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Report
to Council of the Society of American Archivists Task Force on Continuing Education
May
1, 2000
Richard
J. Cox, Chair
Paul Conway
Susan Davis
Tim Ericson
Susan Fox, ex officio
David Haury
Bill Landis
Reneta Webb, SAA Education Officer
Wilda Logan Willis
EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY. The SAA Council established the Task Force on Continuing Education
to evaluate and make recommendations regarding the future of the Society's education
program and the position of an Education Officer. The Task Force deliberated
through the Fall of 1999 and much of the Winter of 2000, culminating in a meeting
in Chicago on March 10-11, 2000. The Task Force recommends a major shift in
the Society's education program, primarily supporting a move from offering basic
workshops to offering online courses. This report describes the change of focus,
the cost factors related to online course offerings, the support of an Education
Officer position, and the matter of educational goals and their ongoing evaluation.
A number of appendices of data have been provided for the use of Council in
its deliberations and reflecting information the Task Force considered and/or
generated.
CHANGING THE FOCUS OF THE SAA CONTINUING EDUCATION PROGRAM. The Task Force
recommends that the Society shift its education program focus to deal with critical
and challenging continuing education issues. In order to accomplish this objective,
the Task Force recommends that the Society do the following:
Develop
the means to help all individuals in the records professions better determine
their education needs and identify where and how they can meet their education
and training needs. The Society needs both to recognize that it cannot
meet the needs of all members of the archival profession and that many
other venues and groups have emerged that can provide basic and remedial training.
The Society needs to focus on all other educational objectives, better reflecting
the experience and education of its membership. Developing the means to do
this suggests the Society helping to develop and support a clearinghouse of
information where individuals can go to find training and education opportunities
(from basic, entry training workshops to comprehensive graduate education
programs). The Society's online education directory and publications catalog
already represent a substantial part of such a clearinghouse and the Society's
support of both continuing education and Masters in Archival Studies guidelines
provides a foundation for such an objective. The Society's good working relationship
with regional archival associations, state archives and historical societies,
and other organizations providing continuing education is another strength
that the Society can draw on for accomplishing this objective. Developing
a closer relationship with these groups not only recognizes the present reality
of archival continuing education, but it creates the possibility of helping
the Society to play a creative role in improving continuing education and
to be more strategic with its own objectives and resources.
Stress the
needs of the changing parameters of the Society's membership, re-focusing
its education program to support archivists and other records professionals
who possess substantial graduate education and/or experience. As recent
evaluations of the Society's membership have discovered, the members are getting
older, better educated, more experienced, and better paid. The Society, while
concerned with the overall state of the archival profession, needs to focus
its education program on the particular needs of these kinds of better-educated
and more experienced professionals. This is especially important as graduates
of MA/MLS/MAS programs represent a new breed of 'early career archivists'
needing challenging and critical continuing education offerings.
Such a focus will not only assist the Society to use its limited resources
more strategically, but it will help the Society to nurture the leadership
of the field. These kinds of objectives are part of the original, historical
foundations of the Society.
Work with
the people and key groups and partners who train archivists and other records
professionals. Over the past twenty years or more, the number of people
and groups interested in the education of records professionals has grown
substantially. There are literally hundreds of potential players in the training
of records professionals, from professional associations to colleges and universities
to consulting groups to informal working alliances of professionals. The Society
now has the opportunity to be more strategic in educational offerings by working
with these individuals and groups both to develop educational objectives and
to deliver training. The Society can also play a leadership role in setting
education agendas and in providing tools, from traditional publications to
online courses, for the training of records professionals. This more strategic
role also provides the opportunity to challenge certain records creators,
such as corporations, to provide better care for their archival records. National
associations, such as the Society, are the best (and, in some cases, the only)
groups to take such a leadership role.
Stress critical
and challenging areas in professional education. There is no denying the
many rapid changes in society, organizations, information technologies, and
recordkeeping systems affecting the modern archivist and records manager.
A key to any agenda for professional continuing education must be the ability
of the discipline to create and support the means to provide education equipping
records professionals to cope with and solve the modern challenges. The Society
must be able to offer excellent training in emerging techniques, such
as represented by Encoded Archival Description and digital libraries. The
Society needs to target critically important sectors creating records,
such as is represented by corporations. And the Society must be able to assist
the profession to work on larger issues through education, such as
represented by the issues generating from the archiving of electronic mail
and Web sites. This objective is probably the most important responsibility
for the Society, and the role it might best be able to play in the broader
profession.
