and guide and advise.

Shauna Cox (13:27):Absolutely. It's so critical. Well, LO is everything that I have for you, but before I let you go, we are going to need a restaurant recommendation from you. And I know you're representing Madison, Wisconsin, so if anyone's coming to town, where do they need to go?

Lois Brooks (13:43):They need to go to Fairchild on Monroe Street. It is the best restaurant in Madison. Always innovative, all sorts. Every time I go, I have something that I have never had before. That is absolutely delicious. And I'll give them a shout out because they were my favorite restaurant already. But last year they won the James Be Award.

Shauna Cox (14:03):Oh wow. Yeah. That's quite a award to have under your belt. Absolutely. Louis, thank you so much again, really appreciate it.

Lois Brooks (14:15):Thanks for inviting me, Shana. Have a good day.