Higher Education Strategy on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

on monocultures, institutional agency, and resilience

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 10 May 2026 09:49:11 -0600

Canvas was hacked this week (starting around May 1, so over a week ago now). No details yet, and I’m not going to speculate or make assumptions. My heart goes out to the people at Instructure and the 8,800 institutions who are dealing with this. There are a few lessons from the incident and collective responses:

1. Clear and authentic communication is essential

Instructure’s initial response was to shut down the Canvas LMS and put up a “Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance” notice up. Which solved the initial problem of “people can’t access Canvas” but raised more questions. Eventually, word got out that Instructure had somehow been hacked - much of that coming from a message posted by the hackers themselves. Students posted screenshots of the hackers’ message on Reddit etc., and that served as the update for a few days.

digital transformation is a teaching and learning opportunity

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:49:58 +0000

Reposting the UCalgary News post I wrote for our TI Newsletter:

Digital Transformation (Dx) in higher education has largely been framed as an organizational and IT challenge: enterprise systems, cloud migration, data governance, workforce development. That framing makes sense for the people leading those efforts, and the work is genuinely important. But it can leave a gap for those of us whose daily work is about teaching and learning. What does digital transformation look like when the starting point is pedagogy, not infrastructure?

DICE in Practice: Adopting Generative AI Guidelines

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:00:00 -0600

The scenario

A mid-sized research university is developing its institutional response to generative AI. There is no single “AI project” - instead, there are dozens of overlapping conversations happening at different levels: individual instructors experimenting with ChatGPT in their courses, departments writing local policies, a provost-level working group drafting institutional guidelines, and national disciplinary organizations publishing position statements. Some faculty are enthusiastic, some are anxious, and most are somewhere in between.

Introducing the DICE Framework for Higher Ed Change Leadership

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:15:00 +0000

Leading change in a university involves many kinds of participation at once. In any given week, the same person might chair a committee with real decision-making authority, serve in an advisory role on another, pilot something new in their own teaching, and sit in a conference session absorbing ideas they hadn’t considered before. Each of those is a different kind of engagement, and each contributes to change in a different way.

AI and the value of thinking out loud

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 09:59:14 +0000

First, I am still conflicted about generative AI. It’s still a horrible, extractive, resource-intensive, opportunistic, hype-addled, broligarchy-enhancing opaque bullshit machine. And it’s still the elephant in every room, the sometimes-unspoken layer underneath every conversation, such that I can’t just pretend that it doesn’t exist. Hence the ongoing conflict.

For thinking-out-loud, this was prompted by Audrey’s recent post on mirrors, awareness, and AI: A Better World Is Possible. Especially, this bit:

But here’s what I think: most people don’t want “AI.” Most people are exhausted by the onslaught of technology “upgrades” that have consistently made everything worse.

Weathering waves of technology in the classroom

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 20 May 2025 08:50:39 +0000

I was asked to write a brief blog post for our May 2025 Taylor Institute Newsletter, and am posting a copy here for posterity.

I’ve been using, developing, implementing, supporting, and critiquing educational technologies for longer than I care to admit. In that time, roughly once every decade, a major new technology emerged that was simultaneously cast as both the future and death of education. Computers in the 1980s. Multimedia and the Internet in the 1990s. “Web 2.0” in the 2000s. MOOCs in the 2010s. And now, generative AI (GenAI).

Hybrid-enabling Spaces at the Taylor Institute

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 18:55:45 -0600

I’d previously written a bit about shifting to more agile/adaptable/flexible learning technologies, and I’ve been meaning to write something about our work to adapt spaces in the Taylor Institute as we try to enable some kind of remote- or hybrid- or mixed- or whatever modality thing we wind up calling this stuff. So… here goes…

When everything shifted online at the beginning of the whole COVID thing, the learning spaces at the Taylor Institute kind of got put on hold for awhile. We focused on online platforms for a year, and then slowly started dipping back into hybrid scenarios where some students are physically in the room and some are elsewhere, wherever.

