Collegis Research Institute
Collegis Research Institute (archival material)
The Collegis Research Institute was an independent higher education research initiative active in the 1990s and early 2000s. Its work examined how information technology could expand access to instruction, improve learning quality, and contain institutional costs. The original collegis.org domain is no longer active. This page preserves selected material for historical and research context.
Learning Lab is not affiliated with the former Institute and does not represent its founders or contributors. The material below is presented as an archive that documents early systems-level thinking about learning infrastructure and educational technology.
The promise of information technology (IT) is to increase access to instruction while containing its overall costs and improving the quality of its outcomes—students’ learning.
Achieving all three goals requires rethinking and reshaping traditional educational processes and infrastructure investment strategies. Simply adding technology to existing practices may increase instructional quality, but can also substantially increase cost.
Likewise, treating IT as an isolated expense to be minimized rather than as a strategic investment is a tactic that is likely to fail.
Learning Technologies: Improving Quality, Containing Cost
The Internet and its World Wide Web became primary technological levers for increasing institutional effectiveness and extending educational reach. This shift created a central paradox in strategic IT investment, articulated by Pat Battin:
“[IT] makes possible an unprecedented decentralization of technical power to individual option while at the same time it requires a globally coordinated infrastructure to permit the effective individual exercise of that power.”
Exploration of these themes—spanning social, technological, and institutional domains—led faculty and staff of the Collegis Research Institute to participate in national and international initiatives. The material that follows points to papers and articles reflecting the Institute’s research interests.
The Institute’s founder, Dr. William Graves, was also a founder of EDUCOM’s National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII), which supported inter-institutional collaboration around educational technology and infrastructure.
The Institute participated in the NLII-sponsored Instructional Management Systems (IMS) Cooperative project, addressing the coordination and reuse of instructional resources.
Jim Noblitt examined faculty–administrator coordination in setting institutional priorities for IT and instruction in Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up.
Carol Twigg addressed gaps in campus technology investment strategies in The One Percent Solution.
Bob Heterick identified faculty productivity as central to balancing access, quality, and cost containment in The Four Horsemen.
In Why We Need Internet2, Bill Graves described the role of advanced network infrastructure in delivering on IT’s instructional potential.
Distributed Learning, by Mark Maruyama and Diana Oblinger, with a foreword by Bill Graves, offered a comprehensive examination of networking technologies in education.
Mission of the Institute
The Institute’s research agenda was guided by its Board of Directors. Its guiding principle was that online communication tools and learning resources, when used by effective instructors and engaged students, could extend learning beyond the traditional classroom while also enhancing in-person instruction.
Instructional methodologies built on online resources faced both opportunity and complexity. Because networked systems connect multiple instructional components, creating a coherent learning environment required systems integration across communication tools, learning resources, and student services.
This need for educational synthesis and systems integration shaped the Institute’s research program. Its policies and practices supported a pre-competitive collaborative environment in which institutions, foundations, government agencies, and companies could contribute to shared technological and cognitive infrastructure.
About William Graves (archival biography)
William Graves served as President of the nonprofit Collegis Research Institute and as Founder and Chairman of eduprise.com. He previously worked at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute for Academic Technology and held senior IT leadership roles. He earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Indiana University and joined the UNC faculty in 1967.
Graves served on the boards and steering committees of EDUCAUSE, the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, the Instructional Management Systems Cooperative, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the Internet2 Project.
He delivered more than 400 invited presentations and published extensively on information technology in higher education. Selected publications are listed below.
- “William Graves on the Emerging Knowledge Economy.” Educom Review, Vol. 33 No. 6 (1998).
- “Developing and Using Technology as a Strategic Asset.” In Dancing with the Devil, Jossey-Bass, 1998.
- “Institutional or Random Acts of Progress?” Information Technology in Postsecondary Education, 1998.
- “The Internet in the Class or the Class on the Internet?” Community College Week, 1998.
- “Learning as an Expedition, Technology as a Unifying Tool.” Syllabus, 1998.
- “All Packets Should Not Be Created Equal: The Internet2 Project.” D-Lib Magazine, 1998.
- “Adapting to the Emergence of Educational Micro Markets.” Educom Review, 1997.
- “Free Trade in Higher Education: The Meta University.” Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 1997.
- “Why Higher Education Needs an Advanced Internet.” Computer, 1996.
- “Toward a National Learning Infrastructure.” Educom Review, 1994.