Opportunities and Problems
Tony Schwartz observed a few years ago that "Education is the slowest
form of learning." His quip highlights a growing belief that current
instructional models emphasize teaching at the expense of learning. That
belief gains credence from a developing body of educational software
that promotes learning by doing.
But these educational innovations are not leading to systemic
change. They are difficult both to sustain and to transfer to other
settings. And they typically are being implemented at additional
recurring costs at a time when education is expected to be openly
accountable for the costs and outcomes of instruction.
These problems provide higher education the opportunity to justify
the results of its accumulating intellectual and financial investments
in the maturing global web of interconnected academic networks
collectively known as the Internet. This new medium for communicating,
collaborating, and sharing is education's lever of greatest potential
for effecting affordable, systemic instructional shifts that de-
emphasize time and place and emphasize outcomes--learning.
Experience with the Internet suggests that standards are the key to
affordability, scalability, and diffusion. From a standards-based
blueprint, a more flexible learning infrastructure can evolve from
today's learning infrastructure of campuses, lecture halls, chalkboards,
and credit hours. Faculty knowledge and know-how can be integrated into
major education lanes for the nation's information superhighway in order
to provide accessible and affordable learning opportunities responsive
to both new fiscal realities and the new plurality of lifelong learners.
But introducing technology into instruction heightens the complexity of
the long-standing interdependencies between learner, mentor, academic
support personnel, institution, discipline, and publisher. Any process
promoting change should recognize that complexity by creating new
partnerships based on mutually beneficial cooperation. The stakes are
high, and the stakeholders are many.
A National Learning Infrastructure Initiative
A carefully structured National Learning Infrastructure Initiative
(NLII) will ensure that the medium is the message and that higher
education's investments and experience in national networking and
telecommunications result in an educational medium in which
instructional programs can be as accessible and effective as educational
leaders dream and as affordable as public and personal fiscal realities
demand.
The opportunity, then, is to help educational institutions and
instructors move toward a learner-centered approach that engages
students in active learning in a systemic and cost-effective way. The
initiative would undertake a range of advocacy activities and prototype
developments under the general guidelines that follow.
1. Clarifying the Experience with Instructional Technologies. Much
has been already accomplished in demonstrating the potential of the
personal computer to engage the learner. Much also has been accomplished
in using the network for sharing, collaborating, and communicating.
Missing, however, is a systemic approach to combining these technologies
in pursuit of educational quality and to containing the costs of a
learner-centered instructional environment.
As the Internet matures and personal computers become cheaper and
more powerful, new modes of human communication and collaboration are
emerging. Today's most promising technologies and instructional models
must evolve into an educational ecosystem of information, computation,
communication, collaboration, and innovative mentoring. Further
development of the technologies underpinning the standards-based
infrastructure must be designed to amplify educators' efforts both to
create learning experiences and to assess the outcomes of those
experiences.
2. Developing the Precompetitive Technologies for Scalability. The
Internet succeeds precisely because of its nonproprietary, open-systems
approach to networking. No one owns the Internet's transport and
middleware standards and protocols, but many profit from them.
Similarly, a new learning infrastructure will require a nonproprietary,
object-oriented learning architecture at its networked technological
core.
The need for standards and common protocols is catalyzing new
partnerships almost weekly in the digital industry, and such partnership
philosophy must be extended into both education and the publishing
industry that supports education. Content experts and their publishers
now rely on hard-coded approaches to the development of software for
learners. But the resulting materials do not readily transfer across
hardware platforms, operating systems, networks, and institutions.
Therefore, one of the immediate objectives must be the development of a
precompetitive library of system-independent, network-sensitive objects.
Such a library will assure authors and publishers of the economic
potential of their development efforts while also speeding their work by
providing reusable building blocks as the basis for their products.
A learning architecture should embody a set of technological and
functional academic standards and protocols: application programming
interfaces. One example could be an object capable of receiving and
displaying three-dimensional data with various features for rotating,
shading, zooming, and so on. Object technologies are emerging at the
systems level from the Apple/IBM Taligent precompetitive partnership;
from Microsoft; from Sun; and from other industry leaders. The academic
community already is capitalizing on some of the new possibilities. Now
is the time to ensure that those system building blocks include
functionalities that serve the learning market as well as the computer
industry.
The Internet Engineering Task Force might serve as a model for
these standard-setting activities. The Internet achieved its success
precisely because creative networking experts from the worlds of academe
and research were able to reach agreement on standards for a series of
complex technological issues. It would be in the self-interest of the
publishing industry, the operating systems industry, the
telecommunications industry, and a number of disciplinary societies to
participate in a series of meetings to discuss the role of
precompetitive, object-oriented technologies and standards in the
creation of a marketplace for digital learning materials.
3. Developing a Blueprint for Scalable, Discipline-based
Prototypes. The proposed NLII must develop prototypes that exhibit clear
advantages to education's most influential stakeholders and
stockholders, and it must involve higher education's faculty in the
process. Prototypes that can be transferred on a national scale, whether
they already exist or must be created from scratch, are likely to be
assembled from a complex mix of components involving disciplinary
consensus building, pedagogical innovation, attention to object
architecture standards, and various educational and economic
assessments.
To do this, the NLII must first develop a consensus blueprint and
coordinate the contributions of participating stakeholders. The features
of a blueprint for prototypes can be formulated as action items, to
include those articulated as follows.