On Shifting Toward Agility With Learning Technologies

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 15 Jan 2022 11:23:39 -0700

I’ve been part of several initiatives on campus over the last year, looking at how we provide and support learning technologies as a university. Several themes have consistently emerged across all of these.

Instructors need a baseline of common technologies to enable a consistent teaching experience across courses
Instructors need flexibility, to be able to use different technologies that enable discipline-specific teaching and learning practices
Students need to be able to access technologies, both within and outside of formal course activities
Everyone experiences a course differently, depending on their role in the course, their connections to others in the course, and the various technologies that they use (both formally and informally)¹

Universities tend to focus on the first point. Let’s develop standards and ensure that all learning spaces meet them. Which is great, as long as the standards are current and as long as sustainable funding is available to ensure all learning spaces are continually updated to implement these standards.

In Media: WSJ Experience Report: Online Proctoring

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 08:35:51 -0600

I was interviewed recently (via email) by Katie Deighton, from the Wall Street Journal’s Experience Report. She was writing an article on online exam proctoring, and wanted to follow up with me about the categories of proctoring software and to get a university learning technologies perspective.

The article was published yesterday. I’m officially a critic. She wasn’t able to use the entire response, so I’m putting the rest of it here:

Katie:

What are the biggest challenges that online proctoring companies face when it comes to both reputation and customer acquisition? How big of a problem is the user experience, when compared to issues surrounding privacy, security, etc.?

Online Exam Proctoring

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 18:07:03 -0600

I drafted this as a briefing doc to help with decision making related to how we handle online exams for courses that are now being conducted remotely as a result COVID-19. It was circulated for feedback, so it may be useful to have a copy for reference here. I wrote it based on information gathered from the various vendors’ websites, and from conversations with colleagues. The doc was intended to give a high level overview of online exam proctoring software without delving into technical aspects. I’m intentionally not linking to vendor websites so this doesn’t turn into a sales pitch.

On preparing a university for a COVID rapid shift to online teaching

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 09:14:42 -0600

With the COVID pandemic still picking up steam in North America, all universities had to make a rapid shift to online teaching as campuses were closed. Mine was no different. We’d been talking about possible pandemic planning since mid-february, but at the time it was all speculative and seemingly so far in the future. Things started to get real around March 11, 2020. There were local cases of COVID (although all travel-related), and it was time to start moving classes online - or cancel the semester outright. The impact on students of cancelling a semester would be severe, so all efforts went into avoiding that. We would shift courses online as classrooms were closed.

On Blockchain Disrupting Higher Education

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 08:26:57 -0700

Martin Weller wrote a response to The Chronicle’s (paywalled) piece by Richard DeMillo on blockchain disrupting education. Martin’s right in pointing out that many of the hoped-for disruptions are actually possible using existing technologies and practices (eportfolios, badges, etc.) without “disruption” needed. Martin has written about disruption before.

Blockchain will certainly be used in higher education. It will transform how some things are designed and run. In the same way that relational databases have - Moodle (or even MOOCs ¹) wouldn’t have been possible without MySQL. Blackboard wouldn’t have been possible without Oracle (or whatever SQL engine it runs on). Relational databases transformed how courses were offered by higher education institutions, without disrupting the institutions themselves.

modularizing and disaggregating

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 14:00:30 +0000

At the COHERE 2019 conference, the informal theme this morning was on modularizing and disaggregating¹ - breaking out of the traditional 4-year degree program, breaking away from the semester-long course, enabling access to content and resources and people outside of the traditional contexts. Dr. Reid opened the conference with a description of this shift, and in reframing how we as an institution think about online experiences - that they aren’t “less than” traditional face-to-face experiences. They can be liberating, enabling, enhancing, amplifying. Dr. Karen Willcox gave the opening keynote, describing projects she’s worked on through MIT in an effort to make sense of the complexities of programs and courses through mapping the curriculum. This is something we have a lot of experience with at the University of Calgary, having built a pretty powerful curriculum mapping application that is already being used across the university. Her application of network graph visualization looks like it provides an interesting interface to exploring the curriculum data once it’s been collected.