CAUSE Professional Paper Series #10 REENGINEERING TEACHING AND LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: SHELTERED GROVES, CAMELOT, WINDMILLS, AND MALLS Edited by Robert C. Heterick, Jr. CAUSE is the association for managing and using information technology in higher education. A complimentary copy of this paper has been sent to every CAUSE member representative; additional copies are available to individuals at CAUSE member institutions/organizations at $12 per copy, to others at $24 per copy. Send pre-paid orders to: CAUSE 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E Boulder, Colorado 80301 Phone: 303-449-4430 Fax: 303-440-0461 E-mail: ordersCAUSE.colorado.edu * * * * * * CAUSE appreciates the generous support of Digital Equipment Corporation, who funded the publication of this professional paper * * * * * * TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword Preface 1 Introduction: Reengineering Teaching and Learning Robert C. Heterick, Jr. 2 Silicon in the Grove: Computing, Teaching, and Learning in the American Research University Richard N. Katz 3 Reengineering of Student Learning? A Second Opinion from Camelot David L. Smallen 4 Community Colleges: Using Information Technologies to Harness the Winds of Change Ronald Bleed 5 Comprehensive Universities Refocusing for the Next Century Thomas W. West and Stephen L. Daigle Commentaries Information Technology--Enabling Transformation Carol A. Twigg A Third Opinion from Camelot Thomas F. Moberg 'Growing' Our Academic Productivity Polley Ann McClure Reengineering or Just Tinkering? Don Doucette Corporate Sponsor Profile Resource List FOREWORD Higher education institutions are on a collision course with their clients. The reality of the nation's economic problems has washed over colleges and universities in a sobering wave of financial cutbacks. While the worst seems to be behind us, our optimism must be tempered by an extraordinary array of competing demands for public support. As much as politicians voice support for the value of education, other pressing issues like health care, infrastructure, and environmental cleanup may capture what few new dollars are available. Declining public support, however, has not meant declining demand. An ever-anxious middle class continues to seek higher education as an antidote to falling wages in low-skill jobs. Meanwhile, institutions struggle to meet their current commitments to "quality." Citing a long tradition, a structure built around bricks and mortar and a labor-intensive production process, institutions face what on the surface appears to be a difficult choice: Cut access or lower quality. It is an artificial choice, however. "Doing less with less" is a prescription for irrelevance. If higher education adopts this strategy, it will end the decade a smaller and less socially relevant institution. Our clients--whether they be students or employers or taxpayers--will voice their anger in destructive ways. Like the corporate sector, our only responsible alternative is to "do more with less" by restructuring our enterprise. This means rethinking our assumptions about delivery systems, curriculum, organizational structures, and the mix of technology and personnel. It means virtually turning the enterprise on its head to find a better, cheaper, more effective way to deliver education, service, and research products. Technology continues to hold the key to much of this transformation. We long for the equivalent of the "automatic teller machine" in higher education--a cheaper, better, and more reliable delivery system. We do not need learning technology to be as good as current classroom instruction, but far better. However, we do not need technology which adds to our financial dilemma. Unfortunately, much of what we have done to date has added to our problems--expanding our reach certainly, but increasing our costs. The productivity challenge of the next decade and beyond will be to expand access while downsizing both the number of personnel and the configuration of the physical plant. The challenge will also be to make a direct impact on student learning. This means transforming the role of faculty from "sage on the stage" to facilitator of a learner-centered, technology-based educational process. The ideal of "anytime, anyplace" education also suggests a dramatic new conception of the college campus. If education can take place in the residence hall, the off-campus apartment, the home, or the workplace, it requires significantly different kinds of capital investment. In the process we will also, no doubt, transform our governance structures, our assessment tools, and our relationships with clients. Organizations like CAUSE, whose members are the experts in information and computing technology, will find themselves thrust into the center of the higher education restructuring movement. Those of us in the public policy arena who are searching for ways out of our dilemma await your revolution. James R. Mingle Executive Director State Higher Education Executive Officers PREFACE Although change is inevitable, it is always accompanied by uncertainty. The advent of changes in digital technology offers significant opportunities to advance the quality of the educational experience for students and faculty. Technology will never replace those qualities of commitment, intelligence, and integrity that are central to maintaining the vitality of the university. However, it can serve as a vehicle to expand our reach.[1] It isn't clear what Aristotle would have done to "reengineer" his teaching process had he access to today's digital technologies, but it might well have been something along the lines discussed by my colleagues in the essays that follow. A voice from the sheltered groves of the research university, Richard Katz tells us that the entrepreneurship characteristic of sponsored research and the German research university model makes bold institutional reengineering efforts difficult. He surmises that while research universities' investments in the information technology infrastructure will create the context for reengineering teaching and learning, major progress will be paced by the faculty reward system and by efforts to achieve a new equilibrium between research, instruction, and service. We have a view from a liberal arts institution that suggests that their version of Camelot is one that should be tampered with only with great care and at significant risk. Drawing on his experiences at Hamilton College, David Smallen observes that liberal arts institutions have worked to maintain the residential nature of the student body and small class size that have been the hallmark of lecture and credit-for-contact--change should be attempted on the effectiveness dimension only. A community college view expressed here is that the winds of change have already been harnessed by the windmills of two-year schools. Many of the teaching/learning issues that are new to other institutions have already been addressed by many community colleges in their continuing efforts to efficiently cope with a heterogeneous, non-resident student body. Ronald Bleed argues that with what has always been their primary, if not singular, focus on learning, many of the lessons of reengineering learned by institutions such as the Maricopa Community Colleges are valuable for study by other institutional types. The significant impact of state budget-cutting on comprehensive institutions has engendered something near crisis, especially in statewide systems such as the California State University. Tom West and Steve Daigle draw on their experiences at CSU to suggest that survival of urban and suburban "mall" institutions may depend, in large extent, on changing the teaching/learning paradigm, focusing on changing the institution along the efficiency dimension. As with any open discussion, there are more than a few views of the "appropriate" course of action. Having completed the essays that comprise the main body of this paper, we shared them with several other practitioners who have been active in the field and solicited their comments. In her commentary, Carol Twigg takes the authors to task for ignoring the fiscal realities of our current condition. She points out the importance of making a clear case that the benefits of technology will outweigh the costs. Thomas Moberg offers several examples of how information technology is changing teaching and learning in the liberal arts college, based on his experience as both a faculty member and an administrator at liberal arts colleges. He strikes an optimistic note regarding the opportunities for improving the quality of the learning experience. For her part, Polley McClure thinks many of our efforts to "reengineer" teaching and learning will meet with limited success because instruction is the personal creative work of an individual teacher. In many ways, she says, higher education already has achieved the status of an empowered workforce in a "flat" organization. And, finally, Don Doucette makes the clear distinction between doing things differently and doing different things, arguing that just "tinkering" with the current paradigm is insufficient for the task that lies ahead of us. Given the heterogeneity and diversity in our system of higher education, we shouldn't be surprised that there are many views of how reengineering should be pursued. Given the highly differentiated mission statements of our various institutional types, anything less would be a disservice to the society they serve. Robert C. Heterick, Jr. February 1993 ______________________________________________________________________ 1 _Report of the University Task Force on the Impact of Digital Technology in the Classroom Environment_ (Blacksburg, Va.: Virginia Tech, 1989). ______________________________________________________________________ CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: REENGINEERING TEACHING AND LEARNING by Robert C. Heterick, Jr. At least since Aristotle's peripatetic garden discourse with his students, lecture has been the principal delivery mode for instruction. "The overwhelmingly dominant model of instruction in American university education, especially at the undergraduate level, is credit-for-contact. In this model, the student's progress and the faculty member's instructional contribution are measured by hours of contact in lecture hall, seminar room, or laboratory.[1]" Perhaps for the first time since Aristotle, certainly for the first time since Gutenberg's invention of movable type, we have the opportunity and the technology that will permit us to break with the credit-for-contact model and consider alternatives to lecture as a delivery mode. There are those who subscribe to the Mario Andretti school of change, "If everything is under control, you are going too slow." For them, the occasion of the emerging digital technology is reason enough to change. A more moderate course of action follows the first law of wing walking, "Never let go of what you have hold of, until you have hold of something else." Such moderates will ask for something more than anecdotal evidence that a dramatic shift to digital technology will significantly improve either the efficiency or the effectiveness of teaching and learning. And finally, there are those who follow the first law of engineering, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." For the educational conservatives it will first be necessary to demonstrate that some, or all, of our current approach is, in fact, broken. IS IT BROKEN? Institutions of higher education are extraordinarily labor intensive. For many of our institutions, 80 percent or more of the operations budget is allocated to personal services. For at least a decade, the cost of personal services has been rising at about 8 percent per year and the increase in faculty salaries has consistently outpaced the Consumer Price Index. The consequence has been tuition increases that have about doubled the rise in the CPI. The current recession has further exacerbated this trend with double digit tuition increases promising to double tuition costs between 1990 and 1997 at many public institutions. Slowly and insidiously student-teacher ratios have been creeping upward. Perhaps more disturbing, we have done little to ensure that the instruction in larger sections has been appropriately supported with a classroom technological infrastructure. Faculty frequently lecture to classes of sixty or more students without the aid of a microphone, much less appropriate projected graphics and course materials designed for optimum impact in large lecture halls. As more institutions chase the research university model we witness a slow, but steady, erosion in the average contact hours of faculty. At the same time, the demographics of our students have changed dramatically. Fewer than half the learners in higher education are the traditional 18-to-22-year-olds domiciled on or near a residential campus. Increasingly, our students will be unable to be either place bound or time constrained as assumed in the credit-for-contact model. Under the lecture mode/credit-for-contact model, to simultaneously contend with the expected infusion of new students into our system of higher education and reduce average class sizes would require a doubling of our faculties and an expenditure on facilities that is at least as large as our current deferred maintenance deficiency. Simple solutions such as these are not available without massive increases in budgets. Nothing in our current economic situation suggests that such massive increases in capital and operating budgets are possible. Given the changing student demographics, such approaches ignore the educational problems of the majority of our students. We hear equally simple solutions proffered from the obverse side of the coin. Why not have faculty assume a larger teaching load? While this doesn't address the shortfall in appropriate classroom space, would it at least deal with the shortfall of faculty? The difficulty comes, of course, in the linkage of lecture/credit-for-contact with perceptions of quality of teaching and learning, thereby creating an explicit tradeoff between efficiency and effectiveness. Particularly in the sciences and professions, there is good reason to believe that the effectiveness of instruction could suffer noticeably under the current paradigm. What we need to do is avoid defining the problem so narrowly as "having smaller sections" or "increasing faculty contact hours," and deal with the real and historic problem--improving both the efficiency and effectiveness of teaching and learning. Our discourse must not presume the lecture mode or the credit-for-contact model. We need also to realize that there are trade-offs implicit in choosing efficiency and effectiveness in any learning model. Looked at another way, the problem might be stated as providing the most effective learning, most efficiently delivered, consistent with the budgets we are likely to receive. In this broader context we open all sorts of avenues that are not normally part of the discourse surrounding teaching and learning. Large sections are not necessarily bad. Learning can take place without lecture--in fact, without the direct participation of faculty- -and learning (teaching for that matter) need not be confined to a campus classroom but could happen in a residence hall, in the office, at home, or even in a high school classroom. We should be encouraged to design learning environments that are most effective for the learner (not all learners necessarily respond best to a given delivery or reception mode), that provide sufficient efficiencies to permit us to operate within our budget constraints. IS THERE