Improving Productivity in Higher Education - The Need for a Paradigm Shift Copyright 1992 CAUSE From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 15, Number 2, Summer 1992. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear,and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission.For further information, contact CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301, 303-449-4430, e-mail info@CAUSE.colorado.edu IMPROVING PRODUCTIVITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION-- THE NEED FOR A PARADIGM SHIFT by Carol A. Twigg ABSTRACT: To what extent do our perceptions of how colleges and universities "work" prevent us from finding new solutions to the problems that confront us? This article proposes that the predominant paradigm in higher education creates obstacles to the effective application of new technologies and argues the need to analyze the assumptions that dominate that paradigm to capitalize on the solutions that information technology offers. ************************************************************************ Carol A. Twigg is Associate Vice President for Academic Programs and Information Technology at SUNY Empire State College, responsible for academic and administrative computing and enrollment management. She leads the recently created ESC-SUNY Center for Learning and Technology, whose mission is to develop innovative applications of instructional technology. ************************************************************************ There is universal agreement among all sectors of American society that improving education and training is essential if the United States is to remain competitive in the 1990s and beyond. Yet, as William C. Norris, founder of Control Data Corporation, has recently said, "There is little doubt that progress toward that national objective is discouragingly slow."[1] There is also general agreement that one of the most serious problems facing the U.S. is the seemingly inexorable rise in the cost of education with no apparent increase in education's benefits--i.e., students are paying more for less. As James Wetherbe, speaking at CAUSE90, observed, "There is a feeling that American higher education costs too much and does not deliver," and that, as Norris says, "Increased spending has not been matched by productivity improvements."[2] A May 1991 _Forbes_ magazine article sums up the public's attitude: "Can nothing stop this relentless inflation in college costs?" Forbes' answer: "Nothing but innovative thinking and a serious restructuring in the universities."[3] Or, in words familiar to the information technology profession, nothing but a paradigm shift. While there is a general sense among us that the application of information technology to higher education can somehow solve these problems--can, in fact, contribute to increased productivity--there is little consensus about how this can be done. Many in higher education, like Milton Glick, argue that "increased productivity in higher education is hard to define, let alone quantify or measure."[4] Despite the frequent and urgent calls for restructuring education, equal numbers of articles appear bemoaning "the failed revolution," the numerous failures of technology to transform education and training. As Brian Hawkins expresses it, "Computing has not lived up to its promise of bringing truly revolutionary improvement in the quality of our core education programs. In retrospect, we were naive in expecting dramatic change, given the numerous structural problems affecting higher education, which technology itself cannot address."[5] The premise of this viewpoint article is that as long as technology is applied to the current model, or paradigm, of higher education, the result will be merely added costs rather than increased productivity. What does it mean to increase productivity in higher education? Simply defined, it means either increasing output at the same cost and/or reducing costs while producing the same output. Currently, higher education places its emphasis on increasing inputs in order to produce the same or lesser outputs. We need to develop meaningful, sophisticated measures of what students need to know and be able to do as a touchstone for more productive education policies. Our goal should be a vast increase in productivity: more learning for more people at less cost. Why is a paradigm shift necessary to increase productivity in higher education? Because, as James Wetherbe put it at CAUSE90, "The biggest obstacle to innovation is thinking it can be done the old way." Familiar examples of how, in Wetherbe's words, "technique lags behind technology" come to mind: * During the American Revolutionary War, the British soldiers, dressed in bright red uniforms, clustered together in a style that had made sense doing battle with swords and shields but made them vulnerable to the Americans' new style of fighting. Feelings of superiority prevented them from seeing why they were losing the war. * Faced with the invention of the telegraph, the first reaction of the Pony Express was to buy faster horses. When that failed, they tried to hire better riders. They did not realize that the world had changed, and they went out of business. * The first ATM was located inside a bank and was available only during banking hours. Real innovation occurred when it was placed outside the bank, available 24 hours a day. As Lewis J. Perlman points out in a 1991 _Business Week_ article, "Without critical, structural changes in the system, placing more computers, videodiscs, and other gadgets into conventional classrooms will do nothing to reverse the failure of the education economy; it may actually make things worse. For one thing, we know from the extensive experience of office and factory automation that roughly 80 percent of the productivity gains from technology innovation come not from new hardware or software but from fundamental changes in management, organization, and human resources."