Distributed
Learning and Institutional Restructuring
by Brian L. Hawkins, President of EDUCAUSE
Before
an institution pursues the development of a distance learning or distributed
learning program, it needs to make a number of decisions regarding the
marketplace and to define a clear business plan and strategy. Clearly,
technology is having dramatic effects on higher education:
- The new technology
affords exciting opportunities for more effective learning.
- The new technology
offers a scalability that is greatly needed.
- The new technology
will transform higher education as we know it today.
One can easily
argue that all of these statements are true. Indeed, these three axioms
are all supportable, but they cannot be taken at face value, without
qualification or context. The idea that technology is a panacea and
that it is applicable across all types and sizes of institutions is
an extraordinarily dangerous assumption. Institutional planners need
to apply the above axioms within a context, embedding them in the strategic
planning that needs to be done before pursuing a distributed education
strategy.
An emphasis is
placed here on distributed learning rather than distance learning. The
historical focus of distance learning has been to reach remote areas
and to provide access for full-time working adults anywhere. The distributed
learning approach, on the other hand, is as applicable in a residential
learning environment as it would be in a far-distant environment. In
fact the "anywhere-anytime-anyplace" character of this new set of electronic
educational opportunities may well have its greatest impact on residential
education and higher education structures as we know them today. Whereas
one dimension of customization is the distance or remoteness of the
learner, customization may also be needed because of differences in
backgrounds or differences in basic academic preparation.
How can these customized
learning environments be created for people coming from a variety of
different backgrounds? Customization may take the form of consideration
of learning challenges and disabilities and differing learning styles.
Or this new distributed environment may be just a reinforcement -- providing
the opportunity to explore something in much greater depth, as learners
study the material on their own time, outside of the traditional classroom
and homework assignments. It is important to formulate this new arena
as a distributed learning environment in a far more inclusive manner,
whether these opportunities occur in a residential or a distance environment.
The educational
opportunities that the new technologies afford are exciting and technically
feasible, but institutions face significant obstacles that need to be
addressed before such opportunities can be made operationally feasible.
The purpose of raising these concerns is not to dissuade institutions
from getting actively involved in distributed learning approaches, but
merely to try to identify the organizational, business, and cultural
challenges that need to be considered in order to effectively implement
such initiatives. To implement distributed learning opportunities that
are effective and sustainable, campuses must develop viable organizational
and business strategies. It is hoped that the issues raised here will
encourage the kind of in-depth consideration that will lead to strategic
discussions at campuses entering this exciting new world.
Institutional
Challenges
The following institutional
challenges are not listed in any order, since each institution must
define its own hierarchy of the key issues. Instead, this list of challenges
should be viewed as a "laundry list" that campuses need to review from
a broad institutional point of view, in order to ensure that adequate
consideration has been given to these and other issues, before entering
the business of distributed learning. The pursuit of a significant or
comprehensive approach to distributed learning is a huge undertaking
-- far more complex than determining whether a few faculty can successfully
put a course on the Web and teach effectively in a networked environment.
Library Access
How does an institution
provide library access in this distributed environment? Although many
campuses have defined initial approaches to offering courses over the
Internet, few if any have defined a scalable and viable strategy for
making library resources available to these "distant" learners. Because
of the current copyright limitations, making readings available electronically
is extremely difficult, requiring closed access, key servers, or other
restrictions. Under the recently enacted Digital Millennium Copyright
Act (DMCA), the concept of fair use is all but gone. Defining a strategy
to provide students with adequate access to primary source material
in a distributed learning environment is unclear at best.
Our campuses are
having difficulty providing adequate materials in a residential setting;
how they can supply online resources is even more challenging. The Web
does not provide full-text materials currently, and the legal and business
challenges of making these resources available electronically are significant
obstacles. Furthermore, it would be extremely wasteful to have each
campus or organization that intends to provide online courses invest
in duplicative structures to handle this problem. A collective approach
is called for, and such an effort should be an essential part of any
plans to enter this distributed learning environment.
