Key points:

• Seemingly minor leadership decisions can profoundly impact people
• Leaders must pause to reflect, gather input, and consider various viewpoints
• See related article: With better data, these 12 things would improve, supes say
• For more news on leadership, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership page

In the tapestry of leadership, decisions are often viewed through a lens of routine or regularity. It’s easy to fall into the belief that some choices are mundane, merely navigating the day-to-day operations of an organization. However, beneath this seemingly commonplace surface lies a profound truth: no leadership decision is truly routine. Each choice, whether seemingly minor or monumental, has the potential to send ripples through the fabric of an organization or impact an individual in ways that may extend beyond the leaders’ view.

Understanding the potential consequences of seemingly routine decisions is not just an important leadership skill; it’s a necessity. Every leadership decision, regardless of its apparent simplicity, possesses the potential to have a far greater impact than it appears viewed on the surface. A few examples illustrate this premise:  

As a high school principal, a science teacher gave a student a final grade of F. The student had earned 69.7 percent in the course. When asked about the grade, the teacher identified that her grading scale for a D started at 70 percent and she didn’t round up for her grades. She felt it was important to hold her students to a high standard. The student would need to retake the course over the summer to graduate high school. The student did not reach out to me, however, her parents did. As did her Navy recruiter. The young lady was scheduled to enlist in the Navy. If she couldn’t leave for basic training the week after graduation, she would lose her promised training option and may not be able to get the job she desired. The teacher was unwilling to change the grade, but the law allowed the department chair to change the grade if he wished. The decision might seem routine, but the potential to impact the young woman’s post-high school career was significant.

A second situation is the high school principal who learns that the starting varsity football quarterback violated the athletic code of conduct and was photographed with a beer in his hand at a party a week before school started. The student athlete comes from a family that has a lot of struggles and the potential for their oldest son to get a football scholarship has given the family a new positive view. If the quarterback is suspended, both the parents and the athletic director feel it will have a negative impact on his ability to obtain a college athletic scholarship. Additionally, the football team has a legitimate chance to win its conference and make it to the state playoffs for the first time in a decade. There is a lot of community enthusiasm for the team. At this point, the image has not surfaced in the community and the AD thinks that the issue will not become common knowledge.

In a third example, as the district is trying to reduce expenses before potential budget cuts, the human resources director sends out an early retirement buyout offer. However, she did not do a thorough review of the list of those eligible. Several faculty members who are not technically eligible receive the offer. It might seem like a minor error to the high school staff, but one of the faculty members has already told his wife about the offer and she is excited as they are eager to move closer to their children. Now, he will have to explain to his wife that the offer was withdrawn. It was the first time in several years that they were excited about the future. He is extremely stressed out about having to explain the HR department made an error.

A final example, which is a bit old these days, is the concept of IT change control. It was common for IT help desk folks to be frustrated when end users called in flummoxed about a minor software upgrade. Historically, it was common before the widespread adoption of cloud-based tools, where there is no local control over when tools will be updated, to only update software during academic breaks, particularly in the summer. This allowed ample time for staff to be trained in using the updates and learn how the tools had changed. Often, IT folks would be frustrated with the end users who “couldn’t figure out minor changes.” However, from the end-user perspective, the changes were not routine, and they had to learn new ways to complete their tasks. IT leaders should still be careful about making software changes except during breaks and with adequate warning.

These examples underscore how seemingly insignificant leadership decisions can profoundly impact people. While leaders may view some choices as routine, each harbors the potential for unintended consequences extending far beyond expectations. We must broaden our perspective to see how alleged minor calls can affect lives and communities in ways not readily apparent.

Leaders need to adopt a mindset recognizing the potential gravity inherent in all decisions, even small ones. Rather than making snap decisions, leaders must pause to reflect, gather input, and consider various viewpoints. However, that does not give leaders the excuse to delay decisions. That is one of the balances required by leaders. They need to be both thoughtful and decisive. While efficient operations matter, leaders must consider the impact of decisions on individuals.

