Review by: Reichert, Raimond (2005-05-10)

The Educause Current Issues survey seeks to identify those issues that leaders in higher education information technology deem their most critical challenges. This year’s report summarizes the findings of the sixth Current Issues survey and also presents a summary of all six Current Issues surveys from 2000–2005. For this year’s report, 1653 Educause member representatives were invited to participate, and 603 (36%) responded. The report briefly presents the top-ten current issues; the full data is available to Educause members only.

The most stable issues since 2000 have been the following: In the category “Critical for Strategic Success“, Funding IT and Administrative Systems; in “Potential to Become Much More Significant“, Security and Identity Management, Funding IT, and Administrative Systems; in „Occupies CIO Attention“, Funding IT and Strategic Planning; and in “Takes the Most Human and/or Financial Resources“, Administrative Systems and Infrastructure Management. In summary, the most challenging issues are Funding IT when budgets are shrinking and Administrative Systems, the latter probably due to their importance on the one hand and their complexity on the other.

With regards to eLearning, it is interesting to observe the rise and fall of the item “eLearning environments / distributed teaching and learning“ in the four categories:

• It ranked fourth in “Critical for Strategic Success“ in 2000, then disappeared from the top-five list, with rank seven in 2004 and 2005.
• It ranked second in “Potential to Become Much More Significant“ in 2000, dropped to fourth place in 2001, and then disappeared from the top-five list, but reappeared on rank 9 in 2005.
• It never made the top-five list in “Occupies CIO Attention“, and is not in the top-ten in either 2004 or 2005.
• However, it ranked fifth in “Takes the Most Human / Financial Resources“ from 2002–2004, and rose to third place in this category in 2005.

Given the diminishing of importance “eLearning environments / distributed teaching and learning“ in the other categories, this might mean that eLearning environments will have to increasingly prove that they are worth the resources they take up.

The report presents the top-ten IT issues as identified by Educause members in a concise fashion, and provides thought-provoking core questions an institution must deal with for each issue. It is also interesting to track the report from year to year to identify the IT issues trends in higher education, and the retrospective of this year’s report is particularly interesting, since it identifies those issues whose importance has been stable over a six-year period.