While some of
the above objectives can be met through the traditional means of short-term,
onsite workshops — the norm for the Society's education program — the
Society needs to refocus the main thrust of its education program toward
more comprehensive courses offered in an online environment.
THE SOCIETY'S NEW EDUCATION FOCUS: ONLINE COURSES
The Task Force
believes that the year 2000 presents an opportune moment to reorient its education
program — now directed primarily but not exclusively toward SAA members
— to take advantage of the rapidly maturing technology of distance education.
Since its inception,
SAA's continuing education programs have relied nearly exclusively on the workshop
format. Education specialists define the workshop as "a relatively short-term,
intensive, problem-focused learning experience that actively involves participants
in the identification and analysis of problems and in the development and evaluation
of solutions." They contrast the strengths and limitations of the workshop
with other formats, including seminars, institutes, and in particular short
courses, which are abbreviated, more focused versions of the classes typically
found in colleges and universities. Designed to update or deepen the knowledge
of those in a particular field, the expert dominates the sessions because the
short course focuses on communication and on acquisition of information within
a short time." See Appendix One for a description of the workshop format.
A careful shift
over a two to three year period from a nearly exclusive focus on one- and two-day
workshops to delivering challenging short-courses in an online environment has
at least four distinctive advantages for the Society.
Educational
Goals. Because distance education is a relatively new phenomenon, SAA
has the opportunity in adopting the format to make a clean break with its
past efforts and define its educational goals clearly for participants. As
its online program develops, SAA can move away from the simple ideas of "basic"
or "advanced" offerings to a multi-faceted definition of "challenging" that
emphasizes the respective role of the learner, the teacher, the content,
and the format. SAA may need to target its offerings to members new to a
given
topic and attempt to assemble participant groups that are homogeneous in
terms of familiarity with a given topic. SAA will probably need to recruit
experienced
teachers or train them in teaching methodologies and equip them with techniques
for generalizing from the particular.
Economics.
There is a compelling economic argument that supports the aggressive development
of online course offerings. The long-standing goal of economic self-sufficiency
notwithstanding, SAA's educational program has depended on grant funds for
development and has always run a significant deficit when managed without
the benefit of soft money sources. The Task Force developed a sequence of
income and expense models for one-day workshops, two-day workshops, and online
courses. The three models demonstrate that conclusively that SAA will most
likely never be able to balance income and expenses if it relies exclusively
on one- and two-day workshops. SAA would have to provide 32 one-day courses
per year with an average of 22 people paying $375 per course in order to break
even. SAA would have to provide 12 two-day courses per year with an average
of 22 people paying $750 per course in order to break even. This price structure
is outside the bounds of most SAA members; the pace of program development,
especially in domain of one-day workshops, is likely outside the capability
of the SAA office and its cadre of instructors.
In the online
environment, SAA's overhead costs drop dramatically since there is no need
to support instructor travel, local technology costs, and course support materials.
Similarly, the opportunity for increased enrollment and higher course fees
increases because participants do not need to incur travel costs. In order
to break even, SAA needs to provide only eight online courses per year with
an average of 50 people paying $375 per course.
See Appendix
Two for the details on the economic models.
Relevancy.
Educational surveys of SAA members have consistently shown that SAA members
want and need educational offerings on pressing current topics that contain
state-of-the art information. The Task Force believes that SAA's online educational
program should identify cutting edge content and strive for deep coverage
of the subject matter, even if this means risking criticism for favoring the
trendy over the tried-and-true.
Technology
Leveraging. In a recent survey of SAA members, technology-oriented training
surfaced as a principal need across all categories of survey respondents.
Because online courses are by nature technologically centered, the format
provides the opportunity to marry the medium and the message; the content
of the course and the mechanism of its delivery can be intimately entwined.
Additionally, the online environment allows SAA to take maximum advantage
of the interpersonal networking capability that is the very essence of the
Internet.
In the short-run,
the distinctive advantages to the Society may be partially offset by challenges
that will require the Society to devote sufficient time, resources, and focused
energy to program development, implementation, and evaluation.
Expectations.
SAA members may need to abandon (over time) their expectation that SAA will
continue to provide basic workshops and introductory-level training that either
compensates for the lack of formal archival education or provides refresher
information for seasoned professionals. SAA will need to encourage members
to find basic workshops in other venues, including regional archival associations,
by forming educational alliances with the regionals.
Startup.
Startup costs will be high. SAA will need to invest in its technology and
network infrastructure (servers, storage systems, redundant network connections,
etc.), the creation of course materials, the recruitment and training of instructors,
publicity, pilot programs, and initial evaluation. Additionally, SAA will
need to plan on coping with declining income from traditional workshops as
energy shifts to creation of online content.