[6] Much of the discussion of applying information technology to education treats it as an input, or an add-on. As Kenneth M. King, president of EDUCOM has noted, "The corporate sector has used information technology to reduce unit costs while information technology is widely regarded as an add-on cost for higher education."[7] Yet when thinking about its application to higher education, the most King can suggest as an example of re-thinking instructional delivery systems is to use projectors and computers in the classroom. Talking about "wiring the classroom" or "wiring the campus" exemplifies the "technique lags behind technology" principle. This is simply automating the existing process, and the result is ineffectiveness. Bob Heterick has eloquently written that "microprocessor technology has clearly demonstrated that it is the idea, not the physical embodiment in artifact, that has enduring economic value. The surrogate of the library as a physical place, the computing center as a collection of machines, and the network as an assemblage of wires are weak concepts in the age of the microcosm."[8] If Heterick is right, if the paradigm of networking technology is "anyplace, anytime, anyway," why would we want to confine its application to the classroom or the campus? The paradigm effect The word "paradigm" comes from the Greek word "paradeigma," meaning model or pattern. A paradigm represents a way of looking at the world, a shared set of assumptions which enables one to understand or predict behavior. In his book Discovering the Future: _The Business of Paradigms_, Joel Arthur Barker describes what he calls the "paradigm effect."[9] Paradigms have a powerful impact on individuals and on society because one's view of the world is determined by his or her set of assumptions. To put it another way, a person's vision is often affected by what he or she believes about the world; one's beliefs often determine the information one "sees." To apply this concept to the application of technology, the paradigm effect may cause people to be "blind" to what is happening around them such that they may fail to "see" the potential in a new application of technology. A familiar example is that of the quartz watch revolution. The Swiss Watch Federation Research Center at Neuchatel created the first prototype of the quartz watch in 1967, but the watch manufacturers' rules about mechanical watches blinded them to the potential of the new technology. Market share dropped from the 1970 level of 60 percent to 10 percent during the 1980s. A more recent example of the paradigm effect is described in Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, and Ignored, the First Personal Computer.[10] The authors recount how Xerox executives refused to market the Alto, the first personal computer which was developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, because they never fully realized the implications of personal computing. They were victims of the paradigm effect. If a belief in an existing paradigm is unrelenting, it can lead to what Barker calls "paradigm paralysis," a terminal disease of certainty. Leaders of the old paradigm community, who have a tremendous amount of time and energy invested in using the old rules, are often resistant to change and less likely to look for creative, innovative solutions to problems. In much the same way as Thomas Kuhn, who first called our attention to the idea of paradigm shifts, observed scientists trying to "save the theory," so too do victims of paradigm paralysis focus their efforts in defending old solutions to new problems. All paradigms give practitioners a view of the world that enables them to solve specific problems. The problem arises when the old paradigm cannot solve new problems. When change is slow, dogmatic beliefs are not as damaging. However, in periods when the ability to react and change quickly is crucial, unswerving commitment to the old paradigm can be fatal, as the British Army discovered in the American Revolution. According to Barker, a paradigm provides both boundaries for behavior, or guides to action, and direction for success within those boundaries. When a paradigm shifts, the rules for success change. A crucial managerial tool during times of dramatic change is the skill of anticipation, the ability to foresee, to realize beforehand, the consequences of changes that are occurring in society. By anticipating major changes, rather than reacting to those changes, managers can leverage their competitive advantage during times of turbulence. Bob Heterick puts it another way: "Struggling against inevitable change leaves us the object rather than the agent of change."