SOMETHING ELSE TO GRAB HOLD OF? Programmed Instruction, Computer Aided Instruction, and Computer Managed Instruction were all supposed to revolutionize teaching and learning in higher education. We have had so many panaceas thrown at us over the last 20 years that it seems only reasonable to ask, what's new? For one thing, the cost of digital technology at the chip level has been decreasing at better than 25 percent per year for the last decade. The cost of an entry level personal computer (in terms of tuition) is about the same as the cost of a slide rule 25 years ago. We thought little about the requirement of a slide rule then and we should think as little about the requirement of a personal computer now. The operative question should be, "What are the likely capabilities of an entry level computer during the next five years and how can we utilize it to improve learning?" Today's entry level machine (less than $1,000) is capable of displaying graphics, some jerky video or animation sequences, and high quality sound, and can be connected to a local area network and through that to the world Internet. Sophisticated text processing, draw and paint programs, mathematical routines, and a host of non- trivial applications are available at prices comparable to text books. If the five-year future is anything like the five-year past, then 1997 entry level machines will be portable RISC machines with all the characteristics of today's Sun or NeXT workstations--perhaps more. Such machines will clearly be affordable and incredibly powerful. All that seems lacking is a rich and robust set of applications to complement curricular decisions. The time and effort required to build one of these applications for a whole course is roughly equivalent to that of producing a new text book. The list of new text books coming to the marketplace each month is long and varied. The set of new computer-based applications and alternative learning resources coming to the market could be equally long and varied--if there existed a set of incentives commensurate with those for producing text books. Access to the campus network, to broadcast and switched video, and to the Internet opens the door to a rich set of new possibilities. It is easy to imagine contact between students and faculty that is neither place nor time bound. In fact, it is already happening. Contact between libraries--not just the campus library--and students is similarly freed from time and place constraints. There is nothing in our technology forecasts that suggests that we are technologically constrained from reaching the holy grail of scholarship--anything, anytime, anywhere. ARE WE GOING TOO SLOW? Is getting on the technology bandwagon like surfing? If we miss this wave will there be another one along in a few minutes? For our research institutions, which are the seed bed for most faculty in higher education, the question of timing is all important. Of all the types of institutions of higher education, research institutions would seem to be the best positioned in terms of technology infrastructure, budget strength, and reward for innovation, to begin the experiments necessary to define the shape of a reengineered teaching and learning paradigm. Unfortunately, militating against aggressively experimenting with teaching and learning is an incentive system developed with the research university model. Scholarly production, the basis for tenure and promotion decisions, has seldom been defined so as to include improvements to the teaching and learning process. At many research universities, text books are looked upon as second-class scholarly output. A new-found interest in undergraduate education on the part of many research university presidents offers some hope that this situation may change. But, realistically, we have to recognize that measures of scholarly production are not handed down from university administrations but rather are promulgated through the community of scholars. Measures of scholarly production are not institutional standards but are consensus questions across a profession. An equal contributor to the inertia that dampens experimentation is the lack of appropriate physical surroundings within which experiments may be conducted. Few campuses have classrooms appropriately equipped for "high tech" teaching. Nearly all campuses have concentrated their energies and resources on creating "open laboratories" of personal computers and workstations, forcing students to be constrained by both place and time in their use of that technology. Even our use of broadcast television in distance learning is similarly constrained. The situation is roughly the same as the classrooms of the 1800s where the student had to go to, and queue for, the copy book owned by the school. We have been so taken with the computer qua computer that we have lost sight of its potential in creating or augmenting a learning environment. Learning in ways that do not depend upon delivery by lecture, and/or are notrestricted by credit-for-contact, will depend upon the existence of a communications infrastructure. That communications infrastructure must exist at three levels. The campus itself must be wired with megabit delivery to the workspaces in classrooms, offices, and residence halls. Since at most institutions the majority of students reside in the local community, not the residence halls, there needs to be a metropolitan area network that extends the campus infrastructure to students and faculty in the community. And finally, there needs to be a national infrastructure that binds local learners with distant learning resources. While there is still much to be done, we have nonetheless made significant progress in creating the national infrastructure. NSFNET and the Internet are already delivering on the promise of providing a technological platform for breaking the lecture/credit-for-contact mold. Many institutions, but not nearly enough, have begun the task of megabit delivery to campus workspaces. The capital costs of creating the campus network still seem beyond the reach of too many of our institutions. Even so, it is in the domain of the metropolitan networks that we are farthest behind. The local telephone companies are aggressively pursuing narrowband Integrated Digital Services Networks (ISDN) in most major metropolitan areas. There is reason to be concerned that this effort will become ubiquitous too late with too little bandwidth. On the applications side we are seeing the development of "freenets" and a number of data services, albeit at very low bandwidth, that offer some connectivity for electronic mail and bulletin boards. What is needed is more aggressive experimentation with higher speed, more pervasive metropolitan networks like those proposed by the Blacksburg Electronic Village experiment.[2] LEARNING IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT Information technology folk are at the center of the maelstrom of change and its accompanying dichotomies. We have, for years, been in the business of providing central services in a business increasingly dominated by niche markets. We have been the purveyors of a homogeneous information service in a technology that is rapidly shifting to customized products. We have been driven by the search for an elusive efficiency in a market that puts increasing emphasis on flexibility. We have been organized to reap economies of scale in a field where economies of scope are currently favored. These dichotomies are a consequence of trying to apply industrial age strategies in the information age. Nowhere are these dichotomies more evident than in our approach to teaching and learning. If the reengineering and total quality management movements are about anything, they are about offering differentiated services. If we place our focus on the learner we are struck by a multiplicity of cognitive styles. Our digital technologies offer the opportunity to address each learner in a style and at a location with which he or she is most comfortable. The hallmark of our better teaching institutions has been small class sizes--a convenient, lecture-based strategy for offering something approaching an individually differentiated learning environment. The optimum must be something like the learner and Aristotle on a park bench. However, budget constraints have been the proximate cause of a creeping inflation in class size. Unfortunately, lecture as a delivery mode and credit-for-contact as a teaching model do not scale well. The plethora of digital technologies offers the opportunity to break the industrial age model of teaching and learning and offer a customized service directly to the learner. Our institutions of higher education have been amazingly resilient in resisting change. Fortunately, many of our academic administrators are coming to recognize that the system is either broken or soon will be. It still remains for them to devise reward structures that will encourage faculty to experiment with the new technologies to find extensions to, or substitutes for, lecture and credit-for-contact.[3] The challenge is not to substitute one model for another, but to find many ways for learning to take place without compromising quality. We need to avoid trying to manage the faculty and concentrate instead on managing the environment so that faculty are encouraged to experiment as broadly with teaching and learning as they do with research. Our institutions devoted to undergraduate teaching--the liberal arts college, the community college, and the comprehensive university- -may prove to be the breeding ground for the most fertile experimentation with the new technologies. For them to do so, they must populate their campuses with the technology and overcome fascination with the computer qua computer. Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, a collaborator with Babbage on the Analytical Engine, said it well over a century ago: "In considering any new subject there is frequently a tendency, first to overrate what we find to be interesting or remarkable, and secondly, by sort of a natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case." The true state of the current case is that our digital technologies can be a tremendously liberating force in designing learning venues that bring the full set of senses (sight, sound, action, interactivity, feedback) to the process. If learning is to become a highly differentiated, anywhere, anytime activity it will be necessary to reengineer more than just the syllabus, delivery mode, and teaching model. We will need to make the digital or virtual library a reality as well. Certainly since the Library of Alexandria, the size of a library's collection has been a reasonable surrogate for the quality of services it offered its patrons. In fact, most industrial age evaluation strategies are focused on similar measures of input. The virtual library requires that access supplement and quickly supersede collection as the measure of the value of the library to the networked learner. Libraries have been quick to make the transition to automated "back office" services--primarily the online public access catalog. The transition to a rich offering of full text and multi-media has not come as rapidly or as painlessly. Automating the "back office" didn't require a paradigm shift--disintermediating the "front office" (public services) does. The problem of reengineering for libraries is exacerbated by our ambivalence over how best to deal with intellectual property rights in the information age. Information in the networked world is not a commodity--and commodity-based protection schemes for intellectual property don't seem to work well. Librarians are particularly afflicted with the Law of Wing Walking. The proper adjustments to the reward structure to encourage libraries to move vigorously into the virtual library are not obvious and are likely to be difficult to implement once we do discern them.[4] But it is abundantly clear that many of the new models of teaching and learning that we will experiment with will be very dependent on new models of library service. Many of our new education models will feature attenuated contact between the teacher and the student in formal classroom settings. The maintenance of quality will likely require new strategies for examinations and assessment--assessment of both the student and the instruction. The reduction in the intensity of contact between student and instructor in the classroom will create the need to find ad hoc, unstructured ways in which this contact can take place. While electronic contact between student and teacher will be a valuable new strategy, we will need to re-think the physical layout of the campus and the daily rhythm of activities to encourage the continuing physical contact between teacher and learner. We will need to design faculty/student contact strategies for distant learners who may likely never set foot on campus. The English tutorial system may provide clues as to how this can be accomplished. Just as our definition of a student is changing, we may require similar re-definition of faculty. "In one way, this transformation of unviersity instruction should increase the requirementfor faculty contact with students. A university is not just a warehouse of information and technique to be automated with the same eye on a simple "bottom line" as a warehouse of auto parts. A university is a community of scholars. While we can learn much with the aid of books, machines, and other devices, we can understand the life of the mind and the connections between its parts only by sharing that life with others, especially others more experienced or experienced in fields other than our own. A genuine university education thus must include extensive informal and semi- formal personal contact with faculty.[5]" The assessment of learning is not a new problem, but the infusion of digital technologies into the teaching/learning environment will certainly call for new strategies. There has been an increasing drumbeat these past few years, particularly from state legislatures, for more systematic assessment. The new technologies are likely to make teaching even more of a team effort between course content specialists, delivery experts, and instructional designers. This set of shared responsibilities will make assessment even more difficult. The highly quantitative, input-based assessment methodologies that have been introduced to date seem far too simplistic for this more complex model.[6] Strategies for measuring outputs, or even agreement on what constitutes appropriate or desirable outputs, are essentially nonexistent and need to be developed. LEARNING TO LIVE WITH CHANGE As we move to break the mold of lecture and credit-for-contact, we will be asking our campuses to set aside centuries-old traditions and techniques in favor of experimentation. The experiments are likely to vary significantly among liberal arts colleges, community colleges, research universities, and comprehensive institutions. Between, and perhaps even within, institutions no one model is likely to dominate. The tried and true will coexist with the new and experimental. One person's constraints will be another's opportunities. Some segments of our community will focus on the effectiveness (quality) issues while others will search for efficiency (productivity). Each is likely to be very uncomfortable with the changes that will ensue as a consequence of the infusion of digital technologies into teaching and learning. The part of the educational community interested in effectiveness will focus their attention on developing new course modules while those interested in efficiency will undertake whole courses and radically different teaching/learning strategies. The former will be attempting incremental changes within the current paradigm while the latter will be attempting to reengineer teaching and learning with order of magnitude changes in productivity. Both are needed and both will be useful. These changes will have to take place during a period of significantly attenuated resources, intensely critical public scrutiny, and accelerating technological developments. "Although change is inevitable, it is always accompanied by uncertainty. The advent of changes in digital technology offers significant opportunities to advance the quality of the educational experience for students and faculty. Technology will never replace those qualities of commitment, intelligence, and integrity that are central to maintaining the vitality of the university. However, it can serve as a vehicle to expand our reach.