As initially asserted, the tapestry of leadership harbors a profound yet often overlooked truth–no decision can be classified as merely routine. While leaders may be tempted to view choices as insignificant or mundane, each threads the fabric of an organization and individuals’ lives in complex ways.

Key points:

• AI has a place in the classroom, but students shouldn’t rely on it to write papers
• Educators can use a few key strategies to identify AI-generated work
• See related article: Debunking common myths about AI in education
• Everything You Need To Know About AI In Education

As the school year starts, the excitement and stress about the potential use of generative AI has K-12 teachers and university faculty collectively stressed about these new tools and their potential impact on instruction. A recent professional development meeting about AI at a midwestern university set a new attendance record for such events.

There is no sure-fire way to identify text as generated by AI, and some of the early tools offered to do such have either been shown to be only somewhat effective or have been withdrawn from public use as not meeting their developer’s standards. A spate of AI detectors are available, including CopyLeaks, Content at Scale, and GPTZero, but most will note it is important to consider the results in conjunction with a conversation with the student involved. Asking a student to explain a complex or confusing portion of a submission might be more effective than any of the AI detectors.

Instructors at all levels should consider the following criteria to help them determine whether text-based submissions were student or AI-generated:

1. Look for typos. AI-generated text tends not to include typos, and such errors that make our writing human are often a sign that the submission was created by a human.

2. Lack of personal experiences or generalized examples are another potential sign of AI-generated writing. For instance, “My family went to the beach in the car” is more likely to be AI-generated than “Mom, Betty, and Rose went to the 3^rd Street beach to swim.”

3. AI-generated text is based upon looking for patterns in large samples of text. Therefore, more common words, such as the, it, and is are more likely to be represented in such documents. Similarly, common words and phrases are more likely to appear in AI-generated submissions.

4. Instructors should look for unusual or complete phrases that a student would not normally employ. A high school student speaking of a lacuna in his school records might be a sign the paper was AI-generated.

5. Inconsistent styles, tone, or tense changes may be a sign of AI-derived materials. Inaccurate citations are often common in AI-generated papers. The format is correct, but the author, title, and journal information were simply thrown together and do not represent an actual article. These and other such inaccurate information from a generative AI tool are sometimes called hallucinations.

6. Current generative AI tends to be based off training materials developed no later than 2021. So, text that references 2022 or more recent events, etc. is less likely to be AI-generated. Of course, this will continue to change as AI engines are improved.

This article is not intended to dissuade instructors from using AI detection software, but to be aware of the limits of such tools.

In the end, like in any other student issue, speaking with the student is the best way to determine if the student is submitting their own work or that of a machine. One potential method would be to randomly ask one or two students to orally explain how they developed their submission for the class for each assignment. This oral exam method might go far in encouraging students to be prepared to defend their own work and to not rely on AI.

Related:
5 ways AI can help teachers in the classroom
How to redefine learning in the digital age

Cybersecurity is at the forefront of IT issues to be addressed over the next year. Nearly every list of major IT or educational technology issues for 2023 includes the need to further harden educational systems and infrastructure.

More than 20 educational organizations–including AASA, the American Association of School Administrators (the primary superintendents’ association)–have asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to expand E-rate to cover advanced firewall technology to support protection from denial of service (DOS), improve virtual private network (VLN) access, and similar upgrades. The FCC is currently soliciting public input on the potential change here until February 13, 2023.

It is easy to understand the need for increased cybersecurity safeguards. In the first half of 2022, at least 34 major cyberattacks were made against schools. Cybercrime cost more than $6.9 billion in 2021. The evening news commonly reports on cyberattacks against pipelines, government systems, and other vital services. Due diligence in considering ways to harden cyber targets and protect student and institutional data is essential and to not do so in today’s environment would probably be willfully negligent. However, there is a need for balancing security with usability.

IT leaders need to ensure that usability is still the primary consideration in building IT systems. IT systems are of little value if they are not able to be used effectively by end users. Considerations of what level of additional steps end users are willing to take is essential. This is particularly important as many organizations still have a high number of remote workers. Make sure the warnings provided to end users are significant as well. Too many warnings can numb end users into assuming the IT department is crying wolf and they may stop paying attention to warnings.