[11] Barker's view is that most of the turbulence in society today is caused by two contrasting situations: (1) the failures of existing paradigms and an unwillingness to change the current rules, and (2) the creation and development of new rules in times of crisis. Those who create the new rules, the "paradigm shifters," are almost always outsiders to the paradigm community. Since they lack investment in the prevailing paradigm, they can look for innovative ways to solve new problems. Finally, Barker emphasizes that the key component in what he calls strategic exploration is "the ability to understand how your perceptions are influenced." Without this understanding, all else is rendered ineffective. Major changes affecting higher education If Barker is correct in saying that the ability to foresee the consequences of changes that are occurring in society is a crucial managerial tool, it is incumbent upon us to begin our discussion of a paradigm shift by considering the changes that are affecting American higher education. The 1980s were supposed to be a time of decline in postsecondary enrollments. Instead we leave the 80s with record numbers of applicants and stable-to-increased enrollments. What happened? While the traditional sources of college students--eighteen-year-old high school graduates--declined, new sources of students have emerged that have "masked" the effects of the decline. According to the Pew Higher Education Research Program, by the middle of the 1990s, traditional college students--those who proceed directly from high school to enroll full-time in an undergraduate program--will be a clear minority of all students in collegiate programs. Non-traditional students will constitute what is being called "the New Majority" in American higher education. In 1976, traditional students comprised 60 percent of students; in 1986, 52 percent; and by 1999, traditional students will constitute only 40 percent. The Pew Trust calls this "a fundamental transformation of the student market for higher education."[12] What characterizes the students of the New Majority? First, they are primarily working adults who come "in and out" of higher education. Second, they are placebound. Due to work and/or family obligations, these students are almost entirely placebound in their communities. It is no wonder that, in a 1986 College Board study of adult learners, location was listed as their number one consideration when choosing a college or university.[13] Third, college students are increasingly part-time. According to a 1989 report of the National Center for Education Statistics, part-time students represent the fastest growing population in higher education. Between 1970 and 1989, part-time enrollment increased by 109 percent compared to a 32 percent increase for full-time enrollment. Nearly half of all students enrolled at all levels of higher education attend part-time. During 1989, there were 13.5 million students enrolled in higher education; 5.8 million--more than 43 percent--were part-time[14] Even now, the paradigm of the residential four-year university does not fit the majority of higher education's students. Thirty-seven percent of the nation's students are enrolled in public two-year institutions. While 57 percent of students currently enrolled are full- time, only 44 percent, a minority of all student enrollments, are enrolled full-time at a four-year institution. In my own university system, the State University of New York with some sixty-four member institutions, only 20 to 25 percent of its more than 400,000 students are residential. Another significant societal trend affecting higher education is the growing importance of lifelong learning. Education no longer ends at graduation; retraining the work force is the next big task for education and training. A 1987 report of the National Governors' Association points out that three-fourths of the citizens who will be working in the year 2,000 are already in the labor force.[15] Others estimate that the number is closer to 90 percent. Thus, the education and training of the current labor force is the key to increasing productivity over the next two decades. The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) estimates that, by the year 2000, more than 75 percent of the nation's workforce will need re-training. Increasingly, Americans work at several different jobs during their lifetimes, each requiring new skills, new knowledge, new attitudes and values. Adults will enter and re-enter higher education continuously throughout their lives to acquire these needed competencies. The higher education paradigm Despite these dramatic changes occurring in society, most discussions of the application of technology to higher education take place within what I will call the "higher education paradigm." What characterizes the higher education paradigm? * It is a university. Allan Hershfield: "There is a single more or less pervasive model of excellence in higher education--the prestigious research university."[16] * Specifically, it is a residential university. Milton D. Glick refers to Iowa State, the University of Missouri-Columbia, and Wayne State University, as the "great heartland universities ... where most college students in this country are educated."[17] * Fully elaborated, it is a "complete lifestyle bundle." _Forbes_ magazine: "The current American idea of higher education encompasses a complete lifestyle bundle, including fancy buildings, research teams, and athletic opportunities."[18] * Its students are young people. They are eighteen to twenty years of age, recently graduated from high school; they attend full-time and live on campus. * It is sequential. Degrees are pursued during a four-year time period via courses that meet three times a week, four or five courses per semester, sixteen weeks per semester, two semesters per year. * Its instruction takes place in the classroom, face to face, primarily vialectures. Bob Heterick: "The classroom lecture has been the primary means through which institutional faculty deliver instruction since the time of the founding of Harvard in 1636. In the late 1800s, the laboratory was added as a supplement to the lecture." Since the 1950s, radio, television, film, and computing have been used as marginal aids to the instructional process. "Yet, none of these techniques has radically altered the paradigm of the faculty member standing in front of a group of students, transmitting information by way of a lecture."