In announcing plans to develop a Virtual University in the western states, Colorado's Governor Roy Romer was quoted as saying, "This is a revolutionary idea. Many people can't afford the traditional way of getting a higher education degree, which is learning by sitting in the classroom. Technology can be an effective and cheaper way to help people learn."
Faced with increased enrollment demands and declining state revenues, the western governors see distance education via technology as a potential silver bullet. Reactions to the western initiative have ranged from fear and loathing to wild-eyed enthusiasm and anticipation. The pendulum of higher education opinion swings from those who say, "Prove it. Show me examples of institutions that offer courses or degree programs of acceptable quality via distance education at reduced cost" to those who assert, "The entire Education Network of Maine cost less to create than one new high school."
This controversy has spurred renewed interest in what are called cost-benefit studies. People want to compare the costs and benefits of traditional classroom instruction with various forms of mediated instruction to "prove" which are most cost effective. Specifically, they want to collect data and create case studies of institutions that have implemented mediated instruction or distance education. On its face, this appears to be an attractive idea.
Those who desire such studies are seeking answers to a number of important questions: Can we extend access to courses and programs for students who are not on campus? Can we generate new revenues by offering programs via technology to new student clienteles? Can students taking courses via technology learn as well as students on campus? Can we accommodate growth without building new campuses? Can we enroll more students for less cost?
Many of the answers to these questions are known. Can we extend access via distance education? Of course. A 1995 Corporation for Public Broadcasting survey of 1,000 colleges and universities found that 34 percent of them offered for-credit, distance education courses during the 1993 fall semester. So we're doing it. Can we generate new revenues through off-campus programs? Ask your favorite dean of continuing education for details. Can students learn equally well? Richard Clark and Tom Russell both have done meta-analyses of literally thousands of research studies showing that students learn as well or better via distance education as they do in traditional classroom settings. But the question remains, can we do it more cheaply?
So let's gather some data to compare the costs of traditional classroom instruction with various forms of mediated instruction, and we'll be able to "prove" which are most cost effective. Seems simple enough, doesn't it? I'd like to suggest some reasons why doing studies may not help us find what we are looking for.
So many choices
First, it is difficult, if not impossible, to get the data. As Tony Bates has said, the reason why we call it "hard data" is not because it's firm, it's because it's hard to get. Institutions generally do not collect activity-based data - the form that is needed for the desired comparisons - for either traditional or non-traditional instruction. So doing cost-benefit studies would eat up a lot of time and effort merely trying to collect the data.
Second, all instructional implementations - whether at the course or program level - involve choice. One can offer introductory economics for $1,000 by hiring an adjunct faculty member, or one can spend $5 million on developing high-quality, multimedia course materials and hiring a Nobel Prize winner to teach the course. Once you've gathered the data, all you will know is that, whether they use technology or not, there are expensive courses and inexpensive courses. The costs of existing courses and programs merely indicate the choices that have been made, not the choices that are possible. And most of these choices confirm what is known as the Bowen hypothesis: people in higher education tend to spend what they have available to them.
To elaborate this point further, knowledgeable people frequently assert that live interactive television is the most expensive form of mediated instructional delivery. This is not necessarily true. The British Open University and the BBC, SUNY's New York Network, and the Education Network of Maine all offer instruction via live interactive television, but they do so with radically different costs, largely due to differences in the number and type of technical staff employed. Buffalo State College recently installed an instructional video network with links to area high schools. Each classroom origination site cost $35,000 to equip. Yet two sister SUNY institutions recently spent $100,000 and $135,000 per classroom respectively for capability nearly identical to Buffalo State's. The point is that these costs are not intrinsic to the technology; they are a result of good and bad decisions made by the program managers.
Third, it is difficult to compare costs of mediated programs even if you narrow your inquiry to one type of technology. For example, you cannot answer the question, "What does it cost to deliver a live video baccalaureate program?" except by saying, it all depends. . . . In Wyoming or in New York? In nursing or in history? Today or in five years? Via compressed or full-motion video? During peak hours or off-peak? Including all courses needed for the baccalaureate or just those in the major? To the home and workplace or to sites in high schools or community colleges?
Finally, and most importantly, the potentially more beneficial, more cost-effective forms of mediated instruction do not exist. What you may ideally want, as Bates and others have suggested, is a combination of pre-prepared, multimedia materials that reduce the contact time between students and teachers and some interactive time where the faculty member can concentrate on the things that she is best at doing: handling interaction with and among the learners. With the exception of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's studio courses, these models simply do not exist, so cost studies are not going to provide the data to prove their superiority.
It's a design
What this suggests is that we are confronting a design problem or a planning issue rather than a research question that looks at existing programs. The problem is conceptual in nature. Thus, what we need is a conceptual framework - or a decision framework - for comparing the costs of classroom instruction with various forms of mediated instruction that disaggregates the cost of instruction. The framework needs to identify the activities involved in delivering a course or a program (e.g., development, delivery, mediation, evaluation) and the cost components involved in doing so (e.g., instructional and support staff, facilities, transmission, equipment) like the one recently described by Dennis Jones at Educom95. Put this framework in a spreadsheet, and you can create hypotheticals with reference to real data (telecommunications costs, salaries, etc.) - i.e., you can start to design different instructional models.
As you design mediated programs, you will find that the more you replicate the traditional campus model, the more your operating costs will resemble or exceed traditional campus costs - e.g., instructor-led models such as televised classes or computer conference-based courses that rely on the same student/faculty "contact" as traditional models. Similarly, if you use site-based delivery methods (versus desktop delivery to the home or office), you will encounter the same borrow-rent-buy facilities issues as you do on campus. You will save money only if you substitute one function for another function at less cost. This isn't a matter of research; it's a matter of logic and common sense.
So is technology a silver bullet? Answering the question of whether technology can help us serve more students at lower costs is critical to higher education's future. But let's not study it. Let's design and implement new program models that will help us get to that answer.
Carol A. Twigg is vice president of Educom. [email protected]