Faculty Workload
Faculty workload
is a key factor that must be clearly defined and understood when offering
electronic education. "Faculty workload" is defined as how much a faculty
member teaches and how much of his or her work time is taken up with
research, administration, and other duties. At a research university,
faculty might teach two courses a semester, whereas at a community college,
faculty might teach four to five courses a semester. Campuses tend to
define workload in terms of courses per semester. But if a campus is
offering a distributed learning course that is not tied to any specific
enrollment time periods, how should the institution define a course?
How many students constitute "one" of these courses? If a course cannot
be defined, it is impossible to define workload in the traditional manner,
thus opening up a plethora of issues. How does an institution determine
a faculty member�s compensation if a full load of work has not been
adequately defined?
Faculty Incentives
What are the incentives
for a faculty member to spend extra time and energy in developing materials,
courses, distributed learning environments and software, or Web sites
when there are no direct rewards for the faculty member to do so? At
some institutions, faculty may be given some release time for the development
of such materials, but usually only on an experimental basis. As a result
of this strategy, institutions will likely offer fewer courses for the
residential curriculum in order to support the prospective distributed
offerings. Thus we return to the issue of faculty workload and indirectly
to issues of faculty governance. The nature of our faculty governance
structures mitigates against a high degree of flexibility, such as the
use of nontraditional methods of shifting resources. Such flexibility
is needed to provide incentives for faculty to develop tools for the
distributed learning environment.
Faculty Support
Structures
The decision to
incorporate technological dimensions within a course has been defined
solely by individual faculty members until fairly recently. Throughout
much of the 1980s, the use of technology was merely an experiment, and
the development environment for creating instructional software was
extremely primitive. Initially some campuses (e.g., Dartmouth, Drexel,
Stanford, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill) invested heavily
in faculty development efforts, including the support of staff who knew
something about pedagogy, about screen design, and about technical aspects
of programming to aid faculty in software development. The faculty members
primarily focused on the content dimensions of such developments. This
model of a cluster of talents largely disappeared in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, partially because the technologies became easier to
use and partially because institutions were unwilling or unable to sustain
such personnel commitments when there was no demonstrable economic or
intellectual payoff.
However, as more
faculty use the Web more often and as distributed learning becomes a
"hot topic," this model is reemerging. It is exactly this kind of team
that has been central to the success of the Open University in England,
for example. The leaders of that institution contend that in order to
develop quality materials for this distributed environment, many pedagogical
talents must be brought to bear on the problem. Although some campuses
have developed faculty support centers, institutional planners must
understand why such investments are important and how they contribute
to the institutional mission. A number of key questions must be understood
before aggressively pursuing this strategy. How widespread and universal
is this faculty support effort designed to be? Is there a limit on the
number of people who may avail themselves of such support, and on the
extent to which they may do so? What is the revenue source to support
these extra professional staff? What is the administrative or governance
structure for determining levels of support, and who owns the intellectual
property once it is developed?
Intellectual
Property
Complex issues
surround the intellectual property rights associated with the development
of distributed learning materials. When an electronic course is created,
who owns it? Does it belong to the institution, the faculty member,
or both? Universities have historically given copyrights to faculty,
allowing them to do as they wished with materials falling under copyright.
As a result, faculty are freely giving away the copyrights to their
articles to journals, contributing to the library access issue discussed
earlier. On the other hand, when faculty developed a new invention or
process, most campuses defined this creative contribution under their
patent policies, because the institution too had committed a significant
set of resources, and thus there was a sharing of any benefits derived
from this intellectual property. In many ways, the patent example is
similar to what has happened or might happen when a piece of software
is developed in a joint collaboration in which significant institutional
resources were committed by the college or the university.
But as Dennis Thompson
clearly explicates in his article "Intellectual Property Meets Information
Technology," neither copyright nor patent policy is well suited to dealing
with distributed learning materials. 1
He argues that campuses should instead focus on conflict-of-interest
issues that define the role of the faculty member within the institution.