[19] The problem with this paradigm is not that such institutions do not exist but rather that discussions about applications of technology take place within this rather specific context, leading to the "paradigm effect." For example, Allan Hershfield notes that television was used by 71 percent of all American colleges and universities in 1978-79, but continues, "Only a few universities and colleges have television as part of a carefully planned package of instructional materials used in their regular academic programs, and those institutions using television in this way tend not to have on-campus students."[20] The implication: Real students live on campus. The Joe Wyatt Challenge, an effort to identify success stories of technology application in higher education, included a selection committee made up of twenty-nine members. Of the twenty-five members from higher education, twenty-one were from large universities; two were from four-year colleges, and two were from community colleges. It is not surprising that of the 101 projects cited, the majority were from large universities. The implication: Success is defined within a university context. Milton Glick says that the impact of computers on the educational process is "marginal at best." Commenting on the situation at Iowa State and other like institutions, Glick concludes, "I am a serious skeptic about our ability to integrate computing into most of our curriculum in the near future in a substantive way. This is not due to any lack of technological capacity. Even on star wars campuses, the culture changes slowly."[21] The implication: Real change occurs at the "heartland universities." I suggest that these conclusions are examples of Barker's paradigm effect. The assumptions of traditional academics blind them to the changes occurring around them and to finding creative solutions to the problems that confront them. The higher education paradigm is time and place specific. In this context, it is little wonder that discussions of applications of technology consist largely of wiring the classroom or wiring the campus. Contrast these ideas to the paradigm of the "ubiquitous digital network." Something is amiss here. We need a paradigm shift, but what kind? It is not sufficient to call for a paradigm shift in higher education as so many are fond of doing; instead, we need to analyze more deeply the assumptions that dominate the higher education paradigm. I have shown how changes in society are forcing a shift in the paradigm in regard to the make-up of the student body and the predominance of the residential university. Let us now turn our attention to another piece of the paradigm: instructional delivery. I believe that we will be unable to realize gains in productivity through the application of technology to higher education as long as the labor-intensive, classroom-based instructional model dominates our thinking. The paradigm of quality Higher education has created its own paradigm of quality that stands in the way of increased productivity. The conventional wisdom says that high-priced, well endowed, prestigious universities can provide a better education than colleges of more moderate means and lower admissions standards. This is a variation of the old saw, "You get what you pay for." But is "quality" a by-product of cost? Increasingly, the evidence says no. See, for example, How College Affects Students, by Patrick J. Terenzini and Ernest Pascarella, which synthesizes 2,600 studies in which researchers examined college's impact on students.[22] The conclusion: Students can get just as good an education at state colleges as at the nation's more elite, private universities. Quality in higher education is primarily defined as the amount of "inputs"--the number of PhDs or the number of recognized scholars on the faculty, the number of books in the library, the number of students in a class, the amount of contact between students and faculty, both in and out of class. A low student/faculty ratio is good; a high student/faculty ratio is bad. The more time faculty spend face-to-face with students, the better the educational process. Ideas about increased time on task as a measure of quality, I believe, grow out of the paradigm of the residential campus. Increased quality equals increased inputs The consequence of this definition of quality is that it forms the context for the national discussion of the need to increase productivity, a discussion initiated largely by higher education's critics. Calls to increase input measures such as how many students and how many hours the faculty teach predominate. Higher education is, in a sense, being "hoisted on its own petard." The business world has seized the theme of increased inputs. Forbes magazine cites the following as examples of declining productivity: "Since the 1920s, time spent in the classroom has shrunk in universities by as much as two-thirds. Since 1970 U.S. colleges have reduced each semester by an average of two to three weeks ... . Between 1977 and 1987 arts and science faculties grew by 16.3 percent while student enrollment in arts and sciences decreased by 14.2 percent." Forbes goes on to compare two liberal arts colleges, one with tuition, room, and board charges of about $20,000 per year, the other with charges of $7,000. At the latter institution, the student/faculty ratio is 21:1, and full-time faculty spend twelve hours a week in the classroom. The former has a student/faculty ratio of 9.5-to-1, and, Forbes concludes, "the resulting productivity problem is visible."