Educom has long been recognized for its leadership in the national networking arena. Through the work of the NTTF, Educom has achieved this recognition by advancing a vision of a national network to support research and education and by fostering effective partnerships among leading higher education institutions, the federal government, and industry in order to implement this vision.
Recent developments in the federal policy arena suggest that a similar convergence is beginning to emerge in the learning technologies arena. Educom's NLII has advanced a vision of a national learning infrastructure to provide greater access to higher education and to create new learning environments characterized by flexibility, customization and cost effectiveness. To achieve that vision, the NLII has promoted the idea of collaboration among leading higher education institutions, government and industry.
Because the NLII's focus is on teaching and learning applications, its constituency, while overlapping considerably with those active on the national networking front, is broader than that of the NTTF - e.g., involving comprehensive universities and community colleges in addition to research universities, state as well as federal policy makers, publishers as well as hardware and software companies. But its implementation strategy has been essentially the same. And just as TCP/IP was the linchpin that sparked the development of the Internet, so too is the IMS specification proving to be the linchpin that will enable the emergence of a national learning infrastructure.
In his keynote address at the most recent NLII meeting, Thomas A. Kalil, senior director to the National Economic Council, outlined a new federal policy climate that has put investment in technology and education at the forefront of the government's economic policy agenda. Expanding upon the educational policy direction announced by President Clinton, Kalil described the administration's interest in educational technology as moving beyond its existing activities in K-12 and in advanced networking research and development (the Next Generation Internet program) to include the role of technology and new forms of collaboration in the area of lifelong learning.
Several new federal initiatives are relevant to this expansion and have a direct relationship to the NLII and its IMS project. These include:
Removal of legal impediments. As part of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965, the administration has recommended changes in student aid programs which will make it significantly easier for students engaged in distance learning to qualify for federal financial aid programs. Recommendations include eliminating the provision in the existing Act that prohibits the awarding of federal aid to students at institutions that offer more than half of their courses outside the traditional classroom. The Department of Education's intention is to stop treating distance-education students like "step-students."
Research and development funding. As part of its $82 million NIST Advanced Technology Program (ATP), the Department of Commerce has announced a new focused program, Adaptive Learning Systems, which aims to promote U.S. economic growth and competitiveness by supporting high-risk technical research to enable the development of Net-centric, Web-based instructional systems. A white paper describing the rationale for the program says its overarching goal is to "hasten the development of a national learning infrastructure that permits education and training to be pervasive and precisely tailored to the needs of educators and learners. . . .This vision assumes a decentralized paradigm of instruction where educational resources and services are made available beyond the boundaries of any single institution or discipline."
The main thrust of the ATP is to support commercial businesses and to emphasize getting products to market. NIST notes that the markets for instructional software and multimedia educational content are still emerging. Since the industry is not yet mature enough to propel the dramatic educational changes expected from learning technologies, the program wants to find ways to overcome market barriers and to accelerate the extension of the national information infrastructure to serve the purpose of education. The white paper is available at http://www.atp.nist.gov/atp/97wp-lt.htm.
Government as a leading edge user. In November 1997, the Department of Defense and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative. The purpose of the ADL initiative is to "ensure access to high quality education and training materials that can be tailored to individual learner needs whenever and wherever they are required." Building on the work of the IMS project, the ADL will support the development of a common technical framework for computer and Net-based learning that will foster the creation of re-usable learning content as "instructional objects." The initiative is designed to accelerate large-scale development of dynamic and cost-effective learning software and to stimulate an efficient market for these products in order to meet the education and training needs of the military and the nation's workforce in the 21st century.
New partnerships to enhance lifelong learning. The Department of Education plans to initiate a new $30 million program, Learning Anytime, Anywhere Partnerships (LAAP), to support pilot projects using technology and other innovations to enhance access to lifelong learning opportunities for all citizens. The program will encourage partnerships among educational institutions, state and local governments, private industry and others to increase the availability of instructional software in high-demand areas; consumer information regarding higher education opportunities and labor market needs (e.g., skills needed for high-demand jobs); and competency-based assessment, certification or credentialing of learning outcomes defined in conjunction with industry and professional organizations.
These new initiatives signal an end to business-as-usual ways of providing education and training. They also reflect a new federal approach to meeting the rising demand for educational services via information technology and market forces echoed by the Western Governors' University at the state level. How will our institutions of higher education respond to these pressures? Will we fight to retain our traditional prerogatives and ways of doing business? Or will we redesign our programs and practices to take advantage of the unprecedented opportunities offered by this growing national learning infrastructure?
Carol A. Twigg is vice president of Educom. [email protected]