[7]" ______________________________________________________________________ 1 _Report of the University Task Force on the Impact of Digital Technology in the Classroom Environment_ (Blacksburg, Va.: Virginia Tech, 1989), p. 4. This document is also available to CAUSE members through the CAUSE Exchange Library as CSD-0679. 2 The Blacksburg Electronic Village is a community-wide laboratory for the development of an electronic communications network that will allow businesses, town residents, students, and teachers to communicate through a high-bandwidth information network. 3 Ernest L. Boyer, _Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate_ (Princeton N.J.: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1991). 4 Harlan Cleveland, "Information As A Resource," Futurist 16 (December 1982): 36-67 . 5 Report of the University Task Force on the Impact of Digital Technology in the Classroom Environment, p. 6. 6 See Carol A. Twigg, "Improving Productivity in Higher Education-- The Need for a Paradigm Shift," CAUSE/EFFECT, Summer 1992. 7 _Report of the University Task Force on the Impact of Digital Technology on the Classroom Environment_, p. 35. ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** Robert C. Heterick, Jr., is President of EDUCOM, a consortium of higher education institutions dedicated to the improvement of higher education through effective and efficient application of information technology. Previously he was Vice President of Information Systems at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, where he is a professor emeritus of management science in the business college. A former chair of the CAUSE Board of Directors, Dr. Heterick is an award-winning author and keynote speaker on information technology in higher education. ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** CHAPTER 2 SILICON IN THE GROVE: COMPUTING, TEACHING, AND LEARNING IN THE AMERICAN RESEARCH UNIVERSITY by Richard N. Katz If the educational context of the small liberal arts college can be likened to Camelot, the 20th century American research university can be referred to as "a sheltered grove in which knowledge is propagated, created, and applied."[1] The variation in content, structure, and emphasis among American colleges and universities is the result of a rich history of American higher education. In his recent study on the priorities of the professoriate, Carnegie Foundation President Ernest Boyer observes that "scholarship in American higher education has moved through three distinct, yet overlapping phases."[2] These phases correspond with the tri-partite mission of most American universities: teaching, service, and research. Understanding this history contributes to an understanding of the modern American research university, defined here to include Carnegie Research Universities I and II, which issue doctorate degrees and receive annually at least $12.[5] million in federal support. * * * * * * * * * * THE AMERICAN RESEARCH UNIVERSITY IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE While "Camelot" institutions of higher learning trace their origins to the English and colonial American focus on the student--and in particular on developing students' moral character and leadership qualities--the modern American research university is an educational johnny-come-lately. To understand the American research university, and hence its directions in and approaches to organizing information technologies in support of teaching and learning, it is first essential to understand their unique origins, academic culture, and reward systems. At least five defining characteristics distinguish the modern American research university from community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and comprehensive universities. While certain of these characteristics will be found among most or all higher education categories, only research universities share all five. First, even the nomenclature distinctions between colleges and universities are significant. The word "college" has evolved from the Latin collegium, the term for society. The earliest colleges were defined in social terms as learning communities in which students lived and to which collectives of scholars traveled. Medieval college teachers were paid through guilds of students. The term "university," introduced in the papal bull of 1243, transformed this notion by adding the corporate dimension. The English, and later colonial American, universities reinforced the corporatization of higher learning by introducing external boards and by seeking public subsidies for their operations. These developments resulted in the "blunting of student economic power" and guarded the institutions' long-term financial interests.[3] While the precise historical distinctions between colleges and universities are "not winningly with us,"[4 ] they do cast symbolic reflections in the relative emphasis that institutions of those names place on students. Second, research universities--particularly public research universities--embraced early the emergent expansionism, commercialism, and pragmatism of the American mid-19th century by incorporating "practical" instruction into their missions and curricula. Contrast here the emergent American focus on developing "builders" of all kinds--through mechanical arts, business, law, and medical education-- with the Jeffersonian ideals manifest in the typical liberal arts college's mission of preparing students for active citizenship. The Morill Act of 1862 which created the land grant university and the Hatch Act of 1887, which funded university-based agricultural experiment stations, institutionalized the evolving mission of some American universities to apply knowledge.[5] In this changing environmental milieu, a new faculty orientation towards applied research was born, defining in another unique way the future American research university. Third, the issuance of the Ph.D. degree is another distinguishing hallmark of the research university. Commencing at Yale University and spreading quickly to other Ivy League institutions, the issuance of doctoral degrees suggests to historians of higher education the triumph of the German influence on higher education in America. The German university emphasis on scholarly detachment and on research as a university endeavor justified entirely on its own merits took root quickly in America, reaching maturity with the establishment of The Johns Hopkins University in 1878, with its clear emphasis on research and graduate education.[6] Fourth, the success of federally sponsored, university-managed research efforts in winning World War II, helped Vannevar Bush persuade President Truman that ongoing federal sponsorship of scientific research at American research universities was, again, an end in itself and a source of American leadership in world affairs.[7] The modern American research university is defined in many ways by the strong influence of continued federal investments in research. Finally, the war's end and the passage of the G.I. Bill of Rights heralded a major American higher education policy shift. Overturning centuries of tradition in which the social role of higher education was the preparation of America's elite gentlemen for enlightened citizenry, commerce, the clergy, or the professions, the G.I. Bill and subsequent financial aid laws provided Americans with broad access to higher education for the first time. These measures and future educational entitlements changed American universities in at least two ways. First, one class of universities, particularly public universities, reorganized to provide mass education for the first time. Between 1955 and 1990, enrollments in U.S. colleges and universities increased by 400 percent.[8] The second change wrought by this post-war policy shift was the fundamental change in the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of the American collegiate student body. TODAY'S DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC--RESEARCH None of the influences described in this short history of American higher education served to shape and mold the research university more than the institutionalization of powerful research incentives posed by the adoption of the German university model and by the post-war federal sponsorship of university research. According to one source, "universities perform almost half of the nation's basic research [and] about 28 percent of its total research."[9] The American research university has been described as "dazzlingly successful."[10] These approximately 200 research and other doctorate-granting universities garner fully 30 percent of all U.S. higher education enrollments.[11] Such success, however, has come at a cost. While many of America's preeminent research universities compete, according to Clark Kerr, to become tomorrow's Harvard, Stanford, or Berkeley, the American public appears to be increasingly "disillusioned with research itself... ."[12] While the debate over how higher education should or should not balance research incentives with the need to educate students or to contribute to the community is outside the purview of information technology executives, these executives nonetheless should be aware of the debate and strive to incorporate balanced capabilities in their technology plans, strategies, and investments. The American research university's emphasis on research signals at least two important differences to those responsible for supporting the instructional program with information technology. First, implicit to the German research university model is the premise that the quality of instruction is directly and positively influenced by the faculty's engagement in research activities. This premise suggests a "trickle down" model of knowledge propagation in which (1) faculty enthusiasm about the process of discovery is exported to the classroom, (2) student learning is enhanced directly by access to research activities and by-products, and (3) curricula devised by active researchers better reflect a discipline's state of the art. The second and more obvious information technology program driver is the set of unique needs posed by a large population of graduate students engaged in original research. The importance of a full-blown graduate program to the planner and provider of academic information technology support cannot be minimized. As David Smallen points out in this paper (p. 16), one of two "fundamental characteristics" of the ideal learning environment is the presence of "consistent opportunities to interact with other students and the instructor." While such a proposition is almost axiomatic where applied to undergraduate education and informs the technology planner about the reasonable limits of investments in information technology, it may be significantly less true when applied to graduate education. For example, in a recent study of UCLA graduate student housing preferences, 947 unmarried graduate students were asked to rate the importance of eight academic services and activities in a graduate housing complex. Among this group of students, access to the campus data communications network ranked second only to study rooms in importance. Nearly as important to this group was the existence of group computer laboratories in the housing complex. Perhaps more interestingly, this group of students rated faculty socializing, faculty mentorships, faculty seminars, and live-in faculty as "unimportant" academic activities vis-a-vis their residential needs and experience.[13] TOWARDS BABEL: CAMPUS COMPUTING'S FIRST WAVE (1947-1977)[14] The unique historical evolution of the American research university has fostered uniqueness in these institutions' information technology strategies, challenges, and approaches. First, the relative emphasis on research, the responsibility for graduate education, and the existence of federal research sponsorship have conspired to strengthen the role of faculty within the framework of academic shared governance. This conspiracy of influences has limited the role to be played by those with institutional responsibility for the management of campus information technology resources--particularly in the area of instructional computing. So, while research universities should be characterized as "early adopters" of information technology--such as MIT's early acquisition of Whirlwind I--and have invested in large- scale computing since the invention of the first digital computer in 1946, the nature of the technology of this period and the idiosyncrasies of the research university itself have limited the use of computers in direct instructional activities.[15] By 1979, only 6 percent of MIT's $10 million annual computing expenditures, for example, went directly to education.[16] In the 1950s and 1960s, America's elite research universities became home to the big machines--those with impressive and even intimidating names such as Whirlwind, Eniac, Maniac, and others. These machines brought automation to many university administrative programs and were made available on a time-sharing basis to students and faculty. Communication limitations, the difficulty of mastering complex programming languages, and not-infrequent frustration with the central campus providers of computing services limited the widespread use of these resources. By 1965, less than 5 percent of the total American college enrollment had access to computing services adequate to meet the defined level of national need.