Instructor
Approach. The mindset and commitment of instructors may need to move away
from a tendency toward canned presentations, not fully formulated content,
and significant variety in the level of interactivity between instructor and
participants to a more rigorously developed content that is closer to the
cutting edge, more interactive, and more amenable to regular updating.
Technology
Limitations. The technology of distance education is not fully developed.
Network connections can be faulty and interactivity may be limited by the
choice of technologies that are commonly available rather than state-of-the-art.
Participants in distance education programs, whether they take the form of
online courses or video teleconferencing, tend to complain about the impersonal
nature of the medium and the limitations that private study on the Internet
place on interpersonal networking. SAA must understand the technological limitations
of distance education and online courses and take measures to offset these
limitations wherever possible.
SAA's transition
to a distance education model that takes maximum advantage of emerging information
technologies will not be easy. The following are the Task Force's recommendations
for easing the transition.
- Phase in the
new online course model deliberately over a two or three year period.
- Seek significant
outside funding to offset startup costs. Such costs include the early recruitment
and retention of an SAA education officer to lead the development of the new
program, the recruitment and consulting fees of the people who will develop
course content, and the subsidy (ca. 50% of real cost) of initial course enrollment
fees to encourage participation by SAA members in the new program.
- Link development
of online courses to creation and distribution of supporting publications
sold and distributed in hard copy and online formats.
- Associate
the development of online courses with the expertise of graduate archival
educators.
- Separate the
development of SAA's online course program from the emergence of Master of
Archival Studies (MAS) programs in universities. The fate of the MAS degree,
either positive or negative, should not have a direct impact on the emergence
of SAA's online course program.
- Gradually
increase the cost of online courses as the number, variety, and extent of
participation in online courses increase.
- Continue to
offer traditional (but seriously challenging) workshops in declining numbers.
THE SOCIETY'S EDUCATION OFFICER. The Education Officer position dates
back to the early-1980s and the Society's receiving a National Historical Publications
and Records Commission grant. The original concept of the position was to have
it become self-supporting through revenue generated by workshop offerings and
the selling of educational materials that could be used by others for training
purposes. The individual, generally an experienced archivist, filling the Education
Officer position in its early manifestations served as the resident archival
expert on the Society staff. More recently, education experts have filled the
Education Officer slot.
In evaluating
the data assembled related to archival continuing education and the Society,
the Task Force has determined that the Education Officer has been forced
to
play a role that is too broadly defined, ranging from Society staff support
to trying to direct a continuing education program with responsibilities
from
basic to advanced workshops and liaison with other education provided from
regional associations to graduate education programs.
The Task
Force recommends that the Education Officer position be continued, and that
the position be filled by an education expert who can best carry out the
new
focus (described above) on critical and challenging continuing education issues.
The Education Officer needs to assume the following responsibilities:
Steering
the Education Program. The Education Officer needs to stress the role
of guiding the education program to meet the critical and challenging continuing
education issues. This requires an individual who can learn about the nature
of these issues and develop venues for meeting such needs. Much of the responsibility
of the newly defined Education Officer would be devoted to developing, coordinating
the offering, and evaluating on new intensive online courses. This responsibility
will also include playing the lead role in securing development funds for
the online courses.
Advocating
the Education Program. Another significant responsibility for the Education
Officer will be that of coordinating continuing education offered by the Society
with that offered by another education providers such as regional associations
and colleges and universities. The Education Officer will need to be both
a liaison to these other educational providers as well as a resource person
for Society members and others interested in training for archival work. This
role might also involve developing and supporting a more active clearinghouse
about education and training, but this depends to a certain extent on the
direction taken by the Council of State Historical Records Coordinators (COSHRC)
and the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) following
its National Forum on Archival Continuing Education (NFACE) project. At the
least, the Education Officer will need to coordinate with whatever results
from NFACE. All of this requires that the Education Officer have resources
and time for marketing the program, especially to non-traditional audiences
(e.g., the online basic electronic records course to the corporate world).
Publishing
Materials for the Education Program. While the Education Officer has been
connected to Society publications, the newly recommended focus expands the
publishing role to include all media. The Education Officer would be responsible
for the development and maintenance of online course materials (hopefully
with the assistance of a newly created Webmaster position), along with the
development of other publications ranging from CD-ROM products to traditional
manuals and other publications. The Education Officer would work more closely
with the Publications Officer in order to expand and market the Society's
publications catalog. The Education Officer also would be responsible for
identifying existing published (again in all media) materials that might be
useful for new courses in the ever-changing priorities formed by seeking to
meet the critical and challenging continuing education issues.