Most campuses have not defined adequate policies and developed clear
understandings about these issues of intellectual property, conflict
of interest, and revenue sharing. It is imperative that our campuses
establish such policies, emanating from a negotiation including both
faculty and institutional concerns. To ensure that all parties clearly
understand the relationships, such arrangements must be defined, no
matter what form they might take, before distributed learning environments
are developed en masse.
Articulation
Agreements
Most colleges and
universities currently have articulation agreements with the local community
colleges and other local institutions to define which courses are eligible
to be transferred. Historically, these agreements have included only
those institutions that are within a very small geographical area. With
distance learning, however, some avenue to define articulation agreements
among potentially hundreds of schools becomes necessary, since students
may be taking courses from campuses all across the nation -- or possibly
across the globe. How does a campus decide if that "distant" course
is really an acceptable course that is worthy of credit? Does the course
meet the standards and criteria of quality defined at the institution?
Will accepting such courses threaten the perceived quality of its degree
programs? These are some of the questions that must be carefully addressed
as these new educational opportunities emerge. Currently, the common
method of making such determinations for courses outside of predefined
articulation agreements is to have a faculty member or faculty committee
review the materials, texts, and requirements of a course taken by a
student on another campus. The process works because this is a relatively
rare occurrence, but it is highly likely that this will soon become
more common than rare. The current institutional method for defining
acceptable courses does not scale in a manner that would allow scores
(or hundreds) of distant courses to be evaluated. Defining those articulation
agreements thus erects a huge administrative barrier to the pursuit
of distributed learning.
Financial Aid
Financial aid is
one of the major concerns that must be considered as an institution
deliberates entering this distributed learning marketplace. Historically,
if a student was taking a correspondence course, he or she would not
be qualified to receive financial aid at most institutions. With the
most recent Higher Education Reauthorization Act, however, students
taking distance education courses are now eligible for federal financial
aid. This act thus defines student eligibility for federal aid, but
each campus still must decide whether students taking distributed learning
offerings from their own or other campuses will qualify for institutional
aid or tuition waivers. Defining these circumstances will not be particularly
straightforward and will likely result in reinventing an institution's
policies, determining priorities for financial aid, and evaluating the
role of financial aid in supporting the institutional mission.
Pricing
One of the most
challenging dimensions of the distributed learning issue is setting
prices for this new alternative, which clearly does not fall into the
traditional pricing model for colleges and universities. If one considers
the following definition of a "market," a number of challenging questions
are raised. A market is a population willing to pay a given price
for a product that they feel is desirable. Taking a course via the
network may be viewed as desirable, but at what price? Many of the schools
currently providing courses online offer online courses at the same
price as residential courses. They are charging the same because they
know how to do that; the price is already set up in their database;
their accounting and billing algorithms determine how they charge for
the courses. For one large university, the current fee for a single
course is $600, whether it is a residential or a distributed experience.
Consider the example
of students who desire to take organic chemistry. If this is a course
they want to take in a more self-paced manner, or if they want to transfer
this course back to their home institutions, there may be student demand,
thus suggesting that there actually is a market. But if an individual
just wants to learn more about this subject and to explore it in greater
detail, one must wonder how many people are going to be willing to pay
$600 for this opportunity. If students merely want to become more familiar
with a given topic, and they know enough and have the prerequisites
to take the course, why wouldn't they get a book or find other, free
Web sites instead of paying such a fee for a structured course?
Should an institution
charge more or less if the course is taken online? When an online student
pays the same price for a course as a residential student, embedded
in that price is the cost for a variety of services and programs that
are not available to the online student. The common price includes psychological
services, athletic programs, recreational facilities, and scores of
other programs that would not be useful or usable by most "distant"
learners. James Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan,
has argued that institutions should unbundle many of their services
to make college more affordable and to give students more choices.2
Some schools may decide that the remote learner should pay a premium
for this convenience, whereas others may charge a reduced fee for online
courses in order to increase their market attractiveness. These decisions
require a clear business strategy and an awareness that the pricing
decisions concerning these distributed courses may influence the perceptions
of quality associated with the host campus and its residential courses.