Target National Educational and Economic Problems. Information
technology is an amplifier of human capacity and ability. It is not a
solution to all of education's problems. Nor is it a replacement for the
faculty, the educational institution, or the publisher.
Information technology can be used to empower both learner and
mentor with the latest tools of the trade used to advance the subject
and to solve problems. But the need for in-depth contact between subject
expert and a small group of learners is likely to remain an essential
feature of this kind of learning, which is at the heart of our nation's
peerless reputation in higher education and the resulting R&D.
Information technology can assist in disseminating the body of knowledge
prerequisite to participating in upper-level small-group learning.
Modularize Instruction and Learning. Flexibility is a major asset
of information technology. Learners' schedules and learning styles may
not match institutional schedules and instructors' pedagogical styles,
and time may be wasted covering topics already mastered in previous
course work. Family commitments, physical challenges, or the need for
full-time employment may impede learners' access to today's mainstream
learning infrastructure.
The new learning infrastructure should offer information to
learners in a flexible, modular form. Flexible subject modules and tools
can be assembled into whole educational experiences to meet individual
needs and the unique standards of particular educational institutions.
The emphasis should be on meeting standards, rather than on credit
hours, final exams, class schedules, and other artifacts that have been
enshrined in the process of balancing faculty judgment about the nature
of "an education" and the economic needs of educational institutions
patterned on the industrial model.
Develop Learning Assessments That Take Advantage of Technology. The
prevailing method of quality assurance in higher education starts with
the final course grade, which typically is dependent on examinations
administered by instructors. This practice wisely places the final
judgment with the content expert, but it has distinct disadvantages.
Being a local form of quality assurance, it often impedes the transfer
of credit to other institutions and sometimes links the ultimate
certification--an academic degree--too closely to the place where a
particular learning event occurred. It also constrains class size unless
the instructor opts for some form of automated testing, such as machine-
graded, multiple-choice exams.
National assessment vehicles created by content experts encourage
institutions to accept extrainstitutional certification of
accomplishment, albeit usually with local option to interpret the
meaning of a particular score. That local-option aspect of national
testing preserves institutions' rights to determine their own standards
while allowing degree-seeking learners more flexibility in meeting
specific learning goals.
If national assessments were to utilize the economies of the
network and a standards-based learning and testing architecture, then
instructors could make individual judgments about learning based on
local interpretation of nationally derived standards while mentoring
more students than is possible when each student's work must be
laboriously hand graded. Mentoring and motivating, not lecturing and
grading, should be at the core of the relationship between learner and
mentor.
Involve Educational Institutions and Organizations as Test Beds.
Prototypes are more likely to scale and diffuse if they have withstood a
stint in the crucible of interinstitutional testing. Colleges and
universities can participate in prototypes and provide resources to
serve their interests and the common good in several possible ways. For
example, they can provide selected faculty members (1) released time
from other duties in order to participate in prototype activities, (2)
related travel support, and (3) any technical or departmental support
required to evaluate testing and learning materials from a variety of
perspectives. They also can provide resources that assist with the
issues of the technological and informational architecture.
School districts and state agencies for public education can
establish useful linkages and economies of scale between secondary
school and postsecondary school activities. Academic societies can
provide both intellectual leadership for prototypes and opportunities
for reporting and debating related activities and issues.
Measure the Effectiveness of New Learning Environments against
Traditional Ones. Making the case for a new learning infrastructure must
include research that compares the results of prototype work to standard
educational results. This may not be possible in cases when the subject
matter or ways of knowing it or testing it are radically altered by
technology. When possible, however, the educational effectiveness of new
learning environments should be compared to the effectiveness of the
traditional counterparts.
Assess the Cognitive Flexibility of Prototypes. Information
technology provides an opportunity for cognitive research. Software can
track the actions of the learner and provide new insights into learners'
cognitive styles.
Assess the Economic Outcomes of Prototypes. Another measure of
educational effectiveness is the ratio of educational outcome to cost.
Prototypes should plan to incorporate such measures and, when possible,
compare them to their traditional counterparts.
Assess the Diffusion of Prototypes. Prototypes should include a
plan for diffusion and should reflect a knowledge of the literature on
the diffusion of technology, especially of technology-mediated learning
materials.
4. Enlisting Leadership for Change. To be successful, the
initiative must enlist the active support of those educational leaders
who understand that information technology, rather than being a cost
sink, can play a role in increasing an institution's productivity by
facilitating new approaches to instruction. Indeed, all other approaches
to instructional productivity would appear to pit quality against
quantity. As long as the lecture provides the main intellectual
nourishment for students, growth in productivity will require larger
class sizes or heavier faculty teaching loads. Neither of those offers
real solutions, however, and both would squander education's most
critical asset and intellectual capital: the faculty.
Faculty salaries account for the heft of higher education's
operating costs, but there is scant public understanding of the critical
nature of the faculty's role in learning and in national economic and
cultural development. Fresh thinking about the nature of teaching and
its relationship to learning can help new, more productive methods of
learning to prosper. But it can succeed only in an atmosphere that
recognizes the value of the faculty. And it will require leadership at
the highest levels of educational decision making.
Decision makers from leading colleges and universities and from
academic organizations will have to collaborate in order to advance the
case for a national learning infrastructure. Without such leadership,
the infrastructure for effective learning and efficient instruction
cannot evolve, leaving both the educational promise of technology and
the public aspiration for accessible, affordable education unmet.