FAQs are categorized as follows:
- Are grants still
available in Mellon's CEUTT program?
- How were the
grantees selected?
- What
was the nature of the grants made?
- Will
there be another grant competition for projects looking at
cost-effectiveness issues?
The Mellon Foundation ended funding under the CEUTT program in
2001. No further funding is anticipated under this program.
CEUTT grantees were selected through a competitive selection process,
primarily among targeted institutions (almost all of which are
universities and colleges in the US). The goal for competing
institutions was to create evaluation projects with robust methods for
measuring costs and pedagogic effectiveness of instructional
technologies as deployed in colleges and universities.
The grants were generally of a two-to-three duration and covered the
costs of running cost-effectiveness evaluations, synthesizing data, and
in some instances, bringing a promising instructional technology
up-to-speed for the purposes of running the evaluations.
There is no further grant competition planned that would target support
for cost-effectiveness issues.
- What
are the responsibilities of CEUTT grantees?
- Is it
possible to renew a CEUTT grant?
- Is
it possible to seek further funding from Mellon?
What are
the responsibilities of CEUTT grantees?
Responsibilities of CEUTT grantees include:
- Completion of the cost-effectiveness study per the proposal.
- Narrative and financial reports to the Foundation.
- Sharing data, where possible, with other CEUTT grantees.
- Presentation of project results in scholarly forums.
Is it
possible to renew a CEUTT grant?
There are no renewals of CEUTT grants.
Is
it possible to seek further funding from Mellon?
It is possible to seek further funding from the Mellon Foundation,
though not for the purposes of a CEUTT-style study (as the CEUTT program
is no longer making grants).
- What are
cost-effectiveness studies?
- Why
focus on gauging
the merits of instructional technologies in higher education?
- What
results have been found by investigators in the CEUTT studies?
- What
is the significance of these studies for higher education in the US
or elsewhere?
- Will
the CEUTT studies be disseminated in a scholarly context?
- Aren't
there many difficulties in conducting controlled studies in
educational contexts?
- Where
can I go for further information about this topic?
What are
cost-effectiveness studies?
Cost-effectiveness studies are evaluative studies performed for policy,
planning, and economics purposes. A cost-effectiveness study
entails two kinds of measurements: gauging the costs of doing a
given activity in more than one way, and gauging the effectiveness of
doing the activity in each of those ways. The ratio of
effectiveness to cost (c/e) gives a comparative measure of the different
ways of doing the activity. Such studies are common in gauging the
relative merit of medical therapies, social policies, and educational
innovations. In the CEUTT studies, investigators examined the
costs and pedagogic effectiveness of teaching with, and without, the
uses of instructional technologies.
Why
focus on gauging the merits of instructional technologies in
higher education?
Instructional technologies have been around for quite some time, but a
revolution in their design and use came about with the birth and
diffusion of the internet. Even more dramatic was the great
promise (and investment) made to introduce new technological tools to
university-level instruction. These cost-effectiveness studies try
to address whether such promises have been realistic: can the use
of instructional technologies truly result in genuine cost savings that
sustain or further pedagogic goals--and if so, how and why?
What
results have been found by investigators in the CEUTT
studies?
The investigators have produced a variety of results, so a first
approximation at a generalization is that c/e is variable and likely
depends on local conditions--sorts of curriculum being taught, types of
technologies deployed, degrees of student and instructor familiarity
with instructional technologies, size of classroom, and so
forth.
Assuming that there are enough relevant similarities across these
studies to further characterize them generally, we can say that the
varying results show it is not guaranteed that using instructional
technologies is cost-effective. In particular, personnel savings
from reduced instructor time may not materialize as expected and and may
even be outstripped by personnel spending related to growth in support
staff. This is a near reversal of the claims traditionally made in
the advocacy literature (cf., for example, Massy and Zemsky (1995) and
Twigg (1996)).
What
is the significance of these studies for higher education in the US or
elsewhere?
These studies should help identify conditions under which instructional technologies
may be used in the higher education sector generally to the financial
benefit of colleges and universities and to the teaching and learning
benefit of those institutions, their instructors, and their
students. Where these studies help identify failures to attain
such benefits, we learn about either limitations on the technologies or
their deployment, or intractable limitations on their
cost-effectiveness.
Whichever of these lessons pertains, colleges and universities can
use these results to help shape their policies on developing,
purchasing, and using such technologies, and can gauge their overall
utility as against traditional means of course delivery. And
whatever the difficulties in reasoning from these particular cases, the
studies provide valuable models for exploring such cost-effectiveness
issues on other campuses, and with other technologies and parameters of
use.
Will
the CEUTT studies be disseminated in a scholarly context?
Work is underway on a monograph that will synthesize results from a
number of the CEUTT studies; most of the investigators are also
presenting and publishing their results individually.
Aren't
there many difficulties in conducting controlled studies in
educational contexts?
There are indeed practical difficulties investigators face in
fashioning truly controlled experiments in education studies. Some
such problems result from difficulties in creating randomized
trials. Other problems result from gauging the "media
effects" (rather than "program effects") of instructional
technologies in particular, given that the designs of those technologies
are often intended to marry pedagogic and mechanical innovations at
once. It is hardly surprising, then, that much of the prior
literature in this domain has been criticized as weak on methodological
grounds. One aspiration of the CEUTT program has been to further
the cause of robust social science methodology in instructional
technology studies, by addressing some of these practical difficulties.
Where
can I go for further information about this topic?
One recent collection of articles on related economic issues is:
- Martin J. Finkelstein, Carol Frances, Frank I.
Jewett & Bernhard W. Scholz, eds. Dollars, Distance and
Online Education: The New Economics of College Teaching and
Learning. Phoenix, Arizona: American Council on Education
and Oryx Press, 2000.
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