[17] The introduction of smaller-scale computing reduced some of the technical barriers to distributing campus computing power and to diffusing the computer's educational role on campus. Beginning in the late 1960s, faculty--motivated by increasing rewards for research achievement and funded by federal contracts and grants--invested heavily in a wide range of technologies. Many of these investments significantly improved research productivity. Student access to computing during this period improved slowly and, again, more through "trickle down" from research activities than from formal institutional intervention. Institutional and faculty investments during this period were leveraged by matching grants from the NSF which sought to boost the computer literacy of America's future scientists and engineers. The shift in the locus of campus academic computing to the academic departments and laboratories contributed to the evolution of the research university's patchwork quilt of heterogeneous computing platforms. By the late 1970s, the computing environments of many American research universities could be characterized as dichotomous. On one hand, few of the premier research universities were able to operate without a large mainframe computer. Large-scale computers were operated to support primarily (1) numerically intensive research, (2) instruction in computer science, and (3) administration. On the other hand, islands of technology emerged in the well-funded, chiefly scientific disciplines. This dichotomous evolution carried important implications for those with an institutional interest in instructional computing. First, faculty independence in the computer acquisition decision blunted central campus attempts to influence or leverage institutional strategies for instructional computing. Second, the technical heterogeneity of the research university's academic computing environment limited the opportunity for faculty--or their institutions and disciplines--to leverage their own achievements in developing computer-supported course materials. This dependence on often narrowly defined and typically incompatible computing platforms effectively limited the diffusion of courseware, retarded the propagation of new instructional knowledge, and increased the financial and opportunity costs of courseware's adoption by interested faculty. In sum, while research universities have invested early and aggressively in information technology, factors intrinsic to these institutions' missions, rewards, and governance constrained both the leverage opportunities of these investments during this period and the widespread integration of computing into the university curriculum. TOWARDS INTEGRATION: CAMPUS COMPUTING'S SECOND WAVE (1979-Present) The period between the late 1970s and the present has seen the continued exponential growth of computing at American research universities. The trend towards a dichotomous academic computing environment as described above was exacerbated, during this period, by the personalization of computing as manifested in the introduction, in 1981, of the IBM PC. This introduction and the rapid improvements in PC and workstation performance have increased both the power and--more important--the ubiquity of computing resources available to faculty for instructional and other purposes. Concurrent improvements in software, particularly as regards ease of use, have gone far in increasing the widespread comfort of faculty with computing. This comfort is a precondition to widespread faculty computer literacy which, in turn, preconditions the widespread integration of computing into the academic curriculum. The increased faculty access to easy-to-use and relatively inexpensive computing technology has made possible a proliferation of computer-based instructional material. Once again, due to funding biases and to differential rates of software development progress towards numerical applications, much of this development has been led by the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering. Nevertheless, exciting work in computer-based instruction is emerging across a broad curricular base, including language training, medicine, writing, literary analysis, and the social sciences.[18] If the rapid acceptance and diffusion of personal computers and workstations on research university campuses has empowered faculty to develop courseware, it has also limited the widespread adoption of such courseware by increasing the number of technological islands. So, while one clear theme of the past two decades is the emerging ubiquity of computing to the research faculty, another must be the continued challenge faced by campus IT executives of supporting a technologically heterogeneous environment. The academic computing environment of the present research university typically consists of hundreds or thousands of DEC, IBM, SUN, HP, NeXT, Apple, and other workstations and midrange and mainframe computers with incompatibilities across hardware, operating systems, and applications. Support, training, and the transfer of courseware technology continue to constrain progress in propagating instructional technology. While the trend towards personalizing computing has increased the complexity of the research university's academic computing environment, other important trends during this period suggest countervailing movements towards integration. Many of these integrating trends are driven by a combination of vision and technological progress. NETWORKING Perhaps the most important trend of this nature is the investment in networking. Recognizing the need to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of historical and prospective investments in information technology, certain leading research universities, such as MIT and Carnegie Mellon University, have articulated unique long term visions for their campuses. The 1978 Report of MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on Future Computation Needs and Resources anticipated the dichotomous effects of personal computing and recommended, among other things, the establishment of a campus-wide network. This report predicted for 1989: "Students may very well use their thousand personal machines and other ports to review course material, solve homework problems and submit them, simulate experiments, text edit theses and reports, prepare graphs, perform bibliographical searches, communicate via the campus electronic mail with fellow students or with instructors, or even with students at other institutions, find out what goes on throughout MIT, and check their registration.[19]" Projects Athena at MIT and Andrew at CMU demonstrated the research university's ability to leverage information technology through decentralization and networking. Perhaps for the first time, campus IT executives--through their networks--were able to create the incentives for faculty to adopt key technology standards that would increase campus computing integration and mitigate the complexities of a fragmented and diverse computing environment. Concurrently with the evolution of networks on many research university campuses, the National Science Foundation recognized the ongoing need for supercomputing in support of the American research agenda. By 1986, the NSF established four supercomputer sites whose resources are made available to university researchers on a competitive grant basis or through partnerships with research universities. The NSF supercomputer centers have, themselves, become important instructional facilities. For example, in 1990 alone 102 graduate students and 57 undergraduates from the University of California San Diego made use of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Undergraduate projects ranged from "modeling of human locomotion" to "computer access for the blind" to "numerical plasma simulation."[20] As important (and perhaps more so), the NSF, recognizing the importance of scale in high performance computing, undertook the creation of a national high-speed data communications network to connect its regional supercomputers and provided seed money for regional providers to provide connectivity to many colleges and universities. Significantly, all 200 Carnegie research universities are connected to the Internet--a network of networks--and, thereby, to the NSFNET. Just as the emergence of campus backbone networks has created incentives for faculty to make "connectivity" investments, so has the existence of national networks provided research universities with powerful incentives to invest in the data communications infrastructure. Throughout the 1980s to the present, the prevailing strategic technology theme of research universities has become that of network connectivity. LIBRARY AUTOMATION In addition to the proliferation of personal computers, workstations, and networks, the last two decades have witnessed the emergence of library automation as a major theme of American research universities. The movement towards the online delivery of electronic library resources is of enormous importance to instructional computing because of its focus on text management and delivery, i.e., information access, rather than on data processing. This shift heralds the entry of computing into the learning experiences of the humanists, fine artists, social and life scientists who have not participated in great numbers in the computer revolution. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, systems like those created by the OCLC and the RLG introduced library computing as a means of economizing and consolidating library cataloging costs and of achieving consistent bibliographic control of a university's library holdings. At the same time, pioneering offerings, such as the University of California's MELVYL system, established online union catalogues of library holdings and provided public access to new and powerful research tools. Progress in networking has leveraged the original intent of such tools by extending access to rich sources of bibliographic information in support of teaching and learning. As computing and network capacity grow, many of these catalogues have grown to include other information such as book reviews, indexes, and abstracts. In library automation, the leading research universities are exploring aggressively the opportunities to (1) reduce library costs, (2) improve student access to information, and (3) improve faculty productivity by leveraging library collections through online access to full text. "Access to information--anytime, anywhere" has become another integrating theme of campus computing's second wave. INFORMATION RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Related, but not identical to the integrating theme of library automation, is the relatively more current theme of information resource management. As the technical infrastructure becomes increasingly interconnected and, thereby, highly leveraged, the focus of many research universities has expanded to include greater recognition of institutional information as an asset to be managed. Multi-campus projects like CUPID seek to find ways to preserve, store, and distribute textual information electronically, while other projects, like Sequoia, work to develop tools for managing very large datasets. Still other initiatives like those between McGraw-Hill and the University of California San Diego offer the ability to customize textbooks--in real time--to meet the increasingly specific and specialized curricular needs of faculty and students. Still other initiatives such as those sponsored by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) seek to create new relationships among librarians, technologists, publishers, scholars, and others to accelerate the flow of published materials across networks. ECONOMIC AND SOCIOLOGICAL TRENDS Two other trends emerging during this period are conspiring to accelerate the drive towards integration. First, the political and economic context of the American research university is changing. During the 1980s, American research universities sustained tuition increases at rates exceeding inflation. Since 1988, public research universities have witnessed the real economic erosion of support from their states. At the same time, enrollments in many universities have declined owing, in part, to the absolute decline in the supply of Americans aged 18 to 24. The essential theme associated with these facts is that research universities' financial and political capital is at risk, if not on a declining trajectory. Whether cyclical or structural, declining resources suggest the need for institutional strategies that leverage existing resources. New information technologies and strategies that make information, networks, or computers available to students faster or cheaper are likely to prevail over stand-alone solutions and technological islands. Finally, some of these same pressures, particularly the pressure to maintain enrollments in the face of a demographic "bust," are causing some American research universities to re-think the research priority within their mission. According to former Stanford President Donald Kennedy, "the overproduction of routine scholarship is one of the most egregious aspects of contemporary academic life; it tends to cancel really important work by its sheer volume, it wastes time and valuable resources, and it is a major contributor to the inflation of academic library costs.[21]" The growing public distrust of research and demand for educational quality is exerting pressure on research universities to recalibrate priorities and to re-focus on undergraduate education. Only as these pressures become translated into formal changes to the assessment process through which faculty are rewarded will step- function improvement in instructional computing become possible. Where in the past computers, then networks, have been in scarce supply, in the decades to come the courseware and faculty time will limit the rate of diffusion of computing in the classroom. COMPUTING, TEACHING, AND LEARNING: CURRENT STATE, FUTURE ISSUES AND OPPORTUNITIES One of the consistent themes reinforced throughout the literature on instructional computing of the 1960s and 1970s is that of access to computing. Owing to the scarcity of computing resources on the campus, budget and technology planners focused the attention of their campus presidents, donors, federal sponsors, and legislators on the need to fund computer acquisitions. Owing to both the considerable success of these planners in securing support and the dramatic improvements in the price/performance of computers during the 1980s, student access to computing per se is no longer the dominant theme at many American research universities. Currently, public and private universities provide one dedicated instructional PC or workstation for each forty- five students. Increasingly important, at research universities, as many as 29 percent of all students own their own computer.[22] Certain universities, like Dartmouth, require that students own specially configured computers as a natural extension of classroom experience, while other institutions, like the University of California (UC), support re-seller programs that make computer ownership financially accessible to most students. By 1989, 51 percent of UC graduate students and 42 percent of its undergraduates owned a personal computer. Student ownership of personal computers grew at a compound annual rate in excess of 20 percent in the past five years at this institution.[23] As computing resources have become increasingly commonplace, their use has become nearly ubiquitous. Again at the University of California, nearly 66 percent of undergraduates and 81 percent of graduates reported using computers to support their learning activities. Significantly, graduate students in all disciplines report spending more than three times as many hours in computing-related activities than do their disciplinary counterparts in the undergraduate program.[24] As access to computing has diminished in urgency, access to networks and access to information have risen in importance. Research universities are vesting new importance in their data communication infrastructures in the belief that investment in networks can leverage their own--and others'--computing capacity, library catalogues, data repositories, and scientific instruments, as well as national computing facilities such as the NSF supercomputer centers.[25] Another indicator of the emerging priority of networks has been the active role played by research universities in the enactment of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991.