For instance, if a user is given a warning that the vast majority of links in the email system are dangerous, how long will it take until the user starts to ignore those warnings. This is particularly true when even links sent by the organization are flagged as unsafe. Most systems allow enough granularity to ensure that commonly used systems, trade newsletters or professional journals, etc. are not flagged. This would be a good first step in building effective trust between the end users and the IT staff.

Another common concern is to ensure that security strictures put into place do not so restrict users that the systems are not fully functional. Testing needs to occur with outside systems and partner organizations. It is particularly common for struggles between organizations that utilize the Google Suite verse those that use a Microsoft Suite. This is often a common struggle for K-12 educators, who are mostly Google users, when they want to interact with higher education institutions or other government agencies, many of which are Microsoft environments. IT staff need to make sure that interagency collaboration is encouraged and supported by the installed technology base. Most of us have had a situation where a Zoom, Teams, or Google call was complicated or failed due to one or both institutions involved having too tight of security.

When the security, as well intended as it may be, gets to the point of being burdensome to the end users, they will get creative. Their creativity will often create an even more insecure situation than the burdensome security measures were trying to address. For instance, when security measures create too many hurdles, users might find other users with more direct access and then just get them to send the sensitive data in a less secure email format, or even use a personal email to avoid the institutional system all together.

Similar rules against forwarding emails are well intended, but when staff or students have multiple emails, insisting that they do not forward them to their primary account is a set up for missed information. When multiple emails exist in the same system, as is common in higher education for staff who are also students, those emails should be merged. One student I was aware of missed his final comprehensive exam for his master’s degree because the notice was only sent to his student email and not to his staff address, which he used exclusively.

There is no doubt that cybersecurity is essential for all organizations in our modern world. However, security cannot be valued more than usability. The sad fact is that the only entirely secure computer system is one that have been unplugged and shut off. Cyberattacks will continue, and it will be important to ensure that every organization has strong backup and recovery plans in place. However, end user usability is just as important as security.

Related:
Exposing the realities and myths of K-12 cybersecurity
Ransomware attackers head back to school

There is a lot of conversation about supply chains and logistics in the news these days. As a picture is often worth a thousand words, maps and tracking sites that allow students to visualize the traffic making up these supply chains can be helpful.

It is possible to track much of the shipping traffic through websites like Marine Traffic. The site is an interactive map showing the movement of many types of commercial ship traffic throughout the world. It is possible to see the general build-up around southern California ports and the normally heavy traffic around the Panama Canal. VesselFinder is a similar tool but seems to include at least some river traffic as well. It allows one to track a specific cruise ship, for instance.

Marine Vessel Traffic allows for tracking through the Great Lakes and appears to allow one to track naval ships. AdsbExchange provides similar information for air traffic. It allows one to filter by type of aircraft–Boeing 777s, for instance–by airline, or only to show military aircraft. FlightAware is a similar interactive map showing flights. It allows filtering by destination or departure location as well as by airline or aircraft type. FlightRadar24 is a third option that provides some additional features with a paid subscription.

Besides ships and planes, there are many ways to see live traffic patterns via the web. For instance, Local Conditions.com can provide traffic maps for a variety of metropolitan areas in all 50 states. The site also provides weather conditions and radar maps. Another common news item these days seems to be about forest fires. Tracking wildfires can be managed from the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) from NASA.

Besides human traffic, the web allows one to track a lot of other life on our planet. Ocearch shark tracker tracks a number of sharks and other aquatic creatures, including seals, dolphins, and alligators. It allows viewers to track some turtles, including a green sea turtle named Andrea who seems to live near Sanibel Island, Florida. GTOPP provides a tracking website of pelagic predators including sharks, turtles, tuna, and seals. Pacificwhale.org provides an app to track whales and dolphins. A limited view map on their website provides some sighting data as well. Whalemap provides mostly data of right whale sightings in Canadian and Atlantic waters. Icarus’s Global Monitoring with Animals has an Animal Tracker App for smart devices that allows real time tracking in both English and German.