Teaching
in the Education Program. Given that one of the new responsibilities for
the refocused Education Program is to work with the people and key groups
and partners who train archivists and other records professionals, the Education
Officer will also need to assume a new role for teaching within the Society's
education program. With the recommendation of the Task Force that the Education
Officer continue to be staffed by an education expert, this individual could
and should develop and teach workshops and courses enabling individuals with
subject expertise to prepare new online, CD-ROM, and traditional venue courses.
The Education Officer could also develop courses and workshops supporting
the work of other education providers, especially regional associations, emphasizing
such matters as workshop and course design, evaluation, development of learning
objectives, and other educational issues appropriate to the expertise of an
educational specialist.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES, EDUCATIONAL GOALS, AND EVALUATION. A critical component
to the success of any future continuing education program or offerings are clearly
articulated learning objectives, measurable goals, and meaningful evaluation.
These components have been present only sporadically in the Society's past continuing
education activities and, as a result, the Society itself has not been able
to learn from past successes and failures. Furthermore, the Society has been
unable to tap into such information to ensure the development of a robust continuing
education program that both supports itself financially and responds to and
successfully addresses the evolving continuing education needs of all facets
of SAA membership.
In order to better
secure the success of future efforts in the area of continuing professional
education, the Task Force recommends that the Society do the following:
Articulate
a coherent continuing education framework of which all SAA courses and workshops
are components. Too often in the past the development of continuing education
offerings has been at the instigation of willing members or in response to
short-term opportunities. Several workshop presenters in the field of archival
description, in an e-mail discussion prior to the meeting of this Task Force,
expressed frustration at the varying levels of preparedness for their courses
of the enrollees. They frequently face workshop participants who do not have
the fundamental preparation in either archival theory or practice to successfully
complete the workshop at the level at which it is being offered, or who sign
up for a workshop because it is the only one being offered at a particular
time and not because it meets their specific educational needs. Of course,
this leads to workshops being taught to the lowest common denominator and,
frequently and to the detriment of all enrollees, in the full range of material
not being covered during the workshop. This situation, while perhaps in the
short-term getting more bodies into seats at continuing education workshops,
undermines the long-term success and health of the Society's continuing education
program. The Education Officer should, in conjunction with CEPD, facilitate
the development of a clear framework of courses and course progressions and,
in conjunction with course and workshop developer(s), articulate minimum
levels
of professional practice and preparatory education for courses whose content
is structured to challenge and educate mid-career archivists. As a part of
a more robust and proactive clearinghouse function for archival continuing
education offerings, discussed earlier in this report, the Society's continuing
education web site should assist potential enrollees who aren't adequately
prepared for a particular SAA course or workshop in finding a continuing
education
offering elsewhere that is more appropriate for their level of experience,
academic preparation, and professional need.
Articulate
clear, measurable learning objectives for each continuing education offering.
As part of curriculum development for each continuing education course or
workshop, the Education Officer must work with the course or workshop developer(s)
to establish clear, measurable learning objectives. The Education Officer
should be the catalyst for involving SAA committees, sections, and roundtables
as appropriate in constructively critiquing these objectives as the syllabus
for a course or workshop is developed. Learning objectives should be used
in formulating advertising for the Society's continuing professional education
offerings in order that members and others know prior to enrolling what they
can expect to learn and, just as importantly, what they are expected to know
coming into the course or workshop. For example, will enrollees in a particular
course gain new techniques that they can apply to the solution of particular
problems faced in their jobs, or will they have a less tangible but equally
important increased understanding of a concept or theory that will generally
enhance their practice as records professionals?
Separate
development and instruction for the Society's courses and workshops. It
has largely been past practice for the developer of a particular SAA workshop
also to teach that workshop. There have been several successful instances
in the area of description courses of a Íhand-off' from the original instructor
to a new person, a model on which the Education Officer can build. In the
future, the Society should fund the development of new courses and workshops
absent the expectation that the developer will necessarily be the instructor.
The Education Officer should take the lead in steering the development of
new curricular offerings, and these should be reviewed by a group of members
with appropriate expertise prior to being offered for the first time. Intellectual
property in SAA courses and workshops must clearly belong to the Society
and
not individual content developers. Course content should be periodically
evaluated by someone with appropriate expertise other than the instructor(s).