[26] This federal law commits, among other things, to a significant expansion of American networking capabilities in support of college- and university-based education and research. Progress towards envisioned gigabit network speeds will increase incentives for research universities to invest in campus networking. As computing cycles become relatively abundant and accessible at many research universities, and as network connectivity, capacity, and reliability improve and increase, the attention of research universities has enlarged to include concern over the information resources themselves. This new focus responds to a large number of pressures and opportunieties, including: ** the growing cost pressures on library acquisitions; ** technological readiness for the distribution of multimedia records, such as images, full-motion video, etc.; ** the growth in size and complexity of national data sources, such as NASA; ** the deterioration of university library collections printed on acidic paper stock; ** new distance learning opportunities made possible by new information technologies.[27] The creation of campus computing environments that will realize the full benefits of infrastructure investments in computing, networking, and information resources will be a complex activity. Not only will this activity require substantial and focused campus investment in a broad set of activities, it will require--in many areas--the cooperative involvement of many within higher education and within the publishing, networking, and computer industries. The strategic emphasis of American research universities on technological integration and on information resources and their management has formed the basis of an emerging and ambitious action agenda for the 1990s and beyond. Convergence on a vision of campus computing characterized by the seamless access to a broad range of information resources--in a variety of media--across diverse technical platforms and institutional boundaries has also informed research universities about the challenges that must be overcome.[28] In brief, elements of this emerging agenda include: *** CONTINUED EMPHASIS ON, AND INVESTMENT IN, THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INFRASTRUCTURE The research university vision of computing anticipates not only exponential, but step-function increases in demand for network capacity. Online access to very large datasets--such as census holdings or recordings of particle collisions--will require ongoing investments in the campus's data communications bandwidth. Developments in scientific visualization, online transport of radiological images, digital photography and videography, and online distribution of library holdings as character or image records will inevitably drive ongoing capacity investments and will increase dramatically the demand for network connections. While virtually all research universities support a campus-wide network distribution capability, most have failed to establish or manage the "last mile" connections to every faculty desktop, or key student locations. It is also likely that the institutional operational definitions of network infrastructure will need to expand to include many of the devices on the network. The fulfillment of the emergent information technology agenda will require that a minimum workstation configuration be defined that can take full advantage of new network- accessible information media. Due to its emphasis on information access, the next wave of research university computing will likely reach those students and faculty who value text, rather than data, processing. As a result, new funding strategies will have to be devised to ensure equitable access to desktop resources to those members of the campus community who are not the traditional beneficiaries of sponsored research funding. Similarly, while the growth of student ownership of PCs has risen sharply, the evidence suggests that much of this growth fails to anticipate the importance of networks. Research universities will need to develop strategies for helping students acquire desktop platforms, at reasonable costs, that leverage investments in networks and in information resources. In addition, there is little evidence to suggest that the long- promised "paperless" environment is within sight. Research universities must thus assume that, in spite of progress towards networked information delivery, a large role will continue to exist for information in print form. They will need to develop and finance institutional print strategies that foster a "print-on-demand" capability campus-wide (and most likely to the home) and that differentiate between tiers of student and faculty printing needs. Initiatives like Project CUPID and UCSD's venture with McGraw-Hill seek to develop a working understanding of networked printing's institutional tier.[29] Another infrastructure element that will receive ongoing investment in the name of integrating the instructional computing enterprise is the development and refinement of user interfaces. As network connectivity and capacity rise and networked information resources become increasingly accessible, network operators and computing application developers will be expected to facilitate their use through the deployment of easy-to-use, and probably graphical, user interfaces. Just as libraries without catalogues are of limited use, so will access to information "anytime, anywhere" be limited by inadequate directory services and fragmented interfaces. Whether or not a "one-stop-shopping" computing environment can be created and maintained, access to information resources must be organized to minimize student and faculty training time. Similarly, campus information security strategies will require tuning to achieve a balance between researchers' and students' needs for public access to information, and the equally important imperative to secure the fruits of work in progress. *** PARTNERSHIPS AND MULTI-LATERAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES The vision of the research university's third wave is predicated on progress in key technology areas. Most of this progress will be enabled, or constrained, by progress in adopting multi-lateral standards and conventions. Many of these standards and conventions, in turn, will require unprecedented cooperation among universities and between higher education and the computing, communications, and publishing industries. Significant areas of activity that form this element of the agenda include: ** national and international directory services; ** development and refinement of "navigational" tools such as Gopher and WAIS; ** standards for the compression and decompression of bit- mapped images, video, and others; ** progress in developing host-to-host connectivity through such protocols as Z39.50; ** standardization of graphical and page markup protocols to facilitate network-based "publishing"; ** creation of electronic data interchange (EDI) capabilities to enable the eventual accounting and billing for access to information resources and network services. The multi-lateral organizational obstacles impeding progress towards the achievement of this agenda are far more daunting than the technological ones. Newspaper publishers, technology manufacturers, academic publishers, and voice communication carriers share higher education's vision of information services delivery. Historically, however, competitive advantage to these necessary partners has been defined, in part, by creating de facto or de jure standards for their products or services. The continued fragmentation of the marketplace through the standard setting process carries the risk of, at best, creating new technological islands and, at worst, creating virtual monopolies among the suppliers or distributors of academic information. Efforts like those pursued by the Coalition for Networked Information to engage segments of these industries on delicate subjects like copyright will become increasingly essential. The essence of where such investments and efforts can lead--and the source of the expected organizational resistance--is the vision of organizational "boundarylessness" articulated by General Electric CEO Jack Welch. In addition, continued investment in leading-edge technology such as supercomputing will be required. Tools will be needed to maintain, access, and manage very large datasets so that students can simulate and model the social, natural, and physical universe in more meaningful ways and so that faculty can push the frontiers of knowledge. Visualization tools, in particular, will become increasingly important vehicles for helping students at all levels to learn. *** RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN COGNITIVE SCIENCES AND IN KNOWLEDGE DIFFUSION The vision and strategies of research universities' information technology providers correctly focus their institutions' attention and resources on (1) infrastructure, (2) information access, (3) information resources, and (4) institutional cooperation and partnerships. This focus will create a rich and easy-to-use environment in which student learning and faculty instruction can be influenced significantly by information technology. However, just as the existence of magnificent libraries does not guarantee their use, neither does the achievement of the envisioned networked environment assure that network-based tools, information, and courseware will be deployed fully or successfully in the classroom. Ultimately, research university governance typically vests most curricular authority in the faculty, and it will be the faculty, department chairs, and deans who regulate--by action or inaction--the rate of diffusion of these new technical capabilities to students. In 1972, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education predicted that "...by the year 2000, it now appears that a significant proportion of instruction in higher education on campus may be carried on through information technology ."[30] Most information technology executives now concede that, in spite of the significant and demonstrable gains in this area, even this somewhat tentative fin de siecle forecast will not be realized. As in the first two waves of campus experience with computing, progress towards achieving the promise of the third wave will be constrained by structural impediments, many of which are intrinsic to research university governance. First, while much is known pedagogically about the nature of learning as it relates to computing,[31] the literature of this field rarely escapes the confines of education departments or behavioral science disciplines. Higher education's failure to "mainstream" these learnings can be ascribed to research university faculty's disciplinary biases and to the academic reward system which reduces faculty incentives to learn about teaching. As a result, while taxonomies and models of the learning process exist[32]--and have been mapped to both discipline-based instruction and to instructional technologies[33]--the efforts to leverage this knowledge have been limited to those faculty who find the combination of enthusiasm, time, skills, and resources necessary to develop courseware. In sum, the creation of courseware is, and will be, limited by a combination of (1) uneven faculty pedagogical literacy; (2) uneven faculty computer literacy and preparedness; and (3) faculty rewards that discount the time, effort, and achievement surrounding instructional innovation. New multimedia technologies, for example, which hold so much promise for educating the "Nintendo generation," may fail to realize their potential in the classroom if faculty are not educated in, or rewarded for, their use. The constraints described suggest factors limiting the creation and introduction of instructional technologies in the curriculum. Another constraining theme is the lack of coordinative strategies to enhance the diffusion of existing courseware within academic disciplines and across institutions. While award programs, such as those sponsored by EDUCOM, provide both publicity and quality assurance for courseware, we do not yet understand well how instructional technology diffuses, or why. Acquiring such an understanding and developing technology transfer strategies that build on research findings may go far in leveraging the investments made by faculty pioneers. Finally, American research universities should recognize the need to ensure universal student computer literacy if the instructional benefits of campus information technology investments are to be realized fully. Uneven student preparation in this area has led to student learning results that can be characterized as equivocal, at best.[34] CONCLUSION In sum, information technology's role in teaching and learning will continue to be one of higher education's dominant themes in the 1990s and beyond. What is emerging is a richly interconnected and highly leveraged network of computing resources, tools, and information resources that will provide students and faculty with unprecedented access across disciplinary, institutional, and national boundaries. Importantly, the evolving national and international network infrastructure will also facilitate access, by students and faculty, to each other and to alternate centers of expertise. While the 1990s will likely witness a continued priority on computational power and sophistication, the real news may be the emergence of new text- handling capabilities that will bring computing's benefits to students of all academic disciplines. The full realization of the research university's instructional agenda will require significant continued investment in networks and in integrative technologies. Also required will be unprecedented inter-institutional and inter-industry cooperation and partnership. Finally, as research universities organize to develop the tools, networks, information resources, and partnerships necessary to realize the vision described, campus leaders will need to engage the academic enterprise in an evolving dialogue on faculty priorities, incentives, and rewards. In this it would be well for campus leaders to remember that the roots of the research university's "dazzling success" fall not in the maintenance of the status quo; rather, the history of American higher education reveals that ongoing change and organizational renewal are our source of strength and, indeed, our imperative. ___________________________________________________________________ 1 Richard C. Atkinson and Donald Tuzin, "Equilibrium in the Research University," _Change_, May/June 1992, p. 23. 2 Ernest L. Boyer, _Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate_ (Princeton N.J.: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1991), p. 3. 3 E. D. Duryea, "Evolution of the University Organization," in James A. Perkins, ed., _The University as an Organization_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), pp. 15-37. 4 Burton R. Clark, "Faculty Organization and Authority," in Marvin W. Peterson, ed., _Association for the Study of Higher Education Reader on Organization and Governance in Higher Education_ (Ginn Press, 1986), p. 267. 5 Boyer, p. 5. 6 Ibid., p. 7; see also Atkinson and Tuzin, p. 23. 7 Vannevar Bush, _Science--The Endless Frontier_ (Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation, reprinted 1980), pp. 10-11. 8 Atkinson and Tuzin, quoting the U.S. Department of Commerce, p. 23. 9 _In the National Interest: The Federal Government and Research- Intensive Universities_, Ad Hoc Working Group on Research-Intensive Universities (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992), p. 15. 10 Atkinson and Tuzin, p. 22. Also, according to the report _In the National Interest_ (ibid., p. 17), the operating revenues of the 170 most "research-intensive" universities rose from $17.[9] billion in 1979 to $72.[8] billion in 1990. 11 Ibid., p. 24. See also, for example, Allan Bloom, _The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). 12 Clark Kerr, "The New Race to be Harvard or Berkeley or Stanford," Change, May/June 1991, p. 8. See also _Renewing the Promise: Research- Intensive Universities and the Nation_, President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992), p. xiv. 13 UCLA Business Enterprises, _Graduate Student Housing Research Project: Marketing Study Results_, unpublished report, October 1991, pp. 120-122. 