[23] Politicians and auditors have jumped on this bandwagon. The August 7, 1991, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the states of Mississippi, New York, Virginia, Arizona, and North Carolina are engaged in studying faculty workload.[24] Workload is defined as how much time faculty spend working with undergraduate students. A recent New York State audit criticized the faculty at the State University of New York at Albany by noting that 51 percent spent fewer than nine hours a week in the classroom. The stated goal of Virginia's workload study, like those of other states, is "to develop incentives to encourage faculty members to focus on teaching and advising." Because the accepted definition of educational quality revolves around time on task, the demand for increased productivity--from higher education's critics-- leads to a call for greater labor intensity. Yet, is there any evidence that an increase in contact hours will improve the quality of education? Is there any evidence that time spent in the classroom is a true measure of productivity and quality? And, how do we apply information technology to increase productivity in this context? A plethora of confusion If we accept the premise that more time in the classroom is good and fewer student/faculty contact hours is bad, the discussion becomes even more convoluted when we attempt to apply technology and, I believe, produces the widely varying, and contradictory, approaches to what is needed. Some say we should use technology to increase student/faculty contact. For example, a 1988 report produced by the National Institute of Education, Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of American Higher Education, says, "Learning technologies should be designed to increase and not reduce the amount of personal contact between faculty and students on intellectual issues." The report condemns the current uses of educational technology which "isolate the learner from the teacher and the teacher from the assessment process."[25] Others advance the idea of the "whole course concept," what I call the all or nothing argument. Glick says, "If you have a complete course for me, great, but it has to be all or nothing, or I don't want it." After setting up the straw man of the "whole course replacement," he then goes on to tell us why it won't work due to the enormous investment of time and effort required to produce a very small piece of courseware. (Glick cites the popular, though somewhat inexact, figures of "100 to 1,000 hours to develop 1 hour of courseware.") Similarly, Hershfield calculates that the cost of developing and delivering whole courses is "five times that of instruction in the traditional mode" and that "the full scale use of technology cannot result in the more efficient delivery of educational services unless technology is used to displace faculty members." A third approach is to leave the decision to use a particular method of instructional technology to each individual faculty member in each individual course at each individual institution. As Hershfield says, "Getting a new method of instruction adopted widely requires thousands of faculty members to make individual decisions to use the new method." Michael Staman, asking why after several years of significant investments in technology, so little has changed in the classroom, points to the same phenomenon. This idea also leads to predictions of failure since, as Staman observes, the momentum of using technology in this way is "excruciatingly slow."[26] Another outcome of leaving the decision to individual faculty members is the creation of "precious jewels" of experimentation. Two examples from a NeXT brochure citing effective classroom technology applications will suffice to make the point. One professor created a multi-media module to be used in his class: "I specialize in African aesthetic traditions, and I've studied brass casting technologies and the contexts in which brass is used in Africa ... . The finished module will present the different contexts in which brass functions in West Africa." A second project, called "Bringing a Dead Language Back to Life," helped the professor overcome one of his greatest instructional challenges: teaching students how to handwrite in classical Greek and to master the language's "odd sounds which one will tend to ignore later on, because, after all, it's a dead language." While these experiments may have some value, they are hardly designed to lead to an improvement in productivity. Only by breaking free of the paradigm of classroom instruction and the tyranny of labor intensive student/faculty contact can we begin to improve productivity through the application of technology to higher education. To do this, we need to develop new definitions of quality based on measuring outputs like student learning. Can we measure faculty productivity, or faculty achievement, by measuring student learning achievement? After all, it is not what the teacher does but what he or she gets the student to do that results in learning. Why should we care if students and faculty are never in the classroom or always in the classroom if student learning results? Why should we care if faculty meet students face-to-face or never meet students face-to-face if the learning results are the same? For those suffering from "paradigm paralysis"--i.e., convinced that higher education cannot or will not change its classroom mode--I'd like to turn to business and industry to see if we can discover models that suggest an alternate vision of the future organization of higher education. A case study: IBM shifts the paradigm In a January 1989 article in ASTD's Training and Development Journal, Patricia A. Galagan describes how IBM restructured its entire education function and streamlined delivery by heading "rapidly out of the classroom into the world of advanced technology."