Seminars on Academic Computing (SAC)2000 Program � August 4-9, 2000 � Snowmass Village, Colorado

The Virtual University:� Alternatives to Traditional Structures

Frank L.� Huband, Executive Director

American Society for Engineering Education

 

 

 

My background and experience are in Engineering Education, and so much of what I say will be biased by that. �However, I believe that the thrust of what I will discuss is relevant to educators and education in most disciplines.

 

US education is the envy of the world - students come from every corner of the world to participate in the US college experience.� Scholars arrive from distant lands to study our system, return home, and emulate our curricula and systems.� And yet, not everyone is happy.� Average tuition levels have increased faster than inflation since the 1980s.� Dramatically increased diversity of both the student and faculty population have not been accompanied by adjustment of teaching styles to accommodate those changes.� There is a perception among the general population of low faculty interest in student learning.� This perception appears to be validated by most university reward systems, which focus on research success.

 

To focus for a moment on the impact of student diversity on effective teaching, a recent report^[1] from the Committee on Learning Research and Education of the National Research Council entitled "How People Learn, " identifies as a principle finding that "Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works.� If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom. "� The Committee report concluded that "Teachers must draw out and work with the preexisting understandings that their students bring with them. " In a classroom with a diverse student population, identifying and engaging all or even� most of the student's preconceptions is a challenging task.

�

In engineering, there is a perception among many students that their education lacks relevance to the real world.� The fact that many engineering faculty come to their positions with no engineering experience and little, if any, preparation for teaching perhaps encourages that view.� Additionally, there are increasing calls for additional material to be added to the engineering curriculum--environmental and biological, ethics and law--even as the complaints increase that engineering curricula are already too full.� A solution to this apparent dilemma would be increased efficiency in the teaching/learning process.

 

However, although computer, communications, and related technologies are permitting the development of educational systems of increasing power and effectiveness, a majority of faculty still use teaching technology only moderately more advanced than that of Aristotle--perhaps substituting a whiteboard and marker for slate and chalk.� Even though academia was created to be a conservator of values and ideas, and appropriately values resistance to current fads, we are, I believe at the beginning of an era of radical changes in higher education.� In this presentation I identify possible directions of these changes.

 

There are, of course, many educators who are thinking about these issues.� Jorge Klor de Alva, the President of Phoenix University, in the current issue of Issues in Science and Technology, published by the National Academy of Sciences, points out^[2] some specific calls for change.� He notes that in 1998, a poll of the 50 state governors was reported in a paper titled "Transforming Postsecondary Education for the 21st Century."� The four highest priorities identified by the survey were:

 

To encourage lifelong learning--with a 97% concurrence;

 

To allow students to obtain education at any time and in any place via technology--83%;

 

To require postsecondary institutions to collaborate with business and industry in curriculum and program development--77%; and

 

To integrate applied or on-the-job experience into academic programs--66%.

 

In contrast, of all the governors responding only one identified maintaining traditional faculty roles and tenure as a priority.

 

A second survey identifying prospective change pointed to by de Alva was a recent poll primarily of university presidents, administrators, and faculty, by the academic accrediting organization North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.� Respondents identified four trends as likely to have the greatest impact on the accrediting organization's activities:

 

Increasing demands for accountability--supported by 80%;

 

Expanding use of distance education-- 78%;

 

Increasing attention to teaching and learning-- 2%; and

 

Expanded use of the Internet-- 71%.

 

In the same issue of Issues, a more traditional educator Jim Duderstadt, former President of the University of Michigan, identifies^[3] several themes that he believes will factor into the higher education enterprise.  He suggests that education will be: learner-centered, affordable, lifelong-learning oriented, interactive and collaborative, diverse, and will use knowledge and distributed-intelligence technology to foster the construction of learning environments that are not only highly customized but adapted to the needs of the learner.