14 Brian L. Hawkins, "Preparing for the Next Wave of Computing on Campus," _Change_, January/February 1991, p. 24. 15 George A. Champine, _MIT Project Athena: A Model for Distributed Campus Computing_ (Boston: Digital Press, 1991), p. 3. 16 Ibid., page 5. 17 President's Science Advisory Committee, _Computers in Higher Education_ (Washington D.C.: McGrath Publishing Co., 1967), p. 4. 18 See, for example, John Bernard Henry, M.D., "Computers in Medical Education: Information and Knowledge Management, Understanding and Learning," _Human Pathology 10 (1990): 988-1022; David J. Unwin and David K. Maguire, "Developing the Effective Use of Information Technology in Teaching and Learning Geography," Journal of Geography in Higher Education 1 (1990): 77-82; and M. Dertouzos and W. Burner, _Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Future Computational Needs and Resources_ (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1978). Other good examples include the University of Michigan's Project Flame (Foreign Language Applications in the Multi-media Environment) and the University of Maryland's Comprehensive Unified Physics Learning Environment (COUPLE). 19 Champine, p. 5. 20 SDSC, "Interactions Between the SDSC and the rest of the UCSD campus," updated unpublished report, May 1991. 21 Speech by (then) Stanford University President Donald Kennedy, referenced in Atkin and Tuzin, p. 24. 22 University of Southern California, Center for Scholarly Technology, _1990 EDUCOM/USC Survey of Desktop Computing_ (Los Angeles: USC, 1990), p. 1. 23 University of California, _1989 Survey on the Instructional Use of Technology_, unpublished report, p. 11. 24 Ibid. 25 For examples, see Caroline Arms, ed., _Campus Networking Strategies: EDUCOM Strategy Series on Information Technology_ (Boston: Digital Press, 1988). 26 See U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, _Grand Challenges: High Performance Computing and Communications: FY 1992 U.S. Research and Development Program_ (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992). 27 A helpful list of trends that will influence research university IT strategies in the 1990s can be found in Richard M. Dougherty and Carol Hughes, _Preferred Futures for Libraries: A Summary of Six Workshops with University Provosts and Library Directors_ (Mt. View, Calif.: Research Libraries Group, 1991), p. 10. 28 Robert C. Heterick, Jr., _A Single System Image: An Information Systems Strategy_ (Boulder, Colo.: CAUSE, 1988). See also University of California, _Report of the Committee on Long Range Planning for Academic Support Services_, 1991, unpublished report, and Richard N. Katz and Richard P. West, _Sustaining Excellence in the 21st Century: A Vision and Strategies for College and University Administration_ (Boulder, Colo.: CAUSE, 1992), pp. 8-12. 29 "UC/San Diego Developing Custom Publishing Center," in Manage IT: _The Newsletter for the Management of Information Technology in Higher Education_, Spring 1992, p. 1. 30 Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, _The Fourth Revolution: Instructional Technology in Higher Education_ (Berkeley, Calif.: Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, 1972), p. 1. 31 See, for example, John F. Rockart and Michael S. Scott Morton, _Computers and the Learning Process in Higher Education_ (Berkeley, Calif.: Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, 1975). 32 See, for example, Roger Levien, _The Emerging Technology: Instructional Uses of the Computer in Higher Education_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), p. 354. 33 Rockart and Scott Morton, p. 30. 34 Roger E. Whitney and N. Scott, "Microcomputers in the Mathematical Sciences: Effects on Course, Students, and Instructors," _Academic Computing_, March 1990, pp. 14-18; 49-53. The authors conclude: "...we cannot see how universities can afford the resources needed to integrate the computer successfully into the curriculum we cannot see how universities can survive without integrating computers into the curriculum." ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** Richard N. Katz is Special Assistant to the Associate Vice President- Information Systems and Administrative Services of the University of California (UC), Office of the President, responsible for planning for administrative and academic computing. Currently Mr. Katz is actively involved in the strategic initiatives associated with UC's Presidential Transition Team and Improved Management Initiatives work groups. He is a frequent contributor to professional and academic journals on management and information technology topics and co- authored CAUSE Professional Paper #8. ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** CHAPTER 3 REENGINEERING OF STUDENT LEARNING? A SECOND OPINION FROM CAMELOT by David L. Smallen Recent advances in information technology, coupled with calls for reform in higher education, have led to suggestions that major surgery, or reengineering[1], of the teaching/learning process is in order. While attention has been largely focused on the administrative side of the research university, the reengineering net has been cast widely. A general conclusion reached by reengineering proponents is that our system of higher education requires substantial overhaul to improve the productivity of our faculty, reduce costs, and enhance student learning.[2] Information technology is seen as the infrastructure upon which the reengineered academy will rest. However, when contemplating surgery it is a common practice to seek a second opinion. This I offer, as one who has been responsible for information technology services for the last 20 years at Hamilton College, where the primary focus has always been teaching and learning. "In the American imagination the four-year liberal arts college has become something of an educational Camelot, a nearly perfect example of the ideal learning environment. It is a place where students learn from one another as well as their professors. Discussion-sized classes are taught by professors who devote personal attention and concern to their students, challenging them to reach beyond familiar modes of thinking to achieve genuine intellectual growth. Such institutions do, in fact, exist.[3]" While this nirvana represents an ever decreasing part of the total higher education scene, enrolling less than 10 percent of all students, it offers insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the traditional methods of instruction, and the potential for the application of information technology to enhance, replace, or alter these methods. In addition, the emphasis on teaching and low student/faculty ratios at such institutions provide an ideal test environment for applications of information technology to the learning process. My thesis is simple: "The environment at liberal arts colleges like Hamilton is close to the ideal for maximizing student learning. Successful applications of technology to the learning process, at any institution, will be ones that address variances from the ideal learning environment. Technology applied in a manner oblivious to these variances will not improve teaching and learning, and will waste critical institutional resources." Further, technology applied by poor teachers will be no more effective than administrative information systems that automate a poorly thought out procedure. Change for the sake of change is counterproductive and will alter the very characteristics of the learning environment that attract potential students and enhance student learning. For example, at Hamilton applications of technology which decrease opportunities for interaction between faculty and students would likely be detrimental to Hamilton's competitive position. Given the nature of the small liberal arts college, it is unlikely that there are many opportunities to make student learning more cost-effective; rather, targeted applications of information technology can improve the quality of learning. Senior administrators at colleges that are looking for information technology to reduce instructional costs are going to be disappointed. Quite the opposite is likely to be true! LEARNING IN CAMELOT Hamilton is a co-educational, residential college located in a beautiful rural setting. All but a few students live on or adjacent to the campus. Students and faculty are accessible. For the most part, first-year students enter Hamilton the same year they graduate from high school. Despite the recent depressed national economy and the substantial cost of a Hamilton education, applications to Hamilton have remained steady, although demands on the financial aid resources of the College have been substantial. There is evidence that the most important attractors for potential students are their perceptions that among the schools they apply to, Hamilton has the "best" and the most highly accessible faculty. Hamilton's mission is unwavering--preparation of students for active citizenship. This preparation is accomplished through the development of fundamental analytical and communication skills, rather than through training for a particular occupation. A liberal arts education is based upon the premise that the future is, at best, uncertain, and that generalists rather than those with specific training are best prepared to deal with that uncertainty. Further, the liberal arts education is concerned with preparation for a "lifetime" of learning. The lecture/seminar method of instruction at Hamilton has remained largely unchanged, but there have been recent strains on the system, some innovative application of technology in the classroom, and modest calls for curricular reform. Even in Camelot, attempting to steer a new instructional course is difficult. Instructional methodology at Hamilton follows a pattern common at other institutions. Classes generally are taught either two or three times per week. Class sizes are small, with over 86 percent of all classes having fewer than twenty-five students. Hamilton eliminated distribution requirements in the late sixties, but has gradually moved back to a system of curricular goals which, together with a strong advising system, function as effective surrogates for requirements. Faculty must deal with the delicate balancing of teaching, professional activity, and community service, as each is important for promotion and tenure. Bi-annual student evaluations of teaching are an important component of the process of self-improvement. To remain competitive with its peer institutions, Hamilton recently reduced the annual faculty teaching obligation from six to five courses, increased the size of the faculty from 150 to 160, and enhanced its system of professional leaves. Two fundamental characteristics of an "ideal" learning environment, present in the small liberal arts college, are subject engagement--consistent opportunities for students to actively engage subject matter--and interaction--consistent opportunities for students to interact with other students and the instructor to test their own ideas and to learn from the ideas of others. These characteristics can be fostered by a variety of physical and psychological features of the environment in which teaching and learning take place. But there are no guarantees. For example, small class size does not ensure that interaction will take place unless the instructor facilitates it. A faculty member who shows excitement for the content of a course can motivate students to engage that subject matter, but the engagement process may be incomplete unless students understand what engagement means. Reading and understanding (engaging) poetry, for example, is different from reading Sports Illustrated. Instructional methodology is the domain of the faculty, who decide what, when, and how courses are to be taught. Most formal instruction takes place without any significant use of technology in the classroom. The spoken word, interaction between students and the instructor, chalk, and blackboards are still the primary delivery mechanisms for instruction. A variety of audio-visual equipment and computers serve as tools of teaching. This approach is successful since the two characteristics of the ideal environment are present for most courses. As the recent Harvard Assessment Seminars report concluded, "students' academic performance and satisfaction at college are tied closely to involvement with faculty and other students around substantive work."[4 ] The report goes on to talk of the value of "interactive classes" and "interactive relationships" in the student learning process. Even in Hamilton's very traditional environment there are notable applications of technology to learning, including an EDUCOM/NCRIPTAL software award winner. These applications are successful precisely because they enhance subject engagement or interaction among students and faculty. Further, these applications impact a significant number of students, since many of them occur in introductory level courses. Understanding where change can produce significant improvements in student learning is paramount. Targeted applications of information technology, fostered by an appropriate information technology infrastructure, can make a difference in invigorating and improving the learning process. Be forewarned: applying technology to improve student learning is about quality, not quantity! APPROACHES TO IMPROVING STUDENT LEARNING Information technology can be used to improve student learning if it addresses variances from the ideal learning environment, that is, when it is used to improve interaction and subject engagement. These variances are present, to some degree, at all institutions. Targeting areas of learning in which these variances are large is the most cost- effective way to achieve improvements. For example, at Hamilton, not all classes are of sufficiently small size to ensure interaction among students and faculty. At some institutions large classes are the norm. At universities with large numbers of distance learners, part-time students, or adjunct faculty, even being on-campus may present difficulties. In many subject areas active engagement of subject matter is problematical regardless of class size. For example, visualizing three-dimensional objects in an advanced mathematics course, or understanding the meaning of a poem in an English course, requires subject matter engagement that goes beyond mere reading. When students actively participate in class discussions they not only test their understanding of the subject matter of the course, but further develop their communication and analytical skills. Facilitating this interaction and making sure all students participate is largely the responsibility of the instructor. In very small classes, under ten students for example, participation is almost assured since students who enroll understand that participation is expected. In larger classes, it is possible for students to remain relatively passive if the instructor adopts a traditional lecture format. When interaction languishes, information technology can help. Electronic discussion groups, computer networks, and guided discussion software can all be used to promote interaction among students and the instructor on course-related matters. Such discussion groups enable the student to develop confidence in his or her understanding of subject matter prior to participation in class discussions. Additionally, the instructor can guide the discussion by using suggestions or focused questions. While the interaction initially takes place electronically, rather than face to face, the faculty who have used such techniques have noticed that electronic communication of this type is a precursor to interaction in the classroom setting, ultimately improving student learning. Most campuses already have the technology in place to use this approach. Even a small network in a public computing facility can suffice. In other institutions, networking technology can be useful in distance learning situations where in-class interaction is not possible for most students. Helping students to actively engage subject matter is another area in which technology has been applied successfully at most institutions. Numerous examples exist of computer applications that help students to engage subject matter in an active rather than passive manner. These range from simple drill and practice in basic mathematics to complex simulations of chemistry laboratory environments. It can be demonstrated that these applications improve student learning and retention of subject matter.