Only a few years have passed since modest federal investments in NSFNet provided leverage for a much larger total investment in campus-based network infrastructure. These investments by higher education and a few key federal and corporate partners were designed to enrich the nation's research infrastructure, but they also quickly resulted in a range of unanticipated, broadly useful applications in the global academic community. The result was the first general purpose (global) Internet. Soon thereafter, the Internet became an integrated set of inter-networking resources and services based on open, de facto standards and offered by an array of competing providers in a commercial environment now exhibiting many of the features of a commodity market. The World Wide Web and its attendant browsers, with their origins also in the research and academic communities, catapulted the Internet to its current revolutionary status both as a social and an economic phenomenon.
What's Next?
The task at hand is to develop a late '90s strategy to define and secure advanced networking services for the constituencies of higher education and other profit and non-profit communities with similar needs. But any such strategy should examine the Internet/Web experience in order to build today's Internet market into a broad, commercially viable market for advanced network services. Higher education cannot afford to build walls between itself and the larger, open, inter-networking community, so new networking services should incorporate a continuous migration path from today's Internet services.
To understand higher education's need for network services beyond those available today from Internet providers, we must consider the enriched educational environment envisioned by many academic leaders and frequently captured in the phrase "virtual university." The main features of this environment are the integrated networked delivery of multimedia learning materials, and asynchronous and synchronous conversations within learning communities of students and their mentors. The advanced network services that would enable such an environment would also serve advanced learning communities of academic, government and corporate researchers.
A group of higher education network leaders has reviewed the technical requirements for the virtual university and for today's research community. They determined that by the year 2000, higher education will require an advanced, open, inter-networking fabric with the capacity to:
- support desktop and room-based video teleconferencing,
- support high-volume video streaming from distant video servers,
- incorporate and integrate voice traffic,
- insert large-capacity inter-institutional projects into the fabric at will in response to the needs of research projects and network experiments,
- interconnect enterprise networks that are in various stages of migration from router-based topologies to virtual switched topologies, and
- control costs and pricing/allocation models from within the enterprise.
These requirements are important to higher education because in the traditional configuration of a classroom- and library-centered campus, a college or university is a successful learning community enriched by a comprehensive set of learning resources. The word "Internet" provokes a justifiable resistance to change in some educators, not because they fear the networked delivery of learning and learned materials, but because they have concerns about a "wired" future in which the human connection between student and instructor is diminished to the detriment of higher-order learning and the overall social fabric. They fear the loss of the conversational aspects of learning, often dependent on humanly rich sensory cues and spontaneous give and take. We switch tasks and modes of communication seamlessly in face-to-face learning environments. In contrast, today's computers and network services do not support an integrated, seamlessly rich palette of communication and application. But proper planning and the integration of the requirements listed above can go a long way toward mitigating the shortcomings of technology-mediated human communication.
Window on Opportunities
Although time and place have been used forever to organize human activity into face-to-face communities of common purpose, communities of discourse are being reorganized today around new modes of human communication no longer bounded by time zones and geography. Conference calling and two-way video conferencing have removed some of the constraints of place but have by no means replaced face-to-face group meetings. Instead, the Internet has become today's primary window onto a range of new communications possibilities organized principally by shared interest and only secondarily, if at all, by proximity in time and place.
Nowhere are the constraints of time and place more noticeable, paradoxically, than in today's classrooms on the very campuses that contributed so much to the birth of the anytime-anyplace Internet. Natural inertia and resistance to change contribute to this phenomenon, along with the fear of creating a diminished social environment for building and joining communities of discourse. But there is another major barrier to change.
Computers connected to the Internet are not yet pervasive in colleges and universities and the communities they serve. Computers and network infrastructure, like telephones and the telephone network, must be personally accessible to all of higher education's constituents to be useful. And while institutions of higher education are moving quickly to create campus-based networking infrastructures within their bounded physical enterprises of offices, classrooms, libraries, labs and residence halls, connecting their off-campus constituencies is a different matter. Remote access to enterprise networks is thus a critical component of any plan to develop advanced networking services for higher education and is especially problematic for institutions with nationally or globally dispersed constituencies or potential constituencies. We must simultaneously advance the capacity and the quality of services available through campus networks, inter-campus networks, and networks providing remote access to campus networks from the home and the workplace. Society's expectations of higher education leave us little choice.
