During the past decade millions and mil-lions of dollars have been
expended to infuse our educational institutions with information
technology, the putative reason being to address the problems of cost
and the constraints of time and space. There is little to show for these
millions on any of those dimensions. To be sure, we have some local
success stories, but few, if any, have demonstrated that they can scale
up beyond the local classroom, much less beyond the local institution.
There is an old story about a fellow who was driving down a country
lane, when he was passed by a chicken--and a three-legged one at that.
He sped up, but so did the chicken. The chicken turned into the driveway
of a farm, and the fellow decided to follow it. At the farmhouse he
asked the farmer about the chicken. "Oh," the farmer said, "I have
hundreds of them. I breed them for the drumsticks." The fellow asked how
they tasted and the farmer said he really didn't know--he had never been
able to catch one!
For well over a decade the federal government, state governments,
philanthropies, and educational institutions themselves have invested
heavily in "breeding" information technology in institutions of higher
education. We have witnessed dramatic changes in the research efforts of
those institutions. We are still waiting to "taste" the results on the
teaching/learning side of the house.
If we are going to continue to invest those millions of dollars in
teaching and learning, we need an investment strategy. The federal
government needs an investment strategy. State governments and
philanthropic organizations need an investment strategy. And, most of
all, institutions of higher education need an investment strategy for
applying the scarce resources--in the form of information technology--
that they allocate to teaching and learning.
Fundamental to investing with scarce resources is the concept of
leverage. While we may be able to generate only hundreds of millions of
dollars in the next decade to invest in technology in the hope of making
those institutions more productive, there is clear and compelling
evidence that society at large will invest in excess of a trillion
dollars on the National Information Infrastructure.
The principal facet of an investment strategy must be to leverage the
National Information Infrastructure--the so-called information
superhighway. At the moment, that means the Internet, digital
technologies, and the protocols and standards of open systems. Continued
investment in analog technologies, while perhaps cost justifiable in the
short term, simply fail to make the most of the huge investment our
society will make in the National Information Infrastructure. Accretions
to our current time-and-place-constrained teaching model likewise will
not generate that leverage, for they have little capability to scale
beyond the local level.
The investment opportunities most likely to be successful are also
likely to emulate the Internet model--in the form of voluntary consortia
of institutions that in their own self-interest agree to cooperate and
share. They will be distinctly nongeographic in scope. They will be
interinstitutional collaborative efforts that feature mutual agreements
about student and course evaluation, transfer of credit, course design,
and, of course, course content. They will feature learning materials
that are available anytime, anywhere. And they will incorporate new
strategies of contact between teacher and learner--something beyond the
conventional classroom lecture of the past several hundred years.
The new courses and course materials will be delivered through the
National Information Infrastructure. Just as with our current textbook
situation, there will be competing courses in high-demand subject areas.
Perhaps unlike our current situation, many of those courses will be
capable of continuous quality improvement, and networked course
materials will be incorporated into courses in a constellation of
different ways by both teachers and learners.
All of this can happen rather quickly if the traditional funding sources
of higher education can adopt a leveraged investment strategy.
Unfortunately, the evidence to date suggests that they just don't get
it. Federal investment strategies (outside the National Research and
Education Network program) have been particularly lacking in a strategic
viewpoint.
Investments in a learning infrastructure will need to move beyond the
physical cables and transmission protocols and on to content development
and provision. Investments need to encourage and involve leveraged
private investments by publishers, authors, production studios, software
houses, and the like. It appears that the National Science Foundation
got it right with its networking program--by leveraging its investment
with nearly a 100:1 investment from higher education and corporate R&D.
Without an investment strategy we will surely find ourselves with the
high-tech version of breeding three-legged chickens.
Robert C. Heterick, Jr., is president of Educom. [email protected]