 

So what is happening now?  One major change is the increased use of distance education courses.  A recent report^[4] from the National Center for Educational Statistics of the US Department of Education noted that 78% of public colleges and universities but only 19% of private ones provided 52,270 distance courses in 1998, more than double the number offered just three years before.  Similarly increased were the number of student enrollments, up from 3/4 million to 1.6 million in the same period.  Eighty-two percent of those schools currently providing distance education, or planning to do so soon, say that they intend to provide their distance courses primarily through asynchronous Internet instruction.  Another study, the 1999 Campus Computing Project survey, notes that 47 percent of their respondents report that their institution offers one or more full college courses online via the Internet and the World Wide Web.  This same study reported that more than three-quarters of all campuses have information technology development programs and about two-thirds have campus support centers to assist faculty in bringing technology resources in their courses.  However, fewer than one in seven have a formal, institutional program to recognize and reward the use of information technology as part of the faculty review process. 

 

Even high-school degrees are being offered online.  Kentucky Virtual High School is a publicly financed program which brings internet-based high school classes to students throughout the state.^[5]  Many of the courses used in this program are provided by the University of Nebraska's for-profit subsidiary, class.com.  The university has created about 32 Web classes so far, and by the end of the year hopes to put enough additional classes up to be able to offer a complete high school curriculum over the internet.  And for the last year or so, the University of Texas has been offering the full range of high school courses through mail, fax, CD-Rom, course-on-a-disk and the internet.^[6]

 

Undergraduate and graduate degrees are being offered online.  Concord University School of Law, established by the Washington Post-owned Kaplan Educational Centers, offers a JD degree online, with graduates being eligible to sit for the Bar in the state of California.^[7]  In its first enrollment period, Concord signed up 170 students at $4200 per year in tuition.  I will say more about Concord later.

 

Many traditional universities are also offering on-line degrees.  Stanford offers several, including a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering.^[8]  Students must select approximately 15 courses out of 30 offered online in order to graduate.  Classes are streamed to individual computers, with the content optimized for a wide variety of bandwidths.  Since the spring of 1997, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been offering distance-based masters degrees in a variety of areas, and had awarded more than 600 such degrees by the fall of 1998.^[9]  Georgia Institute of Technology is offering an Electrical Engineering masters degree, and is providing content to students at Georgia Southern University to allow those students to get Georgia Tech engineering degrees.  (Georgia Tech is the only public university in Georgia allowed to offer engineering degrees.)

 

Online classes also let small colleges expand their offerings.^[10]  Wofford College and Furman University, both in South Carolina, are sharing language classes at a distance to increase the breadth of courses available to students at both schools.  Middlebury College is sharing a virtual lecture series with a number of other colleges and is also leading a project that will bring together 62 colleges interested in using technology for language instruction.  And students from several liberal arts colleges in the south will be taking an online archaeology course which would not be feasible for their own schools to offer.

 

The most visible innovators are the large-scale new providers.  Phoenix University, which with almost 100,000 students calls itself the largest accredited university in the United States, is primarily a shopping-center-based university today, with live classes in low-cost rented facilities.  But more than 10,000 of their students are internet-based, and the number is growing at the rate of 50% per year.  Perhaps since current non-traditional programs require maturity and motivation beyond that possessed by typical college-age students, Phoenix requires all of its students to be at least 23 years old and to have a full time job.^[11]

 

The Open University of the United Kingdom has more than 200,000 distance-based students, and its educational quality is ranked as the 11^th best of hundreds of British universities.  More than 20% of part-time students in Great Britain are taking their courses through Open University.  A U.S. branch of this organization began its first classes in February 2000, and several degree programs will be offered beginning in the summer and fall.  U.S. Open University will offer students at universities that partner with it a Virtual Year Abroad program, which will allow students to enroll in specific courses at Open University of the United Kingdom.  Students will receive British course materials, be allocated a British Associate Faculty member as part of a British student group of approximately 20 students, and participate in course tutorials and discussions via e-mail.  Open University of the United Kingdom is engaged in a substantial research program relating to enhancing the learning process for distance-based education.  Apple and Sun are the program's two general sponsors.