Great Expectations
Society expects higher education to become more flexible in its course and curriculum offerings in order to meet the new educational needs of a learning society. Rapid changes in academic disciplines, along with rapid growth in the volume of the overall knowledge base, are fueling an increasing emphasis on life-long learning and learning to learn. These changes, along with rapid growth in the volume of the overall knowledge base, are driving the need for continuing education throughout a lifetime. Moreover, not all students are interested in a residential experience. Many express tightly focused, self-selected learning objectives as consumers of instruction. This is especially the case with "non-traditional" learners and "life-long" learners who may have legitimate educational needs not easily accommodated by either the time-and-place constraints of traditional campus-based study or the time constraints of multiple-year degree offerings.
Society also expects higher education to link its curriculum offerings, its research agendas and its public service offerings more closely to social and economic needs. This expectation of relevance raises the issue, for example, of how to balance traditional emphases on general education and free inquiry into the "pure" realms of knowledge with a more pragmatic emphasis on meeting society's current needs.
These increased expectations of flexibility and relevance come at a time when new political and economic forces are making it increasingly difficult to sustain historic financial commitments to higher education. The federal government, for example, is shifting responsibility for many social programs to the states, often without transferring enough resources to cover the full historic costs of such programs. This shift and other social and economic changes dictate that higher education's leaders and supporters rededicate themselves to optimizing the collective investment in higher education. Many have already concluded that only by embracing the educational constructs of the virtual university can we both increase access to instruction and maintain the quality of learning while also containing overall instructional costs.
Making It Happen
We cannot simply bolt information technology onto existing educational practices if we expect to extend the reach of higher education's services to meet society's need for flexible, relevant educational services. Today's lecture-dominated contact-hour model is a one-size-fits-all model mass produced on an infrastructure of classrooms, chalkboards and rigid class schedules - an institution-centered teaching infrastructure rather than a student-centered learning infrastructure.
The contact-hour model is labor-intensive, and quality education will be especially costly as long as it is inversely equated with class size, rather than directly equated with learning outcomes. Although face-to-face contact between student and instructor will continue to be important under many circumstances, we must selectively abandon the idea that the primary locus for such contact must be the classroom. The advanced networking services that we envision offer new opportunities to increase the frequency and maintain the quality of communication between student and instructor, wherever they are.
We also must recognize the distinction between instruction aimed, on the one hand, at learning particular skills and bodies of knowledge and, on the other hand, at underpinning the residential undergraduate experience with its goals of socialization and learning to learn. Network applications can be used to mitigate costs in both cases, but the residential undergraduate experience will continue to be expensive because of its residential nature. We must begin to decouple the residential experience from other parts of the educational experience in order to offer more flexible choices for students. These choices will be limited if we do not also rethink the policies and funding conventions that govern today's enrollment patterns.
We must act now to transform today's commodity Internet into a pervasive, advanced global information infrastructure (GII) capable of further reducing human dependencies on time and place through an array of services that capture and integrate a rich combination of human senses underlying ordinary communication. Without such an infrastructure, higher education will fail in its self imperative to transform its educational modus operandi, to extend its reach with more flexible and socially relevant instructional programs, and, in the process, to change its inwardly focused culture.
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A Shared Vision
A 1995 conference in Monterey (California), "Higher Education and the NII: From Vision to Reality," focused and articulated higher education's vision for the future of networking. A particularly noteworthy concern emerged from the conference: today's Internet technologies and services may not evolve to meet higher education's imminent high performance networking capacity and service needs. Most members of Educom's Networking and Telecommunications Task Force (NTTF) share this view.
A few months later in early 1996, Educom's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) met for the third time to advance its agenda of utilizing the NII to increase access to instruction while also increasing higher education's overall return on investment in instruction. The two groups, NTTF and NLII, are working on different parts of a larger problem, and their efforts deserve an attempt at synthesis. Proceedings from the Monterey conference (Higher Education and the NII: From Vision to Reality) are available from Educom.
William H. Graves is chief technology officer (interim) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [email protected]