Develop
standardized criteria for selecting instructors; evaluate instructors in a
meaningful, on-going manner; and prepare multiple instructors for each course
or workshop. The Education Officer should be responsible for organizing
frequent evaluation of instructors above and beyond the collection of routine
data on course evaluation forms. For online courses, this might involve periodically
having an evaluator Ísit in' during an offering of the course. For workshops,
this might involve the Education Officer randomly contacting workshop participants
to administer an impartial evaluation interview. This data should be maintained
by the Society's office in a confidential manner and, in redacted form, be
available to instructors. Continuation of instructors annually should be
based
on a variety of evaluative data. If the Society hopes to market its continuing
education courses beyond its immediate membership, it must be able to ensure
the highest quality of instruction to course and workshop participants. Also,
the Education Officer must be responsible for having back-up instructors
prepared
for each course and workshop so that the Society can market continuing education
offerings based on demand and not on the availability of a particular instructor.
Develop
a three-pronged evaluation scheme that will provide longitudinal data useful
for the continuing development and refinement of a timely, responsive, challenging
continuing education program to benefit both members of the Society, allied
records professionals, and the organizations that employ them.
- Design a
generic evaluation form for all courses and workshops that collects important
data on, for example, enrollees' general reactions to the instructor, venue,
and process, as well as on each enrollee's professional level, job responsibilities,
continuing education funding source, and reasons for enrolling. If administration
of evaluations is problematic, make payment of instructors contingent upon
delivery of completed evaluations. As a part of this evaluation prong, it
might be possible, for some courses and some enrollees, to collect data
about expectations for changed institutional practices and behaviors based
on enrollees' attendance at a continuing education workshop. Follow up studies
by the Education Officer, even on a small pool of enrollees, may over time
assist the Society in marketing select continuing education courses to targeted
audiences, such as corporate or academic administrators and records professionals.
Reports on this data should be submitted annually to Council by the Education
Officer, with the expectation that over time these data will contribute
to increasingly helpful demographic profiles of the Society's continuing
education market.
- Administer
course- and workshop-specific evaluations based directly on articulated
learning objectives for each course or workshop. The Society must be able
to answer a very basic question for each of its continuing education offerings:
do enrollees learn what they are expected to? The Education Officer will
have to work with course developers and instructors over time to refine
methods for this type of evaluation, but collection of this type of data
is critical for the Society if it hopes to attract external funding in the
future in support of specific continuing education development.
- Engage in
a regular 3-5 year cycle of external professional evaluation of the SAA
membership's continuing education needs and response to changes in the Society's
continuing education program. The Society might, additionally, engage in
facilitating or sponsoring external professional evaluations of continuing
education needs in certain targeted sectors where records professionals
are employed as a means of better addressing courses and workshops to meet
those needs. The Education Officer, in addition to being the key liaison
for these studies, must actively evaluate the job done by the contracted
professional evaluator in designing and administering survey instruments,
and analyzing and presenting data in a way that is useful to the Education
Officer, the Executive Director, and the elected leaders of the Society.
APPENDICES. The Task Force drew on a number of documents for its deliberations,
and these have been assembled for perusal by the Council. The documents include:
- One. Paul
Conway, "Basic Versus Advanced Continuing Education
for Archivists," October 12, 1999.
- Two. Paul
Conway, "Annual Budget Model for Online Course Program." [Please contact Jeanette Spears at the
SAA office to inquire about or request this document.]
- Three. Richard
J. Cox, "Report on the Continuing Education Policies
of National Professional Associations," email message September 22, 1999.
- Four. Tim
Ericson, "Assumptions Concerning the SAA Continuing
Education Program," email message September 8, 1999.
Other documents,
not included as appendices (because of their draft form, rough nature, or availability
elsewhere), include the following:
- Society of
American Archivists, "Guidelines
for the Development of Post-Appointment and Continuing Education and Training
Programs," 1997.
- Susan Davis,
extracts from the Society's Archives about the origins and development of
SAA's continuing education program and the Education Officer position.
- Susan Fox
and staff, "Analysis of Education Department Income & Expenses," March
2000. Supplemented by Paul Conway's annual budget model.
- David Haury,
with the assistance of Teresa Brinati, Society publications sales and statistics.
- Bill Landis,
analysis of SAA continuing education offerings, 1993-1999, various emails,
September 1999 - March 2000, and spreadsheets.
- National Forum
on Continuing Archival Education (NFACE), various data about workshops, professional
associations offering continuing education, and the like.
- Society of
American Archivists, Membership Survey and Education Assessments Study, 1997.
- Reneta Webb,
SAA Workshop Evaluations, 1994-present.
All of this material
is available in the SAA offices.
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