 

Perhaps the most interesting of the innovative new providers is Western Governors University.  This University grants associate and graduate degrees and undergraduate certificates, based completely on competencies B the students' ability to demonstrate their skills and knowledge of a field of study B not on required courses.^[12]  Each student is assigned a mentor B an expert in the student's field of study B who helps the student create a plan and calendar for completing the degree program.  WGU carries out the testing of each student's competencies at the appropriate times in the student's program.  The fee for these services varies from $1500 for an undergraduate certificate to $3850 for a Master's degree.  Note that I said nothing about courses.  The fee does not include any educational materials, but WGU offers, for an additional fee, distance-based Alearning opportunities" (courses) relevant to the entire set of competencies required for the degrees and certificates offered.  Some of these courses are prepared by WGU, but most are provided by 50 or so other universities and corporations, ranging from Texas Tech and Washington State Universities to Skillsoft and Novell.  WGU estimates that the typical student will need to purchase about $3000 in "learning opportunities" in addition to the degree fee in order to develop the necessary competencies for a Master's degree.

 

These are a few of the many initiatives that I believe are beginning to reshape higher education.  What are the prospects for the next several decades?  The technology will surely advance.  Internet speeds available to the home will soon match or exceed the T1 speeds that have been common in corporate and academic environments, and with continuing video bandwidth compression improvements, quality internet-based video to the home will be feasible.  Improvements in learning theory should make it possible to tailor instruction to the needs of the individual. 

 

But what structure will be developed to deliver instruction?  Kenneth Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, suggests that there are three components to the instructional mission of higher education.  The first is content, such as information, structure, values, applications and skills.  The second is context, including the learning environment, relationships, and socialization.  The final component is certification, including outcomes assessment, sequencing, and degrees.  Green suggests that, in the future, these components may not all be offered by the same provider, and that some students will accept their education without all three.  We have seen that WGU, in this model, provides as its core activity the third component, contracts out most of the first component to others, and ignores the second.  I would like to construct a hypothetical future extension of this approach, which I will refer to a Fantasy University, and then discuss some of its challenges and implications.  I will ignore certain difficulties, but I will come back to them when the fantasy is built.

 

As the first step in their college career, prospective students at Fantasy University log onto the registration/mentor web page and identify their general areas of interest.  Through a series of interactive steps over a period of weeks, the registration-mentor (perhaps involving the combined capabilities of an expert-system computer program and human experts in the disciplines of interest to the students) develops a set of competencies and experiences that would be sufficient for a degree and meet the student's desires and expectations.  Adjustments to the competencies and experiences in the program would be allowed and expected as the student goes through the program.  In disciplines such as engineering, in which degree programs are currently accredited, the expert system computer program would contain a virtual degree program accreditation component that would be applied to the candidate set of competencies and experiences to assure that it met minimum standards.

 

Once the registration-mentor and the student reach agreement on the initial structure of the student's degree program, a contract is signed and the student participates in a series of knowledge/preconception assessment activities, as well as an assessment of the student's receptiveness to various teaching/learning styles.  Based on these assessments, and the degree program agreed to, the curriculum computer system then shares with the student a series of 10 to 20 minute course modules.  Each module contains relevant information and interactive components that both serve to keep the student's interest and assess the effectiveness of the student's learning.  Each module is available in multiple presentation styles, such as talking heads, multimedia presentation, problem-based instruction, question-and-answer, and computer simulation.  The presentation styles used for a student would be varied to maintain interest, but would be biased in favor of the styles found to be effective for that student.  In addition, at the successful completion of a module, students would rate each  element of the module in terms of how well it retained their interest, how effective it was for them, and how well they liked it.

 

If the student appears to be having trouble with a particular module, the system could present either prerequisite modules that seem to be a source of difficulty or the same module using one or more alternative styles.  The student continues to receive instruction in a given module's content until he or she has learned the material to the depth required.  Depending on the agreed-to curriculum, a student may be required to understand a topic to a greater or lesser degree.  For example, a student whose primary discipline is English might be expected to acquire a greater level of detail in an English literature course than an engineering student who is learning elements of English literature as a broadening experience.

 

Built into the program would be an agreed-to series of experiences.  Most of these might be short-term job-like experiences in areas of the student's interest, but they might include visiting a museum, traveling to another city, or building something that uses knowledge gained in the modules.  Some of the activities might appear similar to an advanced Boy Scout merit badge.  Some might take only a few hours, but others might require months of activities.  Employed students might opt for fewer experiences, but would have to fit the opted-for experiences into their schedule.