[27] Many of the problems faced by IBM when it began this process will sound familiar to observers of American higher education. In 1984 IBM discovered it was spending $900 million a year, or 4 percent of its total operating budget, on employee education with no central planning or management system. Jack Bowsher, a thirty-two-year veteran of IBM who came to education via accounting, marketing, and personnel, spent the next two years examining IBM education. He discovered the following: * No central direction, no central focus, no plan. "People were trying out every kind of delivery system and measurement system. The result was lots of duplication and yet also voids." * A cafeteria curriculum of thousands of courses. "We put a rich smorgasbord on the table and left the choice of courses up to managers and their workers, who were often overwhelmed." * High costs. "Costs were going up without control and quality was going unmeasured." At the completion of the study, Bowsher assembled a group to redesign employee education and to create a new delivery system. The first step was a redefinition of the purposes of education at IBM to relate it more clearly to the company's business requirements. Curricula would exist only to train people for jobs they have today or to train people for jobs of greater responsibility. That meant no more "nice-to-have" courses. The next step was a redesign of course content with a heavy reliance on instructional design. "Instructional designers can build high-quality, efficient, motivating courses; they can reduce the length of a course by about 25 percent." The redesign put more measurement of outcomes into training by systematically testing how much knowledge and skill passes to the student in each course and measuring the course in terms of business results--i.e., how the course content applies to the job. Finally, IBM incorporated technology into the delivery of education, reducing costs and improving quality in the process after its cost study revealed the following: * A central classroom. It costs an average of $350 a day to train each student. * On-site classrooms. Training at IBM plant sites around the world costs an average of $150 a day. * Satellite delivery. Courses carried by satellite from a central classroom to distant sites cost $125 a day. * Self study. Whether by computer, video, or print-based, independent study costs $75/day. Since the 1970s, education at IBM has been moving steadily out of the classroom into the circuits and airwaves of increasingly sophisticated delivery systems. In the early 1980s, no more than 5 percent of the company's education was delivered using technology; today that figure stands at about 30 percent. In 1989, about half its courses were classroom-based and half were self-paced, but Bowsher predicts that by the end of the 1990s, only 25 percent will take place in the classroom. "That's a revolution," he says. And I say, that's a paradigm shift. Other examples from the world of training In a Training magazine article titled, "Good Bye Classrooms (Redux)," Beverly Geber points to other corporate leaders who expect that significant portions of their training will be delivered outside the classroom by the turn of the century.[28] Ford Motor Company estimates that by the end of the 1990s as much as 50 percent of its training will be out of the classroom. For example, Ford Motor Credit Company, the second largest finance company in the world, has replaced most of its classroom training with an interactive video system. Ford currently delivers all training to mechanics at its 1,500 dealerships through interactive video. Motorola estimates that between 25 and 50 percent of the training it will design in the next two years will be delivered via technological systems. Other companies, in an effort to reduce classroom time as much as possible, are requiring trainees to complete work on their own in conjunction with classroom work. Aetna's management training courses typically include a self-study portion that is usually delivered by computer. Why this accelerated move out of the classroom to technology-based delivery systems? Geber cites the convergence of several factors: * Competition and time. In these days of shortened product development cycles, training must become more efficient and effective just to keep up. Corporate trainers are asking, how long would it take to train everybody in a classroom? And who has time to sit in class, anyway? * Greater demand for training. According to many training directors, the skills of entry level employees are horrendous; technology offers an efficient means of imparting basic information. Technology is also a cost-effective way to distribute information to current employees in a fast-changing workplace. * Evidence of cost-effectiveness. Overwhelming evidence shows that these forms of delivery are considerably more cost effective than classroom training and produce learning at least equal to what can be achieved in a classroom. * Better technology. The increasing power of personal computers, innovations such as hypermedia and CD-ROM, and the pervasiveness of electronic communications systems have combined to produce a conceptual shift in training philosophy from a model with the teacher at the center to one that has the learner at the center. Gloria Gery, a longtime expert in computer-based training, believes that these nascent developments will usher in a fundamental change--a new paradigm--in the way training will be delivered by the end of the decade. "We worked hard to automate the old model," says Gery. "We made it prettier, more interactive and faster. We automated it. But, fundamentally, the model was wrong." What was needed, Gery concludes, was a paradigm shift: the ability to stop seeing training as a classroom "event" and begin to see it as a workplace tool that can be delivered in a variety of ways.