Another institutional
policy issue that is critical to consider in setting the course price
is the entire in-state and out-of-state differential currently charged
by most public universities. The difference in tuition levels is obviously
due to the amount of the state subsidy, from tax revenue, for the education
of its own students. If you move into a distributive environment, what
do "in-state" and "out-of-state" mean? Although computers can certainly
charge differentially based on the permanent address of the enrolling
student, the professed advantages of having a geographically mixed student
population lose something in this environment. Furthermore, with price
differentials, the leverage or advantages of scale gained by offering
distributed learning courses and maximizing the potential class size
are seriously diminished. Some propose that the state subsidy be given
to the individual student, meaning that a student from Wisconsin, for
example, could receive funds from such a state subsidy and take the
funds to Kansas. What would such a program do to the pattern of where
students choose to go to school if they can apply the funds to a private
school or to any public institution outside or inside their state? Again,
the policy ramifications of this changing marketplace in higher education
are extremely complex, almost revolutionary, and distributed education
merely adds another facet.
Cross-Subsidization
of Programs
An important requirement
in defining how an institution copes with the advent of a distributed
learning paradigm is to fully understand the economics of the college
or university. Detailed cost analyses of the various individual academic
departments reflect very different profiles on which units generate
net revenue and which ones generate more cost than revenue. How much
space do the various departments need? What kind of library holdings
does a disciplinary unit need? What kinds of computing resources does
a given department need? Laboratory sciences, such as engineering or
chemistry, tend to be extraordinarily expensive. The most cost-effective
units are large lecture courses, with minimal library needs and taught
largely by adjunct faculty. Such units have little or no overhead associated
with their department; therefore, they collect significant net revenues.
Business programs often are illustrative of such units.
At most campuses,
these net revenues are used to subsidize programs that do not generate
large numbers of students (e.g., philosophy, literature, or music) but
that are essential if a complete education is to be offered. The economics
of cross-subsidization are not well understood by most members of the
campus community, and yet these issues are important to understand in
the context of distributed learning because of the impact of competition.
If an outside program, such as an asynchronous business program, begins
to significantly erode the enrollments of a given institution's residential
program, it has a direct effect not only on those enrollments but also
on the economics of cross-subsidized units. This is particularly worrisome
if courses on the network become commodities, resulting in extremely
low-cost course alternatives that are academically acceptable. Furthermore,
if an institution implements a distributed learning program, this new
program, depending on the pricing structure, may also destabilize the
economic models that a college or university uses to operate in a prudent
manner. The point is that both internal and external distributed learning
efforts may affect the entire economy of the institution.
Institutional
Loyalty and Philanthropy
When leaders of
an institution consider entry into the distributed learning environment,
they should simultaneously evaluate the impact that such programs will
have on these students as alumni and members of the extended campus
community. The issue of institutional or "brand" loyalty should be given
at least a modicum of attention. It is difficult -- if not impossible
-- to name any other "product" on which consumers spend such a huge
amount of money, that is, a college education, only to spend even more
money so that they can wear the producer's brand on their sweatshirts,
ball-caps, and key-chains. Higher education enjoys an incomparable level
of brand loyalty that results in support, sponsorship, philanthropy,
and volunteer service. Yet, is it reasonable to expect that the same
level of loyalty and commitment will emerge for students in a distance
environment? If it does, fine. If it does not, there are institutional
considerations, ranging from legislative support to charitable contributions,
that may fundamentally redefine the relationship between a campus and
its alumni -- a unique and cherished partnership at our colleges and
universities. Maybe this cannot be preserved, but it certainly should
be part of an institution's conscious evaluation of the impact that
could result from its programmatic directions concerning distributed
learning.
