GREENFIELD — By training, Carlos Santiago, the state’s Commissioner of Higher Education, is an economist — a field that involves quite a bit of forward-thinking.
So, when he became the University of Albany’s interim chief information officer, charged with maintaining the university’s technology, he found himself overseeing a large IBM mainframe computer — one that took up an entire room, he told a room full of college professors and administrator at Greenfield Community College Thursday afternoon.
Santiago delivered the keynote address at the 11th annual Conference on eLearning, sponsored by Massachusetts Colleges Online and held at GCC. The conference allowed attendees to tour and use the college’s various technology and participated in seminars and workshops about how to improve education through technology.
He didn’t know the first thing about that technology, he noted, and was quite glad to have a new, full-time chief information officer who did. But he did make one big change to that department: he sold the mainframe and used the money to shift the university toward more personal, decentralized desktop-based computing — a move that anticipated how most computer-based learning would be done not far in the future.
“My computer staff was so proud of me,” he said. “We saw the future.”
Technological development is also known for bring together complex systems to make them work effectively and efficiently, and that’s what Santiago said the state’s higher education system needs to start doing, too. To that end, he noted, Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration recently launched a program called Commonwealth Committment to help students along a community college to four year institution path to an advanced degree by making transferring credit easier.
Santiago lauded the conference’s organizers for holding such a gathering, noting that those who attend it and use that knowledge to improve student’s educations are the most important assets higher education has.
“You’re on the front lines of pedagogy, the front lines of teaching and that’s important,” Santiago said. “The question goes to you: how do we use technology to reach more of our students?”
Members of the audience asked Santiago how funding for the state’s public higher education system can be improved to ease access to technology for students who need it to continue their educations.
He noted that lobbying for more money for higher education is difficult as the country’s population ages with fewer younger people entering college due to decisions about child birth made years ago. Under that climate, he said, state funds typically get ushered toward health care and other infrastructure, where the demand is seen more.
One member of the audience, a professor from North Shore Community College, asked Santiago whether supporting open access to academic works, instead of requiring colleges and universities to pay exorbitant annual fees to access the same information they had last year in their library systems, plus some new information.
He noted that the results of research funded through billions in federal money should be free and open for the public to consume and use, a position held by the Open Access Movement. The money saved there, he said, could be used elsewhere in the college.
“There is interest among certain members of the legislature on that,” Santiago replied. “It allows for a broader conversation on the intellectual property generated at our campuses, but we’re in a very early stage of the conversation on that. I do think there is interest in moving in that direction.”