[29] The paradigm shifters When we return our attention to higher education, it is not surprising to find that new models of educational delivery are emerging from those institutions that are responding to the New Majority. Examples at all levels of collegiate instruction include the Community College of Maine, the Extended Learning Institute at Northern Virginia Community College, SUNY Empire State College in New York, Thomas Edison College in New Jersey, and the National Technological University. These institutions are Barker's "paradigm shifters," outsiders to the traditional paradigm community who are finding innovative ways to meet new challenges. These institutions see information technology as essential to their efforts, and they are all, in one way or another, developing alternatives to the higher education paradigm. Greg Kearsley, a well-known writer and speaker on the topic of information technology, is conducting a study for the federal Office of Technology Assessment on the current status and future direction of training technology in the workplace. In the future, Kearsley suggests, trainers will have to justify a decision to hold a class rather than delivering the information through some technological means.[30] As higher education increasingly experiences the same pressures affecting training's move out of the classroom--expressed in both arenas as the need for improved productivity--coupled with the availability of powerful technologies, will we too someday have to justify a decision to hold a class? Some say that day has arrived. ======================================================================== Footnotes: 1 William C. Norris, "Consortia Provide Pathways for Restructuring Education," T.H.E. Journal, October 1991, p. 79. 2 Ibid. 3 Leslie Spencer, "College Education Without the Frills," Forbes, 27 May 1991, pp. 290-292. 4 Milton D. Glick, "Integrating Computing into Higher Education," EDUCOM Review, Summer 1990, p. 36. 5 Brian L. Hawkins, "Preparing for the Next Wave of Computing on Campus," Change Magazine, January/February 1991, p. 26. 6 Lewis J. Perlman, "A New Learning Enterprise," Business Week, 10 December 1990, p. 18ED. 7 Kenneth M. King, "Hard Times for Higher Education," EDUCOM Review, Spring 1991, p. 67. 8 Robert C. Heterick, Jr., "Less is More," CAUSE/EFFECT, Fall 1990, p. 55. 9 Joel Arthur Barker, Discovering the Future: The Business of Paradigms (Burnsville, Minn.: Charthouse Learning Corporation, 1988). 10 Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, and Ignored, the First Personal Computer (New York: William Morrow, 1988). 11 Heterick, p. 55. 12 The Pew Higher Education Research Program, Pew Policy Perspectives, January 1990. 13 Carol B. Aslanian and Henry M. Brickell, How Americans in Transition Study for College Credit (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1988), p. 56. 14 National University Continuing Education Association, Lifelong Learning Trends: A Profile of Continuing Higher Education (Washington D.C.: NUCEA, April 1990), pp. 3,5. 15 National Governors' Association, Center for Policy Research, Making America Work: Productive People, Productive Policies (Washington D.C.: National Governors' Association, 1987), p. 25. 16 Allan F. Hershfield, "Education's Technological Revolution: An Event in Search of Leaders," Change Magazine, November/December 1980, p. 50. 17 Glick, p. 35. 18 Spencer, p. 290. 19 Robert C. Heterick, Jr., "Huxley's Hubris" EDUCOM Review, Fall/Winter 1991, p. 22. 20 Hershfield, p. 48. 21 Glick, p. 35. 22 Patrick J. Terenzini and Ernest Pascarella, How College Affects Students (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991). 23 Spencer, p. 292. 24 Mary Crystal Cage, "States Questioning How Much Time Professors Spend Working with Undergraduate Students," The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 August 1991. 25 National Institute of Education, Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of American Higher Education (Washington, D.C.: NIE, 1988). 26 Michael E. Staman, "An Action Plan for Infusing Technology into the Teaching/Learning Process," CAUSE/EFFECT, Summer 1990, p. 35. 27 Patricia A. Galagan, "IBM Gets Its Arms Round Education," Training and Development Journal, January 1989, pp. 35-40. 28 Beverly Geber, "Goodbye Classrooms (Redux)," Training Magazine, January 1990, pp. 27-35. 29 Ibid, pp. 34-35. 