[5] However, even when it can be demonstrated that integrating information technology into the educational process does improve student learning, there are hurdles that must be overcome to make that integration a reality. INHIBITORS AND OPPORTUNITIES There are significant variances among faculty, and institutions, in their willingness to experiment with instructional approaches other than the traditional lecture/seminar format, and to support such efforts. What are some of the environmental factors that account for these variances, and what can administrators do to turn inhibiting factors into opportunities? MARGINAL BENEFITS AND TRADE-OFFS The ultimate decision about whether to incorporate information technology into the teaching/learning process is made by the faculty member, often implicitly, on the basis of a perceived tradeoff between the marginal increase in student learning (over that achieved by traditional method) and the perceived investment in time to learn to use the technology, integrate it with other course materials, deal with problems related to the technology itself, and choose among available technology alternatives.[6] When all of this is considered the tradeoff does not seem compelling enough to most faculty. For the most part, the faculty's perception is accurate at Camelot institutions, precisely because the two characteristics of an ideal learning environment are abundantly present. There simply is no overriding reason to make the investment. Faculty have other obligations. Publication, presentations at professional societies, and community service all compete for the faculty member's time. When these other obligations enter the picture most faculty do not see the value of investing their time in something with small marginal benefits to student learning. Similar trade-offs should be considered at all institutions. If class sizes are large, or students and faculty are not readily accessible on campus, or interaction is not realistic, then the tradeoff balance will change. Unfortunately, at many institutions where classes are large, research is valued more highly than teaching. However, even if the motivation is present, administrators must provide the resources to minimize the perceived negative aspects of dealing with a new technology. Institutional leadership, from the chief academic officer, supported by personnel in computer services, must be brought to bear to make it possible for appropriate technology to be integrated into the learning process. There are important ways to direct such resources, not all of them directly related to the technology. Before a meaningful tradeoff can take place faculty must perceive that the application of the technology will improve student learning. This perception is one that is shaped almost exclusively by discussions with colleagues. Computer services organizations can provide information about applications of technology that have been successful at other institutions, but it is the opinions of colleagues in the same discipline that are most important to faculty. National, discipline-based professional organizations have started to play a role in providing forums for improving learning; now senior administrators at colleges and universities must support and encourage faculty attendance at such meetings. The impact technology will have on student learning will vary by the environmental setting in which it is used. For example, using software that facilitates and encourages student interaction on subject-related matters will have a greater marginal benefit in a course with a large enrollment than in one that is taught in a seminar format. Software to help students acquire basic skills through drill and practice may be more effective in a self-paced setting than in a traditional lecture format. A software product that is used successfully in a chemistry class of 500 students at a research university may be of marginal benefit in a class of sixteen chemistry students at a small college. The recognition that the marginal benefits of technological applications to student learning are different in different settings is essential to understanding how to make effective use of that technology. Once the faculty member perceives the application will improve student learning, barriers to implementation must be minimized. Removing or lowering barriers will take financial resources! One such barrier is the perceived investment the faculty member must make in actually learning to use the technology. "Faculty will not take full advantage of computing technology for any purpose if access to such technology means a trip to another building--away from the office, phone, and work materials."[7] Providing access to computing in the office environment is essential. It is unrealistic to expect faculty to use computing in connection with instruction if they don't use it in everyday activities. Providing such equipment must be viewed as a long-term investment, similar to providing funds for attending professional meetings. Initially faculty will use computing for personal productivity or research, often doing old things in new ways. Anecdotal evidence from a variety of colleges, supported by my experience at Hamilton, has indicated that providing direct access to computing in a faculty member's office is a precursor to any significant application of computing in the classroom. Faculty must develop a comfort level with any technology before they will apply it in a setting in which they have traditionally been the expert. However, providing access to computing is not sufficient for instructional applications of computing to develop, and has often led to disappointment with massive investments in technology at other colleges. Networking the campus, and providing every faculty member with a computer, doesn't guarantee computing will be used to improve student learning any more than giving a person a hammer ensures she or he will become a carpenter. Finally, the physical learning environment--the supporting infrastructure--needs attention to eliminate technological distractions. Such distractions include poorly designed computing facilities, inadequate numbers of computers and/or licensed copies of software, underpowered computing platforms, and lack of projection equipment to support classroom demonstrations. INFRASTRUCTURE--THE AMORTIZATION PROBLEM Most institutions of higher education made substantial investments in computing technology in the 1980s. Much of this investment is now in need of replacement, especially if it is to maintain its usefulness for supporting teaching and learning. Instructional software now requires more powerful computing platforms. For example, several instructional software products at Hamilton are built on HyperCard foundations. Floppy-disk-based microcomputers with minimal RAM are taxed to their limits running such software. This creates unnecessary difficulties for students and a diversion of attention from subject engagement to computer technicalities. It has been estimated that to create a modest five-year amortization schedule for instructional computing equipment currently in place at Hamilton will require over $150,000 per year. And a five- year schedule is constraining for implementing instructional applications of computing given the advances made in software! Even while institutions invested in computing hardware and software, there was relatively little invested in making classroom environments conducive to the introduction of technology. At most institutions, faculty still have to make special arrangements to have a computer and projection panel set up for use in their classes. Whether computing is used only for demonstration purposes by the instructor, or by each student at his or her desk, appropriate classroom environments need to exist. Portable LCD display panels have provided low-cost technology for in-class computer demonstrations, but these panels and the associated computers and overhead projectors/screens must exist in sufficient abundance to make it possible for faculty to easily plan to use them. Spending even 10 minutes (often one-fifth) of available class time "setting up" the technology is unacceptable. More classroom environments have to be "technology ready." Anthony Ralston, professor of computer science and mathematics, commenting on why there were so few computing applications in the classroom setting, noted, "One answer is that most colleges and universities still do not have any classrooms suitable for such instruction."[8] There is no easy solution to the amortization problem. Financial resources will be necessary at a time when the phrase "no new resources" is on the lips of most college presidents. A major way to minimize the financial impact of creating and maintaining the supporting infrastructure is to control its diversity. Observing standards, minimizing the number of computing platforms acquired and supported, and selecting a small number of generic software products (word processors, spreadsheets, database managers, communications packages) to use on these platforms will minimize support costs and maximize the useful life of every piece of equipment purchased. Senior administrators must demonstrate leadership to achieve consensus on the need for controlled diversity and assure that funding policies for purchases support that consensus. The days of trying to be everything to everybody are gone! INFRASTRUCTURE--PEOPLEWARE Colleges and universities collectively invested heavily in their own service sectors during the 1980s. The percentage of institutional operating budgets devoted to institutional and academic support and student services increased substantially during that decade. In a similar manner, computing organizations grew substantially during that period. Now, financial constraints in higher education have created pressures on the service side of the institution. Freezes, and even declines, in staff hiring have adversely affected the academic support organizations on campus. This is particularly true in the information technology sector. Computing organizations are finding that they are barely able to maintain incremental changes in existing environments. Fundamental changes, especially those requiring substantial additional personnel support, are not supportable at current staffing levels. At Hamilton, the information technology services organization can only support faculty who want to use technology in connection with student learning. Evangelism in the name of technology is not possible! Providing information about software, helping to arrange for demonstration copies, installing software in public computing facilities, and providing reasonable infrastructure (i.e., classrooms, networks, equipment) is all that is possible with current staffing levels. Software development and continuing support for discipline- specific software must be the responsibility of the faculty member. Additionally, at most institutions it is a practical reality that computing organizations have all they can do to support those faculty, staff, and students interested in using computing. It is not an effective use of scarce resources to have the computing staff try to convince faculty to use computing technology to improve student learning. Leadership in this area must come from the faculty and senior academic administrators. As John Kemeny said, "Faculty members are more likely to take advice from colleagues in the same department or a related department than from [computer] professionals."[9] In general, more tasks formerly performed by the computer services organization must now be transferred to the individual computer user. Developing self-sufficiency must become an important objective for every computer user. This must be true for faculty who use computing in their courses. As expensive as hardware and software might seem, ultimately personnel-related costs represent the largest component of the use of technology. Controlling diversity helps to maximize available personnel resources, but encouraging self- sufficiency is going to be the only viable long-term approach to supporting technology. Simply, faculty must become the primary support mechanism for technology used to improve student learning. If computing is actively used in a course, the students must see the faculty member as knowledgeable about it. Of course, hardware repair, software configuration, and network management are tasks still appropriately done by the computer services organization. Training in the use of instructional software and ongoing support for related questions must be something that the faculty member oversees. Developing self-sufficiency among faculty requires access to training, increased experience, and faculty responsibility for decision-making. Faculty who have access to equipment and training will develop experience and confidence over time. They must then assume responsibility for the decisions that relate to the use of that technology. For example, they must work together with computer services organizations to make sure that students have adequate training and accurate written materials that explain how to use the technology. It is not acceptable to "send students to the computer center to do their assignments," expecting them to stumble along. CONCLUSION Using information technology to improve student learning, contrary to the predictions of some "reengineers," is likely to build on existing strengths and characteristics of the current undergraduate educational environment, rather than to radically change it. Change will come from careful reflection about what aspects of teaching and learning are suboptimal, which applications of technology will lead to substantial improvements in student learning, and investing the necessary resources in these applications. Lessons from Camelot are that traditional methods of instruction are successful when used in environments conducive to student/faculty interaction and subject engagement, and using technology to create and enhance such environments for the student is likely to be successful. Robert M. Gavin, Jr., president of Macalester College, has pointed out that "...in the long run we shall see that computing has not changed the liberal arts environment so much as the liberal arts environment has changed computing. While many universities and technical institutions have hastened to modify their curricula and instructional methods to accommodate changes in technology, liberal arts colleges have insisted instead that the technology adapt to an educational approach that has proven effective for the past thousand years.