I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about the digital learning strategy that my home province of BC is considering, as well as talking with various people about it. I’ll be sending my thoughts to the ministry shortly, but haven’t yet decided whether I’ll post them here. What I do want to share though, in case others find it helpful, is the framework that I used in making sense of the strategy and what it might achieve. In other words, in thinking about the content of the policy, I had to answer for myself the question: What are the hallmarks of a good policy? And in turn, I had to answer for myself what “good” means. While this isn’t a typical post for this blog, it’s one that interests me because (a) Royal Roads University offers an MA in Higher Education Administration and Leadership, and (b) i think about policymaking in my grant-seeking efforts.

To help me think through the content of the policy, I considered the degree to which the policy is

  • Inclusive. This strategy should address the needs and concerns of very many groups of people, and every institution in the province. Typically this is conceived in terms of institutional size, focus, location, etc, and, in Canada in particular, in terms of our relationships with Indigenous peoples. However, because of this strategy’s focus on digital learning, it also ought to address both the needs and concerns of predominantly in-person institutions as well as the needs and concerns of predominantly online/hybrid institutions. If the policy is about a particular kind of institution, then it should explicitly focus on, and define, that kind of institution.
  • Informed by evidence. This strategy needs to be informed by the literature on digital learning (duh), but also by the literature on how innovations are supported, sustained, and scaled; as well as by broader literature around sustainability, equity and inclusion, etc etc.
  • Descriptive. The strategy ought to describe macro-level actions, efforts, outcomes, etc rather than prescribe micro-level efforts in order to support the diversity, as well as the opportunity to innovate, in the sector. There’s a bit of a tension here between  descriptiveness and prescriptiveness, and it seems to be that it’s a bit of an art form to find the right balance.
  • Supportive. In inviting the sector to engage in various valued activities, the strategy should explicitly state how the provincial government is going to support the sector in its efforts. In other words, the policy ought to not only state the responsibilities of higher education institutions, but should also highlight the responsibilities of the Ministry and the ways in which it will support higher education institutions (e.g., in terms of resources, fora to provide opportunities for collaboration, funding for institutions to attend fora, etc, etc).
  • Aspirational. The strategy ought to identify its North Star, the thing that not only invites diverse groups to collaborate, but also to agree and strive toward.
  • Contemplative of unintended consequences. The policy ought to consider not just what it might achieve, but what it might unintentionally produce. This is a difficult one because it’s as much about what is in the strategy as it is about what is not in the strategy. To use a university policy example to make this concrete: While a policy which requires open educational resources is laudable in encouraging access etc etc, one of its unintended consequences might be that the course curriculum will be made available to everyone – including groups which use such content to harass and disproportionately target faculty who teach topics they disagree with.

There are other issues here to consider, such as the degree to which a policy includes outcomes which can be evaluated according to fair and explicit criteria, but those are perhaps “general good policy” criteria rather than this-specific-policy criteria. Plus, this post is too long already.

Over to you: What would you add to this list? The comments section is open.

July 31 update: Dr. Chuck Hodges alerted to a forthcoming chapter on National Educational Technology Plans that is relevant.