The web allows for tracking of ships, planes, whales, and other large creatures. However, the web also has the WheresGeorge website that allows one to track dollar bills by serial number. One tracked bill moved 13,905 miles in just under eight years. Of course, one important tracker not mentioned earlier tracks one jolly old elf and eight or nine reindeer by NORAD each December.

Thanks to Erin Carter, a Winona State University doctoral student and biology instructor at Century Community College, for her inspiration for a portion of this article.

As the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic begin to relax, many institutions are going to step back and try to reestablish institutional norms. Many educational organizations have struggled through a year or more of remote learning. The instructional and technology systems of many organizations have been strained.

Some of this stepping back may be as simple as trying to return to a pre-pandemic normal. More of this review may be revision and redevelopment of institutional strategic plans, technology plans, and other such planning documents.

Many of those planning processes have utilized the VMOSA standard as a guide to ensuring a coherent and complete final plan. VMOSA generally stands for vision, mission, objectives and goals, strategies, and action plans. However, as defined, VMOSA is missing a couple of key facets that are required for a truly holistic plan. V should be expanded to provide the planning process not only a guiding vision for the organization, but also the guiding values under which the organization is hoping to operate.

Organizational mission statements are core to their planning process and are potentially the most frequently-recited portion of the strategic plan. All organizations should hope that all aspects of an organization’s strategic plan or initiatives focus on mission completion either directly or indirectly. The mission statement is directly supported by the organization’s values. Those enumerated values support and provide the context in which the mission will be accomplished. Leaving off the values portion of the VMOSA rubric does not provide most organizations the same rich context that values statements can provide to both internal and external stakeholders.

The objectives portion of VMOSA is often the most obvious portion of the planning process. What is less obvious is that objectives and goals need to be measurable, following the SMARTE goal format of creating, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-based, and equity-focused.

As an example, “improve undergraduate student satisfaction with the advising process” is a laudatory goal, but would be difficult to measure. A stronger SMARTE goal would be: “Over the next three years, annually improve undergraduate student satisfaction on the annual advising survey for students both holistically and within each demographic subgroup.” The more measurable strategic plan objectives, goals, or action plans are, the easier it is to measure organizational growth and the ultimate success of the plan.

That leads to the need to measure the effectiveness of the plan. Therefore, VMOSA needs an E. Just as modern SMARTE goals have evolved to add an E for equity, VMOSA needs an E for evaluation. For any strategic document to be worthwhile, there must be a complete and thorough evaluation plan. The evaluation plan should identify who will be responsible for each facet of the evaluation process, how each item will be judged to be successful, and upon what timeline the evaluations need to be competed.

Too often, strategic documents are created to last a specific timeframe, three and five years both being common. However, true strategic vision–and the plans to support achieving the goals and objectives that support those vision–requires ongoing and active care. Governance bodies should be reviewing facets of the strategic documents each quarter. Such ongoing review and evaluation are essential to ensure strategic success.

If the pandemic has taught organizations one thing, it might be that you can’t simply maintain the status quo and expect previous success to continue. Organizations will have to adapt more quickly and be more fluid in delivering key services. Strategic documents must become more fluid and include ongoing evaluation and revision as a fundamental piece of the process. VMOSAE and SMARTE can help organizations build strategic success.

The impact of the pandemic on educational programming has created what will more than likely be fundamental and foundational changes to the traditional classroom environment. In general, the traditional classroom simply is not visible in today’s milieu.

The physical hallways connecting traditional classrooms that have been present since education left the open air of Socrates’s Agora, when Plato established an academy, have been replaced with the fiber, copper, and Wi-Fi of high-speed networks. That has significantly reduced the stress on academic buildings but has put significant stress on the electronic connections within educational institutions.