30 bid, p. 29. ======================================================================== Commentary This commentary accompanies the preceding Viewpoint article by Carol Twigg. CAUSE/EFFECT invites readers to share their perspectives through Viewpoints, and welcomes responses in the form of Letters to the Editor. Address your comments to the editor c/o the CAUSE office in Boulder, or to jrudy@CAUSE.colorado. edu. Don Doucette is the associate director of the League for Innovation in the Community College, a 24-year old consortium of resourceful community colleges organized to promote experimentation and innovation in all aspects of community college development. Dr. Doucette directs the League's initiatives, in partnership with technology-related corporations, in applying information technology to the challenges facing community colleges. ************************************************************************ Carol Twigg has done us a favor by pointing out the prejudices about "college" we all carry with us. There can be little doubt that our dominant paradigm for higher education is that of the prestigious research university. Twigg argues persuasively that this model, far from inspiring us to greater innovation, has caused "paradigm paralysis" and now keeps us from responding effectively to the fundamental challenge facing all of higher education: providing high-quality and affordable postsecondary education to ever increasing numbers of students with stable or declining institutional resources--serving more with less. Twigg's analysis is also a convincing explanation for our failure to use powerful information technology tools to increase either the quality of our instructional programs or our productivity in providing them. My fear is that too many will dismiss her critique as an ill- fitting shoe, a mainly irrelevant criticism of a higher education system that is, after all, the best in the world. However, that the research university paradigm has become increasingly less relevant to a growing segment of the higher education marketplace is amply demonstrated by the burgeoning growth of the least traditional sectors of that market. Community colleges nationwide continue to grow at annual rates of 5 to 10 percent; they now enroll 6 million students--nearly half of all students in higher education--and 55 percent of all first-time freshmen each fall. In business terms seldom used by educators, in under three decades of sustained operation, they have captured over half of the 350-year old higher education market. For the past decade, perhaps longer, community colleges have been dealing with the demographic realities of higher education students whose different needs research universities, and many of their four-year university counterparts, are now only beginning to acknowledge. Community colleges have long designed their programs and schedules for a bimodal distribution of students: 18- to 22-year old "traditional" students and "nontraditional" placebound adult learners. They have pioneered efforts to serve the diverse needs of adult learners, including not only part-time students enrolled in degree programs, but employees of business and industry seeking job retraining and nearly continuous job updating. Largely as a result of these experiences, community colleges are also poised to lead other educational institutions in using information technology to improve quality, to increase productivity, and to ensure greater access to instructional programs. Perhaps the only serious shortcoming of Twigg's analysis is that, having described the existing paradigm of higher education, it does not go on to delineate the characteristics of any alternatives. Yet, an alternative paradigm for higher education is emerging, and it is characterized by the following tenets: (1) Higher education is lifelong learning, with nearly universal access. (2) The primary mode of delivery is distance education. (3) Information technology is fundamental to providing the network infrastructure to deliver instruction and support learning--by providing remote access to information resources, by providing communications among all participants in the learning process, and by providing learner-centered instructional systems. (4) The role and work of faculty is to provide structure, support, and management for learning. Far from fantasy, this paradigm is at the heart of not only the strategic plans of a growing chorus of two-year colleges, as well as some four-year colleges, but also of the business plans of many major international corporations. As Twigg points out so convincingly, the current model of higher education will inevitably change because it is economically unsustainable. In its place, for the vast majority of students, will be colleges and universities that provide the infrastructure to support lifelong learning and guidance in its use. Investments in that information technology infrastructure are already apparent. Networks are being developed to provide access to instructional resources on campus and digitized databases worldwide and to support routine electronic communications among students and faculty. Multimedia systems, a new generation of assessment instruments, and structures to support open-entry/open-exit curriculum units are being piloted. Mutually beneficial models to fund needed investment in technological infrastructure to increase faculty productivity are being explored. The key to success is the transformation of the teaching and learning process from one that is teacher-centered to one that is learner-centered, to transform our paradigm of the "community of scholars" to one that is defined by "communities of learners." While not all major change represents a paradigm shift, Twigg is correct in assessing the magnitude of the change required. Shifting from a system of higher education in which the learner replaces the faculty member at the center is no less drastic than replacing the earth in the center of the Ptolemaic universe with the sun of the Copernican. ************************************************************************