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Copyright 1997 CAUSE. From CAUSE/EFFECT Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 1997, pp. 40-44. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: [email protected]
Virtual commerce in higher learning involves the online development and management of, participation in, and payment for learning activities by postsecondary learners. Virtual commerce in higher learning will figure to be an important component of the 21st-century learning environment. Today, most colleges and universities are not yet developing the core competencies and pilot projects necessary to engage in virtual commerce. We believe the time is ripe for such initiatives. Waiting for tomorrow may be too late.
This is not surprising. Many educational leaders are still charting a path to the future guided by extrapolations of the past. They are digitizing existing structures and processes for academic delivery to provide virtual versions of today's courses and degrees. To prepare for the learning environment of the Knowledge Age, leaders must prepare for a very different world than exists today. A world involving legions of learners from ages twenty-two to eighty-two. A world in which the metaphor of "educational delivery" is superseded by the metaphor of "interactivity." A world in which traditional, on-campus learning will remain popular with some learners, but in which new modes of learning will arise to supplement and change even our traditional learning enterprises.
Tomorrow's learning environment will contain many choices: (1) traditional learning, experienced on campus, augmented by technology; (2) new forms of technology-based distance and virtual learning that are variations on today's themes; and (3) truly transformed learning, strongly technology-based, that can occur any place and any time. Virtual commerce will be central to all of these 21st-century learning scenarios. The 21st-century learning enterprise will provide learners with the capability to engage in learning any time and any place and to pay for intellectual property and academic support services online. Front-end, lump-sum payment for some types of learning and support services will be supplemented by per-use, point-of-sale payment for everything from merchandise to courseware to information to intellectual property to services of all kinds.
Virtual commerce will be critical to delivering distributed learning beyond campus boundaries. It will be essential to customizing learning experiences to fit the needs of every individual. And virtual commerce will be fundamental to pay-as-you-go approaches to technology-supported learning that will create new revenue sources. These will be necessary to raise new pools of revenue for enhancing IT infrastructure and applications.
Campuses must begin today to build the core competencies necessary for virtual commerce. Without these competencies, our institutions will not be able to take advantage of opportunities as they emerge. Yet to develop these competencies, we need to comprehend the look and feel of learning in the Knowledge Age. This requires that we look beyond today's leading edge to foretell the true nature of learning in the 21st century.
The new tools of the Knowledge Age are presented to us incrementally. Most IT-based advances are crafted in increments upon existing tools. As Arno Penzias points out in his book, Digital Harmony, this leads to a condition where our sense of the current limitations of technology clouds our comprehension of its ultimate potential to create new ways of working, learning, and being.2
This is the misleading leading edge of technology that masks our appreciation of the potential of the Knowledge Age. But we must look beyond this misleading leading edge to see how work and learning in the Knowledge Age will be on a different plane than the one on which we are currently functioning. Penzias refers to this as the "Age of Coherence" or "Digital Harmony." It will become known as the "Age of Learners." An "atmosphere" of perpetual learning will be everywhere.
Our challenge is to develop visions of what the future of learning in the Knowledge Age will mean, and then to pull these visions to the present to understand the competencies we must develop to take advantage of these new opportunities as they emerge. We call this "making the blue sky meet the road." Without these visions, deploying technology is like trying to push a rope uphill.
There is not just one plausible future, nor one path to the future. The challenge of planning for the Knowledge Age is to prepare learning enterprises for success in any of a number of plausible futures. This requires the creation of assured migration paths from the present to the different plane of operation that will ultimately be possible in the Knowledge Age. These migration paths should prepare colleges and universities to be successful in a variety of plausible futures.
The creation of assured migration paths consists of several steps:
This is "expeditionary" development of new learning products and experiences. It views these new products as "rapid prototypes" that must be continuously changed and improved to move the institution up the mountain toward the future. We learn as we go, changing the rapid prototypes to re�ect our emerging understanding and changing conditions.
First, let us understand that successful virtual commerce will involve much more than digital cash, smart cards, and online accounts, although competency in these tools will be critical. The core competencies for virtual commerce involve the whole range of processes, infrastructures, skills, and perspectives necessary to execute online commerce. These include competencies in developing the new products and services that will be delivered via virtual commerce channels.
To support the development of virtual commerce, campus planning processes must understand the patterns and cadences of Knowledge Age learning. Successful campuses will foster campuswide dialogues on transformation and change.3 They will redirect existing processes -- facilities master planning, budgeting, program review, and others -- toward transformative ends. They will find ways to create new organizational cultures -- both academic and administrative -- and to share this new, organizational DNA with existing cultures in order to change them over time.
Achieving a higher level of competency in campus planning and change processes will enhance the success of virtual commerce initiatives.