Related content: The new role of the school CIO

Many cabinet-level leaders are asking how institutions can ensure that they are managing an effective school help desk operation. Although cabinet responsibilities have not changed, the reliance on help services have increased exponentially in the last several months. At first, educational institutions were in an emergency “band-aid” mode in many cases, but just as patients transferred from the ambulance to the hospital will be reevaluated, it is time for help services to be reconsidered given that the current virtual environment will need to be sustained for at least the next year in many cases.

One of the primary considerations should be if the school has a consolidated help desk. The most frustrating issue for many users is being bounced around between more than one help service. The first-line school help desk staff should be either able to address any issue or at least directly connect the user to the proper person for assistance. Being told by a help desk staff member, “No, we don’t support that, please contact the LMS support system for that issue,” or something similar is always frustrating.

At a minimum, the school help desk staff should forward the e-mail or transfer the phone call to the proper help system. A lack of a consolidated help desk often means a lack of a consolidated ticketing system, so tracking the type of calls and the resolution times for many issues is not possible. Such a system can lead to learned helplessness on the part of faculty who simply develop their own workarounds or otherwise manipulate the systems in place to meet the needs of their students. Healthy help systems should be willing to embrace all types of help calls, because it might be more work for the school help desk staff, but is both more efficient and effective for the end users who should be the organization’s primary focus.

First-contact resolution is often identified as one of the key metrics in evaluating help desk performance. If basic issues routinely require more than a single contact with the school help desk, then IT management needs to review how calls are addressed. This is particularly true in educational institutions that employ student workers as the first line of help desk response. These workers often are employed based primarily on considerations other than IT skills. About 75 percent of the time, my personal experience with help desk students is they are unfamiliar with the issue being addressed and either have to go ask their supervisor or are providing directions based on a knowledge base document that they don’t fully understand.

In many cases, the student worker should simply pass the end user off to the supervisor and eliminate what is often an ineffective middle person It is not uncommon for staff and faculty to complain about having to escalate help calls to reach “an employee” and not a student. Although student workers can be a cost-effective solution, IT management should regularly evaluate the cost-benefits if first contact resolution rates are dipping below 50 percent to 66 percent depending upon the organization’s tolerance levels.

Measuring customer satisfaction is another key facet to ensuring help desk effectiveness. The help desk process should always include a follow-up survey to the end user asking if the problem has been sufficiently addressed. A lack of follow-up with end users does not allow a holistic approach to evaluating the effectiveness of a help desk. If evaluative metrics only look at data provided by the help desk staff, such as time taken to respond to the initial ticket, etc., help desk statistics can be easily skewed towards the IT staff’s perspective.

Often with low-functioning school help desks, end users simply give up and figure out a workaround. No one expects a high response level to such surveys, but end users with strong feelings about their school help desk experiences are likely to respond. A faculty member might hear from staff that the “help desk isn’t helpful” or “it takes three tries to get an actual employee.” Fellow faculty members might comment that the help system isn’t really helpful, and they often do not have good information. In today’s environment where the IT infrastructure and full functionality of technology is essential, ensuring appropriate feedback from end users is essential to evaluating the effectiveness of IT services.

Another potential metric is tracking the number of unplanned changes or outages that occurred. These are typically due to one of two issues in the current environment: a lack of capacity, or a conflict between systems. Early in this semester, many systems seemed to struggle with demand under the new paradigms that many institutions were working. It is difficult to anticipate demand spikes in new environments. However, the second issue can be an indicator of poor IT planning. This occurs when one newly implemented system conflicts with another, causing user frustration, inefficiency, or simply a broken system. Such examples would include sending out a link to a new video from leadership that does not open in a commonly used browser or sending out human resources documents where links are blocked. These are more often examples of a lack of prior planning and review by the IT staff or coordination with other departments. Often simply fixed, they can shine a poor light on IT processes and leadership.

In summary, educational leadership, as well as IT leadership, should focus on ensuring the best support for faculty, staff, and students. Priorities for school help desk operations should include a consolidated help desk, striving for a high rate of first contact solutions, routinely measuring end-user satisfaction, and ensuring that unplanned changes or outages are minimized. Doing these few things well can be extremely impactful given today’s highly virtual learning environments.