 

At the end of the degree program, unlike most current students' experience, students will not graduate with a transcript filled with letter or numeric grades.  The transcript will describe the competencies and experiences of the student, and the student will have achieved all of the competencies and had all of the experiences listed.  The principal variable will be the length of time a student needs to complete their studies for a degree.

My discussion of Fantasy U.  so far has covered content and credentials, but has ignored context--the environment in which the studies take place.  Today, college students typically study on a campus, filled not only with instruction but also with social interaction, including mentor and colleague interactions and the opportunity to meet and interact with students of the opposite sex.  The flexibility of the 24/7 nature of Fantasy U.  allows the student to study in any environment they choose and can afford.  Students having limited funds could maintain a full-time job.  For students with greater resources, the private sector will certainly provide attractive environments in pleasant surroundings--one could contemplate Club-Med style learning environments spread around the world.  And students could shift from one environment to another as they wished.  Some environment providers might cater to students in specific disciplines, with subject-matter mentors available for consultation.  There might even be several under-used university campuses which offer the use of their facilities for Fantasy U.  students.  At the top of the financial ladder, one could contemplate an elite stratum of students who would travel the world with the content producers as they prepare their modules, visiting hydroelectric plants in Venezuela and participating in the preparation of a module on the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.

 

If Fantasy University were created, would it be successful?  I believe it would be a very attractive option for many students.  Most folks I talk to about their undergraduate experiences describe the efficiency of their learning as low.  Often lectures were redundant with required readings, or at a level enough below or above the student's readiness to understand that the student tuned out.  Many of my colleagues describe entire courses that could not capture their attention, and were lost to them.  It would not surprise me if an integrated learning system operating as I have described Fantasy University--outcomes based, focusing on competencies attained rather than courses taken, could graduate a better-educated student in half the number of study hours currently required.  Students could use this reduction in study required in many ways--to shorten their program, to extend their level of learning, or simply to use the freed-up hours in fun and frolic. 

 

Another strength of the Fantasy University approach is that it segues nicely into lifelong learning.  The same approach, indeed, much of the same content, could be made available to the graduate for a fee.  Whether for just maintaining current expertise, developing new areas of competency, or obtaining a higher degree, the Fantasy University system would be available to the graduate.  Many scholars of lifelong learning argue for the creation by educational institutions of EMOs--educational maintenance organizations, parallel to the HMOs of the health industry.  Fantasy University would be ideally structured for this purpose--charging graduates a fixed annual fee for sustenance access to the system. 

 

From the perspective of the accountants at Fantasy University, the huge economy of scale that their system provided would motivate them to turn over every rock to find additional students, including the cutting of deals with state legislators and University trustees to provide content to existing schools at dramatically cut-rate prices.  This would allow research universities to hire as faculty pure researchers who would need to do no teaching, and to use the "curriculum robot" of Fantasy University to provide instruction.  Although many faculty members might find such an arrangement highly desirable, the question is how long academic research funding would remain high if academic researchers did no teaching.

 

Well, at this point the future gets quite blurry B except that if one or more Fantasy Universities came about and dominated the content of university education, only the best teachers--those that could produce the most effective teaching modules would still be in the game--and they would be highly prized and highly paid.  Other former faculty could become student mentors or question answerers, but probably at much lower levels of compensation.

 

What are the obstacles to the development of a Fantasy University, or even to a less radical system of content provision?  One of the first roadblocks is the current uncertainty in the ownership of teaching intellectual property.  Traditionally, unlike research intellectual property, teaching intellectual property has been assumed to lie with the faculty member who develops it, even if it is developed on University time and with University resources.  For example, faculty members who write a book based on a course they presented, or who move to a different university and teach the course the developed at their former school, or goes to another school to teach a summer course developed at their home school, are seldom challenged for such behavior.

 

Recently, however, with the high-stakes potential of internet teaching, things have begun to change.  I participate in the Engineering Deans Institute, which brings about half of the country's 300 engineering deans to a pleasant venue for a few days to discuss important issues.  For the last several years, I have asked several deans at this meeting  whether they had any concerns about the ownership of teaching intellectual property.  The first two years, every dean I talked to responded negatively, and most looked at me as though my question was irrational.  Only in the last few years has the question generated a serious response.

