The topic of the virtual university is a hot one, and there are many ideas around about what it is, what it should be, and so on. For most, the virtual university seems to be merely an extension of traditional distance learning - i.e., take the traditional teacher-centered paradigm and broadcast it over the airwaves or put it on the Net.
Forbes magazine recently published an article, "I Got My Degree through E-mail," that pretty much sums up the current state of affairs. In it, examples of what they call "cyberlearning" include students who "watch professors on screen as they deliver their lectures" or others who log on the Internet to "read the professor's lecture." As Peggy Lee would say, is that all there is?
Please don't get me wrong. Traditional distance learning programs have done a great job of extending access to courses and degree programs for millions of students who otherwise could not have completed their education. And contrary to the views of some senior public policy makers that "the only kind of learning the virtual university seems likely to produce is virtual learning," a half century of educational research has shown that students learn as well or better via distance education as they do in traditional classroom settings. But can't we do better than "as well as?"
There are a small but growing number of educators with a different vision. For them, the virtual university represents, in Bill Graves' words, "an enriched educational environment that integrates the networked delivery of multimedia learning materials with asynchronous and synchronous conversations within learning communities of students and their mentors." This enriched environment is what we at Educom having been calling a national learning infrastructure.
How do we create this new environment? The Internet and the Web offer both educational institutions and commercial organizations a common foundation for developing and integrating software tools into distributed learning environments. What is still needed, however, is a set of higher-order specifications that will permit learners, teachers, software developers and publishers to share and integrate modularized learning materials from a variety of sources and to manage the instructional process from enrollment to certification.
One can think of the process of learning as a series of interchanges between various components of the learning environment. Interchanges, in the form of communication or interaction, occur between the principal entities involved in the learning process: learners, teachers, learning resources, providers of resources and coordinators of these relationships. Similarly, interchanges also occur within entities as peer-to-peer interactions. What passes between parties involved in an interchange is information, whether in the form of a dialogue, a textbook or a computer program.
The Instructional Management System (IMS) project will create specifications to support these interchanges. Working under the auspices of Educom's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, the IMS project is the product of a partnership of institutions (the California State University system, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Miami-Dade Community College and the "Big Ten" Commitee on Institutional Cooperation) and companies (Apple, IBM, International Thomson Publishing, KPMG Peat Marwick and Sun). The IMS specifications will define the interface between systems and components and describe the information that may be exchanged through these interfaces. As an open architecture, it will not prescribe the operations of specific components nor will it prescribe a particular user interface or instructional methodology.
The objective of establishing common specifications is to facilitate the interchange and management of learning materials, not to specify content, learning style, pedagogical methodology or any other attribute of learning materials that forces all learning to comply with a particular philosophy or educational approach. The IMS specification is thus pedagogy-neutral in that it enables a range of learning scenarios, including synchronous/asynchronous, local/distant, push/pull, constructivist/behaviorist, and so on, in any combination. Learning environments that abide by the IMS specification will be considered IMS-compliant - that is, they will be able to recognize and enable communication between IMS-compliant content, between content offerings and an IMS environment, between environments from different vendors, and between users and the environment. The IMS specification will incorporate existing industry and formal standards where applicable.
The fusion of HTTP and Web browsers has resulted in a de facto standard for worldwide information exchange, thereby setting off a chain reaction of technological innovation, content explosion, and new market development. Building on that model, the IMS specification is intended to become a de facto industry standard that will be freely distributed and implemented without first going through a formal standards process. Commercial developers may create proprietary IMS systems based on those generic specifications, and developers of instructional modules or assessment instruments will be able to adopt the specifications to ensure that their software will operate and interoperate regardless of the specific IMS implementation. Just as the Web had a pioneering application like Mosaic to demonstrate its potential, an initial proof-of-concept prototype of the IMS will be developed and freely distributed on the Internet.
Traditional pedagogical models are based on the premise that students bring the same backgrounds, learning goals, learning styles and the ability to progress at the same rate to every learning experience. If you believe that students are essentially alike, then one-size-fits-all teaching strategies will serve all of them equally well, whether in classrooms or on the Net. But if you believe that students bring different purposes, abilities, interests and styles to what only appear to be similar learning experiences, then more flexible models are required. We need to provide a rich array of learning opportunities that can be customized to the individual student. The IMS alone will not realize this vision; but without it, getting a degree through e-mail may be the best that we can do.
Additional information about the NLII IMS project is available at http://www.imsproject.org.
Carol Twigg is vice president of Educom. twigg@educom.edu