[10]" Major instructional surgery using information technology in Camelot, and in many other institutions of higher education, is not warranted-- and more likely will lead to failure, disappointment, and ineffective use of scarce institutional resources. This doctor's recommendation is to examine your institution from the perspective of variances from the ideal learning environment--and call me in the morning. ______________________________________________________________________ 1 James I. Penrod and Michael G. Dolence, _Reengineering: A Process for Transforming Higher Education_, CAUSE Professional Paper Series #9 (Boulder, Colo.: CAUSE, 1992). 2 David W. Benson, "On Productivity in Higher Education," _Policy Perspectives_, March 1992, Section B, The Pew Higher Education Research Program. 3" Learning Slope," _Policy Perspectives_, November 1991, Section A, The Pew Higher Education Research Program. 4 Richard J. Light, _Explorations with Students and Faculty about Teaching, Learning, and Student Life_, The Harvard Assessment Seminars, Second Report, 1992. 5 An excellent review of these issues can be found in _Computing Strategies in Liberal Art Colleges_, edited by Martin Ringle (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc., 1992) in part four, "The Impact of Computing," which includes "Information Technology in the Liberal Arts Environment: Faculty Development Issues," by Carol Lennox, and "Computers for Teaching and Learning," by Marianne M. Colgrove. 6 Ibid., see Lennox for an excellent review of these issues. 7 Ibid., p. 306. 8 Anthony Ralston, "Classroom Computing: The Promise Eludes Us," _EDUTECH_ Report, February 1992. 9 "The Computer and the Campus," an interview with John Kemeny, Videotape from the 1991 EDUCOM Conference. 10 Robert M. Gavin, Jr., "The Importance of Computing at Liberal Arts Colleges: A Presidential Perspective," in _Computing Strategies in Liberal Art Colleges_, Martin Ringle, ed. (Reading, Mass.: Addison- Wesley Publishing Company Inc., 1992) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + David L. Smallen is Director of Information Technology Services and Institutional Research at Hamilton College, responsible for academic and administrative computing resources, campus voice and data communications, and institutional research activities. He holds a BS and MS from the SUNY Albany and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Rochester. He has been a leader of national seminars dealing with strategic planning for computing and has served as a chair of the CAUSE Board of Directors as well as a member of the EDUCOM Board of Trustees. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + CHAPTER 4 COMMUNITY COLLEGES: USING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES TO HARNESS THE WINDS OF CHANGE by Ronald Bleed For many decades, the landscape across America has been dotted with the sight of windmills attempting to capture the wind's force and convert it to an energized state to create electricity or to pump water. Similarly, the United States landscape is dotted with community colleges whose information technology agendas are attempting to capture the forces of change swirling around them to energize the mission of the community colleges. Two such forces are the move toward "building communities" and the "quality imperative." What follows is an overview of community colleges today, an explanation of these two major forces, and an analysis of how community colleges are using information technologies to harness the winds of change. * * * * * * * * * * COMMUNITY COLLEGE PERSPECTIVE Since the first "junior" college was established in Joliet, Illinois, in 1901, the number of junior and community colleges has grown to over 1,200 institutions nationwide, enrolling nearly 50 percent of all the students in higher education in the United States. The egalitarian nature of the community college, epitomized by the open-door policy of admitting any adult wanting to take courses, has been the cornerstone of what is called the "community college movement." While elitist institutions have defined their excellence in terms that are exclusionary, community colleges have sought to define their excellence in the service to many.[1] An open door policy and dedication to the service of many means that community college enrollments are continuing to grow and that more and more services are being demanded. A 1991 lead story in The Chronicle of Higher Education predicted that "more and more students will be squeezed out of four year institutions and into community colleges. as the enrollment pattern shifts, the quality and scope of instruction at community colleges which are already reeling from demands to provide basic education to underprepared students, will assume growing importance.[2]" In addition to their mission of providing educational access to the many, community colleges are dedicated to the mission of effective teaching and learning. Community colleges claim that they are the premier teaching institutions of higher education based upon the rationale that they offer smaller class sizes and more qualified teachers who are dedicated to teaching and who are rewarded on that basis. The mission statement of the Maricopa Community Colleges, for example, illustrates this commitment to teaching: "The mission of the Maricopa Community Colleges is to create accessible, effective, and affordable environments for teaching and learning for the people of our communities in order that they may grow personally and become productive citizens in a changing and multicultural world. To accomplish this mission, the services area of the Maricopa Community Colleges are general education, university transfer education, employment preparation, basic skills education, student support services, continued education and community services, and economic development services.[3]" BUILDING COMMUNITIES The decades of the 60s and 70s marked dramatic growth rates in the number of community colleges and in the number of community college students. This period also saw the shift from the "junior" college concept, a niche in the vertical ladder of formal education, to a much expanded role of transfer education, operational and vocational training, community services, general education, and corporate training. Today, an extended definition of community is emerging for community colleges, defining community not only as a region to be served but also as a climate to be created.[4] As the Commission on the Future of Community Colleges has stated, "The building of community in its broadest and best sense encompasses a concern for the whole, for integration and collaboration, for openness and integrity, for inclusiveness and self-renewal."[5] Community colleges have long recognized the need to empower the individual and most programs have been built upon educating and training the individual. However, emphasis on individualism can have its downside, causing self-centeredness, divisiveness, and selfishness. In _Habits of the Heart_, Robert Bellah observed, "Since World War II, the traditions of atomistic individualism have grown stronger, while the traditions of the individual in society have grown weaker. The sense of cohesiveness is lost. As never before, the nation needs institutions that recognize not only the dignity of the individual but also the interests of the community.[6]" Community colleges attempt to balance the interests of the individual with the interests of the community. The Commission on the Future of Community Colleges strongly argues that teaching is at the center of building communities: "Teaching is the heartbeat of the educational enterprise, and when it is successful, energy is pumped into the community, continuously renewing and revitalizing the institution."[7] Within the concept of "building communities" are six major and interrelated themes: ** a partnership for learning between students and faculty. To develop and maintain this partnership, community colleges must recognize the changing demographics of students and must keep their doors open to all students to prevent the fracturing of America, both socially and economically. In addition, the recruitment, renewal, and professional development of high quality faculty is essential to the partnership for learning. ** a curriculum which is in synch with the community. This curriculum includes the essential literacy proficiencies, the human heritage, technical and career related competencies for the information age, and lifelong education. The challenge of rapid change to the individual and to the community must be met by the curriculum. ** quality instruction in the classroom. New approaches to learning, such as collaborative techniques and the use of technology, should be used along with the reinforcement of existing approaches such as smaller class sizes, rewarded faculty, and active learning processes. ** the extension of the community beyond the classroom. A larger vision of the community college is required for this theme to be successful. Extension of the community means that student service activities are joined with curricular activities, and recognition that the community is no longer a small geographic area, but is now the world. ** connections beyond the community college. Partnerships with K-12 feeder schools and universities are essential. Alliances with businesses, labor, and economic development agencies should also be cultivated. ** leadership for a new century. Building communities requires creative, visionary leaders. Community college presidents and other top administrators must accept this challenge and develop the leadership skills required to guide others into the new century. These leaders must also recognize and commit themselves and their institutions. QUALITY IMPERATIVE The powerful force of the "quality imperative" is the second major force seen swirling above the community college landscape. The concept of TQM (Total Quality Management) is a popular topic for the renewal of American corporations and that same quality momentum is beginning to influence higher education in America. According to another Chronicle of Higher Education article, "Campus administrators have experienced a mindset change as retrenchment has led them to incorporate techniques like strategic planning and total quality management to increase the efficiency and productivity of employees.... We will be applying a lot of this to the academic program.[8]" The CEOs of six major companies last year issued an open letter to higher education, in which they asked for a broader participation in what they called "the campaign for change." This is their challenge: "We believe business and academia have shared responsibility to learn, to teach, and to practice total quality management. If the United States expects to improve its global competitive performance, business and academic leaders must close ranks behind an agenda that stresses the importance and value of TQM.[9]" Three objectives that were stressed by the corporate CEOs are to identify core knowledge generic to total quality, to develop a total quality academic research agenda, and to develop faculty understanding and commitment to TQM.[10] What are the key principles of quality management? The United States General Accounting Office has made a definitive study on quality management. They cited several fundamental elements common to all quality management environments: 1. A visionary, committed leadership and a team willing to lead the improvement effort. 2. A redefinition of internal and external customers with the understanding of customer expectations and a commitment to satisfy them. 3. Empowerment of all employees with a spirit of teamwork, innovation, risk-taking, and problem-solving. 4. Use of measurement to assess progress toward meeting objectives. 5. Open communication channels and open corporate culture. 6. Development of a quality education and training program.[11] The quality imperative is as important for community colleges as it is for corporate America. The promise of a new way of thinking, planning, and managing may not only help to facilitate the "building communities" agenda but it may also be the paradigm for survival in the next decade. Paul Elsner, Maricopa Community Colleges Chancellor, takes the total quality management program a step further with this definition of "quantum quality." He says that quantum quality means that an organization has reached the highest state of effectiveness when its functions, its services, its goals, its resources, and its deployment of energy, time, and effort are aligned complementarily and continually reinforce themselves. He points out that quantum quality has similar characteristics to TQM, but quantum quality takes into account our values and our relationship to broader community needs and values. It has the institutional health, betterment of lives, and a greater function of society as its larger ends. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RESPONSES If the forces of "building communities" and the "quality imperative" are so crucial to the future of community colleges, the question is how can community colleges use information technologies to capture these forces and develop an energized state characterized by effective teaching and learning? What are some of the possibilities? Are information technologies properly positioned to contribute to the success of students in the coming decade? Information technologies are being used in seven ways to energize community college environments, each of which captures the essence of building communities with quality imperatives: teamwork systems, classroom/laboratory systems, student-centered systems, remote learning systems, school connections/partnership systems, faculty- empowerment systems, and information access/research systems. TEAMWORK SYSTEMS The value of new learning approaches such as classroom research and collaboration are being explored in community colleges. One advocate of these approaches is Dr. John Seely-Brown, who has defined new paradigms for learning. "Collaborative memory," built upon shared creation of individuals, and "transition memory," built upon access to specialists, are the two key components he describes. Both of these concepts are practiced in community colleges today through the use of electronic communications.[12] Dramatic results in support of such collaborative learning have been achieved at the Maricopa Community Colleges by the use of one piece of computer software. Electronic Forum is a computer conferencing system designed by Maricopa systems professionals specifically for interaction among students and faculty. New patterns of communication occur because students who are shy or who hesitate to communicate verbally discover a real comfort with this new style of electronic communication. Within the Maricopa Community Colleges, use of Electronic Forum has grown to 20,000 students. The system is heavily used by the English classes to help students learn to write better and by many other disciplines for collaborative writing and general communication. Outside of the classroom, electronic communication has also provided a meeting place for students to discuss issues and ideas. In community colleges, where most students are commuters, the electronic medium has been effective in giving the commuting student a forum in which to experience the same kind of discussions that residential students enjoy in dormitories or student unions. Another example of how information technology can be used for collaborative learning can be seen in the way in which at-risk students are paired with advanced students. As economic developments continue to unfold during the 90s and increasing disruptive pressures occur, the dichotomy in society between the "haves" and the "have nots" will continue to increase. The same divis