 

In some quarters the issue has turned litigious.  Earlier I mentioned the Washington Post/Kaplan/Concord University School of Law.  One of the senior members of the School's board of advisors, and a lecturer in its internet courses is Arthur Miller, one of the more visible members of the Harvard Law School.  Miller is prominently featured on the Concord web site,^[13] with his photograph and a note in which he states that all Concord materials are based on his principles.  Harvard is not amused by Miller's activities, and has sued Miller to stop him from continuing.

 

At the other extreme, it is reported^[14] that York University in Canada required its faculty to videotape their lectures, and consequently fired many of them, offering to take them back only as assistants at much lower salaries.  After a long strike and some harsh words, York backed down.  It is also reported that UCLA also tried to require its faculty to record their lectures.  UCLA signed up with a for-profit organization to sell its course work -- apparently without getting consent from the faculty or even informing them.  However, general resistence to the requirement has stymied the process.

 

In the long run, the issue of who owns the rights to teaching intellectual property will be resolved, presumably with some sort of joint ownership.  However, to make it possible to share this property widely, there must be a low-transaction-cost process to license material from lectures, course modules, textbooks, and other information resources.  One possible model is an analog of the process used for recorded music.  One or more licensing organizations obtain the rights to most teaching intellectual property from the owners.  In music licensing the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) are the two principal licensors.  The licensors then charge fees to Universities and others for use of the material, and reward the owners with a fraction of the moneys they collect based on the total use of the material they have provided.  The computers serving the course modules, and other information providers, would track the use of each content owner's materials and provide that information to the licensors.

 

A second potential problem in aggregation of content by curriculum providers such as Fantasy University will be the need for a common nomenclature and notation for all those providing content to a curriculum provider in a particular discipline.  One role of the content provider will be the establishment and dissemination of that common terminology.

 

A third potential roadblock for a curriculum provider system could be lack of money.  Development and maintenance of such a system would obviously be a money hog.  But there is a lot of venture capital around today, and internet education is one of the hottest topics on the list.  Billions of dollars appear to be available to support potential profit-makers in this area.  In addition, computer hardware and software companies such as Cisco, Sun, and Oracle are funding and carrying out research to enhance the quality of internet-based education.  And there is a suspicion that Microsoft would like to own the whole business.  Academic research on this topic, both in the United States and elsewhere, is substantial.  So when the intellectual property issues have been resolved, content aggregation and curriculum provider systems will likely soon follow.

 

Just as improved technology, such as increased internet bandwidth, enhances the potential of internet-based distance education, the potential for internet-mediated research collaboration at a distance is also enhanced.  Large discipline-specific university research centers have grown in importance in the past fifteen years as the federal government and other sources of research funding have increased their support for these activities.  Many of these centers have been highly effective.  One problem has been that, except for the largest research universities, the available faculty at a university with real interest and competence in a given narrow area of research is often insufficient to justify a center.  To "flesh out" the proposal, faculty members having limited interest and competence in the subject matter of the center have been recruited to the activity, thus reducing the potential productivity of the center. 

 

Soon, however, as the tools for distance collaboration are developed, collaborations between individual researchers and research groups anywhere will be almost as effective as collaboration in person.  Teams consisting of the world's best researchers can collaborate without leaving their home institutions.  This will allow individuals who might be the sole experts in their area of specialization at their university to participate in or even lead large research centers.  The National Science Board is currently evaluating the effectiveness of the international collaborative research that it funds.  I recently discussed this activity with Alex de Angeles, a staff member in NSF's International Division, and he confirmed that internet-based in addition to travel-based collaboration support is under consideration.

 

So what will be the shape of higher education in the fully developed internet age?  The prospect of a global market will drive the production and aggregation of internet-based content, and once the content is produced and aggregated, economies of scale will drive its use even in traditional academic environments.  Worldwide research collaboration through the internet will become commonplace, probably with both academic and corporate participants. 

 

One area of great uncertainty is who the players will be in this new age.  If university faculty members resist participation in the development of this new academic paradigm, Fantasy University, when it comes, may be a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft.  I encourage all of us to participate in moving toward this new paradigm, so that when the new era arrives it will contain at least a part of what is best in academia today.

Endnotes