The payment component of virtual commerce will depend on a combination of technologies. Powerful, smart-card-facilitated applications will be a cornerstone of the virtual commerce system. Smart-card systems will evolve from the current generation of access, security, and auxiliary-enterprise-driven tools to include the support of major academic functions. In addition, campuses will need to develop competencies in the integration of a variety of mechanisms for online payment -- smart cards, digital cash, and other means of payment and accounting for transactions.
Campuses should be building the integrated network and applications infrastructures necessary to support the technology of virtual commerce. Moreover, they should be building expertise in pay-for-service, smart-card applications, digital cash, and other basic technologies. While initial projects on each campus are relatively primitive, they should be driven by a vision of where these applications are heading and build complexity over time.
These new learning tools will include learning management tools that can be "mass customized" to fit the needs of any individual learners. And academic software that may enjoy national, international, or even global success. Network-centric scholarship will prevail for all levels of scholarship -- discovery research, synthesis, teaching, and improvement of practice.
New generations of interactivity tools will enable group- and individual-based collaborations that will be a key part of online communities of reflective practitioners. Payment for participation in these "collaboratories" will involve both lump-sum payments and pay-for-value transactions, most of them virtual.
Learning agents are being developed today in colleges and universities, commercial online ventures, and other settings. These will emerge as integral tools in the future atmosphere of virtual commerce. Institutions should be deploying these tools, as they become commercially viable, in expeditionary projects to develop competencies in their applications.
Pay-for-service is a key ingredient in this mix of new resources, and virtual commerce is central to pay-for-service, both on and off campus. Campus leadership must comprehend this vision, and the salience of virtual commerce to its realization.
Campuses should recognize the importance of these competencies to the world of virtual commerce in higher learning. They should launch initiatives to develop these competencies using existing academic models, in preparation for the new learning experiences of the Knowledge Age.
First, these alliances will be critical in the development of learning, interactivity, and assessment tools. Colleges and universities do not have the capabilities, working alone or even as the primary driver, to create the new generation of learningware for the Knowledge Age. If they do not form alliances, they risk being bypassed by other providers.
Second, institutions should practice aggressive outsourcing that surgically separates out functions that can be better performed by outsourcing providers. These relationships are more like co-sourcing or re-sourcing than our traditional concept of outsourcing. Such re-sourcing alliances exemplify a new variety of partnerships that will be key to virtual commerce.
Third, colleges and universities must reach a more re�ective understanding of the new skills required for virtual commerce in higher education, and of how their own skills sets need to be complemented -- dramatically.
Colleges and universities need to launch initiatives and expeditionary projects, today, to develop these core competencies for tomorrow.
It almost seems as though in coming to terms with standards and agreed-upon transaction sets, institutional identity might be at risk. It is less the technology of EDI, we believe, than the conservative and risk-averse nature of our institutions to embrace change that has held up an initiative that will greatly reduce our operating costs, speed up important information exchange, and free up staff for important "knowledge work" instead of clerical transaction processing. It is up to the campus leadership to move the organizations to change.
Several publishers are already working with academic administrators, faculty, and bookstore professionals to lay the groundwork for electronic delivery systems. Librarians and information systems professionals are at work building the infrastructure for the virtual library of the future. Content delivery, both from a curriculum perspective and a research dimension, has already begun to be provided through electronic media. But these initiatives are in their infancy, and campus leadership must weigh in to participate in the design and development of this virtual commerce initiative. On campus, partnerships between the bookstore, libraries, and academic professionals will be needed to advance virtual commerce involving intellectual property.
2 Arno Penzias, Digital Harmony: Business Technology and Life After Paperwork (New York: Harper Business, 1995).
3The nature of such planning is described by Donald M. Norris in "Perpetual Learning as a Revolutionary Creation," On the Horizon, November/December 1996.
4A second conference, WebdevShare97, will be held October 19-21 in Bloomington, Indiana, in cooperation with CAUSE. For details, see http://webdev.indiana.edu/WebdevShare97/
5Carol Twigg, Academic Productivity: The Case for Instructional Software (Denver, Colo.: SHEEO, 1996).
Donald M. Norris ([email protected]) is President of Strategic Initiatives, Inc., a management consulting firm in Herndon, Virginia. He is internationally recognized as an authority on transforming organizations for the Knowledge Age. He is co-author of Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century. Norris is working with a number of strategic alliances focusing on virtual commerce and involving technology firms, colleges and universities, and other stakeholders.
Mark A. Olson ([email protected]) is Vice President, Education Network Resources, at Sallie Mae, where he is responsible for developing a range of new business initiatives, leveraging Sallie Mae's core competencies and expertise to deliver innovative solutions to challenges in higher education. Previously, Olson was Deputy Vice President for Student Administrative Services at Columbia University, and prior to that worked for over a decade at the University of Southern California in a variety of capacities in systems and student services.