Technological
Infrastructure
It takes a significant
technological infrastructure to deliver a serious and comprehensive
distributed learning program. This infrastructure might include studios,
massive servers, support and help desks, and a very high speed and high
capacity network, for example. Since only a limited number of campuses
or other providers are necessary or appropriate to make a viable marketplace,
campuses should carefully consider whether they are positioned to provide
the requisite technological infrastructures. Currently a myriad of campuses
are investigating and exploring their own potential roles in this distributed
and distance education arena. However, it would be highly inappropriate
for all of these campuses to replicate the core technologies, since
there is no leverage in such an investment. Perhaps consortia and other
alliances could allow many campuses to contribute substance, content,
and intellectual innovation to specific courses or areas of study. To
think that all campuses can or should develop their own delivery platforms
is both inappropriate and unrealistic in this period of cost containment
in higher education.
Organizational
Structures and Governance
In terms of organizational
structures and governance, it is appropriate to question whether a distributed
learning "business" can effectively operate within the confines of the
traditional university and the current faculty governance model. The
old metaphor about pouring new wine into old wineskins, which inevitably
burst apart, immediately comes to mind. Can our current faculty governance
model work in the new market environment? To be competitive and successful,
a distributed learning program will require a governance model with
a level of dynamism and flexibility different from what has typified
most traditional faculty governance models.
Many academic departments
are making major investments to support faculty in their development
of electronic courses. These investments, creating the kinds of teams
already discussed, are being supported with unit funds, which largely
come from undergraduate tuition. In other words, the undergraduates
are funding this new potential product line for the entire campus, college,
or department. If an extra-institutional structure existed, could these
development costs, these support people, these programmers, plus some
of the involved faculty, be housed in a separate entity? Maybe these
faculty wouldn't have a research obligation but would instead shift
their full energy into the development of course materials. Maybe they
could share in the resources, that is, in the profits that might emanate
from a successful distributed learning program. It is unlikely that
such an entity or strategy could be accomplished with the current faculty
model. Thinking extra-institutionally seems appropriate. If a campus
takes a wholesale approach to distributed learning, rather than an experimental
or isolated-course approach, the development costs will far exceed anything
that anybody could bury in today's budget. Furthermore, trying to fund
or staff such an approach within the current budget and planning processes
that exist at most of our colleges and universities would likely prohibit
such innovations from emerging.
Do we morph existing
structures, or do we create new organizational types? Do we create something
that is extra-institutional to handle this new distributed environment?
At the extreme, are we prepared for mergers and acquisitions in higher
education? In this new environment, do our traditional faculty-governed,
credit-driven approaches to higher education have the needed flexibility
and ability to quickly respond to market pressures? Although there is
certainly plenty of room for alternative models, units outside of the
traditional college or university enterprise should be given due consideration.
Then the support costs of developing these new courses can be better
understood, new approaches to technical support can be defined, and
different employment contracts can be negotiated with faculty who desire
to work in this new enterprise, thus creating alternatives to tenure,
to workload, and to the current faculty reward structures. These will
likely be key issues in defining the future of distributed education
on our campuses.
Conclusion
Institutions need
to seriously consider all of the relevant issues as they enter the exciting
new marketplace of distributed learning. An institution cannot be naive
in such a venture, assuming a "build it and they will come" philosophy.
If a campus does not have a clearly defined business plan and a well-thought-out
strategic plan, developing such initiatives is essential before a tremendous
amount of money and effort is spent in a distributed learning effort.
These concerns
should not be misunderstood to suggest that distance education is something
that campuses should avoid, and they must not be used as reasons to
do nothing. The three axioms presented at the start of this article
are true; they simply do not apply universally across all aspects of
all higher education. Thus, institutions must carefully define their
distributed learning strategies in light of the economics and the goals
of higher education and within the context of the unprecedented pressures
and accountability issues that higher education is facing today.