This summer, many faculty will work on developing or revising curricular content for their courses. One of the keys in developing new digital materials is verifying that those materials offer accessible content for all students.

Today, most learning management systems (LMS) and software programs offer some level of accessibility compliance checking. However, they are not always thorough or error-free.

Related Content: 5 steps to ensure accessibility

For instance, some PowerPoint templates show less-than-ideal contrast between text and background colors. Many YouTube videos include closed captioning, but the automatic captioning often leaves something to be desired. Taking the time to review accessibility of materials makes sense to ensure all students can experience success instead of frustration.

Related Content:

eSchool News IT Solutions: Hardware and Management Guide

The eSchool News IT Solutions: Hardware and Management Guide is here! It features strategies to help K-12 IT leaders work with school administrators and teachers to prioritize IT solutions that support innovative digital learning in classrooms. A new eSchool News Guide will launch each month–don’t miss a single one!

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 are a checklist of items to consider in developing accessible websites or other digital documents. The WCAG 2.0 guidelines were published in 2008, so they are well established. Unfortunately, they are not well implemented. WCAG 2.0 has three levels of compliance from least to most restrictive: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. Level AAA is considered to be difficult for some new technologies to embrace immediately, so Level AA is considered an acceptable standard for digital resources. W3C, which is the entity responsible for issuing the WCAG 2.0 guidelines, maintains a listing of compliance tools for evaluating websites. The list also includes tools to check the compliance against the federal Access Board’s Section 508 standards and those of several other nations. Google provides a web development tool called Lighthouse that offers performance and accessibility audits.

WebAIM did an analysis of the top 1 million websites earlier this year. They used WCAG 2.0 Level A/AA–the lower two levels of compliance–and estimated that less than 1 percent or so of commonly accessed websites conform to WCAG 2.0 Level AA. They found on average 59.6 average accessibility errors per page. According to WebAIM, users with disabilities should expect to encounter an error on 1 of every 13 HMTL elements with which they interact. A complete summary of the results is available.

Four common barriers to accessible content for all students

The four most prevalent issues identified by WebAIM’s study were items lacking contrast, missing alternative text tags for images, empty or broken links, and missing form labels. Eighty-five percent of homepages have issues with presenting low contrast text. Nearly 68 percent of pages were missing alternative text for images. More than half of the websites included empty links or missing form labels.

Related Content: 3 steps to an accessible classroom

Two great tools for checking the contrast ratio of text and its background are WebAIM’s Color Contrast Checker and Contrast-ratio.com. As a reminder, WCAG 2.0 Level AA asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for regular text and 3:1 for large text. Level AAA asks for 7:1 of higher ratio for regular text and 4.5:1 for large text. Muzli has an excellent in-depth article on the science of color design. If you don’t want to stay with black text on a white background, stay with the tried and true color combinations used on informational road signs, white on blue and black on yellow. The reverse of those schemes are equally effective.

Ensuring the alt text tags are not missing is another important topic both for websites and documents included informational images. SEO Site Checkup has a simple Image Alt Test scanner for any URL. Screamingfrog has a good article on how identify those missing alt text tags. Adobe has excellent help resources to help users create and verify PDF accessibility. Microsoft Office provides similar help to create accessible MS Office documents.

Most LMSs and other web tools include link verification tools to assist in ensuring there are no broken or empty links on a website. However, with the fluid nature of the web, links break constantly. Additionally, some links created by Java script are difficult for those with disabilities to access. Links to other formats, like pdfs and docx files should include those identifications within the link text, so users except that file type. WebAIM includes a detailed article on links and hypertext. As an example, CANVAS’s support for error checking is linked. Brightspace/D2L has a process for resolving broken links as well.

Ensuring form labels is not a consideration for most digital documents, but it is for web documents and some Adobe Acrobat documents as well. Google provides four ways to provide labels to every element in a web-based from. Adobe support for labeling forms is available as well.

Although there are other potential accessibility issues with websites and digital documents, addressing the four most common issues identified above will go a long way towards improving accessible content for all students.