The
New Technologies and the Future of Residential Undergraduate Education
by Gregory C. Farrington
Computers
and inexpensive telecommunications have sparked a revolution in communications
that is comparable to the impact of radio and television earlier in
this century. The new information technologies make it possible to disseminate
information faster than ever before, but their truly revolutionary aspect
is that they allow each user to be a publisher of information as well
as a consumer and to interact with vast numbers of people around the
globe, simply, quickly, and inexpensively. With the Internet, commercial
publishers are no longer the arbiters of what information is made available
and by whom. It would be hard to find any industry whose vision of the
future has not been changed radically by the dawn of the Internet Age.
Digital media are
now challenging those most venerable information organizations -- colleges
and universities -- to rethink the ways in which they serve society.
Colleges and universities specialize in creating new knowledge, sifting
and storing it, and then sharing it with the next generation. The new
communications technologies offer higher education the opportunity to
carry out its traditional missions with powerful new tools. Education
has never been more important, and access to affordable higher education
is increasingly a necessity rather than a privilege. The most imaginative
colleges and universities will not hesitate to use the new technologies
to make education more effective, more affordable, and more accessible
as well.
Some of the most
promising new applications of information technology are in programs
of postgraduate education designed to provide lifelong learning for
mature students. Digital media have liberated traditional educational
institutions from the constraints of their real estate and now allow
them to deliver courses and programs to new and often untraditional
groups of students wherever they may be in the world. Many of the more
innovative institutions are already exploring these new educational
opportunities or, to use a very unacademic word that is destined to
be heard more and more, their new markets.
What, then, in
this new world of high-speed communication lines, compressed video,
laptops, and distance education, is the future of the undergraduate
experience, particularly residential undergraduate education? What of
the freshman year, all-night study sessions, cramming for finals, and
calls home for money? What of the football team? Will the world of undergraduate
education that most of us recall so fondly disappear, transformed into
a virtual experience on a glowing screen?
One certainly hopes
not, but surely the new technologies can be used to make residential
undergraduate education more effective. Doing so will take a great deal
of experimentation, the goal of which should be to improve what can
be made better, leave alone what is working just fine, and have the
good sense to know the difference. This chapter explores some of the
opportunities digital technologies offer for improving residential undergraduate
education and suggests, as well, aspects that would be better left alone.
. . .
Learning
Is Not Entertainment, and Education Is Not Baseball
In this dizzying
rush into the future, it is important to keep in mind that the challenge
for education in ten or twenty years will be the same as it is today:
to educate real people, not computers, and to stimulate them to learn,
not to entertain them. It is easy to be dizzied by techno-enthusiasm
and imagine that computers will change people and how human minds learn.
However, for a long time to come, learning will remain hard work, requiring
not only information but also interaction, practice, and discipline.
Yes, it is fun to frolic with the new media tools, but it's important
to keep in mind that human heads are not filled with computer chips
(not yet, at least). Learning is not the same as downloading.
One often hears
that the new tools of communication will make it possible for one master
professor, presumably one sitting under a palm tree on a warm island
in the Caribbean, to educate thousands of students at a time. The implication
is that hundreds of faculty with lesser minds will be put out of work
and replaced by a small international cadre of superstars. This vision
is analogous to many of the changes that did, in fact, occur in sports
when radio and then television made it possible for fans everywhere
to follow only a few professional sports teams instead of cheering the
hundreds and thousands of local teams whose playing was not quite so
good. As a result, interest in local teams faded and was replaced by
national professional sports mania. Recordings and radio had much the
same effect on local orchestras.
But education is
not baseball. Learning requires engagement and interaction. If one master
teacher could replace dozens of local hitters, then videotapes would
have put hundreds of faculty out of business long ago. Videotapes didn't
because they do not provide any way for students to interact with one
another and with the teacher. The big star on the tape does not hold
office hours, grade homework assignments, give exams, and provide the
discipline that forces students to convert information into learning.
Armchair baseball fans do not need to learn to hit, but students do.
Learning is not a spectator sport.
Nevertheless, the
new media do present provocative opportunities for improving education
and possibly making it less expensive. To explore them, it is important
to keep in mind that the way we teach today is neither the only nor
the best way. New is not necessarily better, but neither is old. The
current model of teaching at the college level is widely taken as the
"right way" not because it is, but because it has worked for a long
time and the forces for change have not been too great. Lectures and
discussion, combined with practice in the form of homework, laboratory
experiments, and similar exercises, all integrated by the discipline
of a regular schedule, grading, and examinations, have been and still
are a very effective method of educating large numbers of students at
a reasonable cost.
Traditionally,
teaching has been largely a cottage industry. Each faculty member has
selected the information he or she plans to teach, produced it in the
form needed for instruction (notes, overhead transparencies, homework
problems), delivered it in person, devised all sorts of methods for
encouraging students to engage and learn, and then assessed each student's
performance. The process has involved far more than just the delivery
of information, which is a relatively simple task and could well be
replaced by a video clip. The expensive part has been the interaction,
engagement, and assessment; one might say that what students pay for
is not so much the batting theory but the practice time at bat.
With the new digital
technologies, students no longer need to sit in a classroom all together
at the same time to access a professor's lecture. Similarly, the powerful
visualization capabilities of computers can be used to present information
in ways that are often more effective than print. Increasingly powerful
software enables computers to interact with students more and more as
humans do, to help them learn skills in subjects as diverse as foreign
languages, mathematics, and music. Most importantly, the digital technologies
connect students and faculty so that they can discuss and debate with
one another without being present in the same place at the same time.
Certainly, student-teacher
interaction via e-mail is different from in-person interaction. On the
one hand, those who have experienced Web-based teaching will attest
that in many instances e-mail interaction is more personal and intimate
than live interaction. It gives the students and teacher more time for
thoughtful reflection and can help lower the natural barriers that exist
between expert and novice. On the other hand, e-mail interaction is
slow; it is hard to imagine a Web-based discussion breaking into the
lively and infectious debate possible in a live setting. Of course,
for most students and faculty e-mail and Web interaction are simply
one additional method of communicating and certainly not the only means
by which they interact. Web-based discussion will most likely only increase
the participant's interest in meeting and talking "for real."
In fact, it will
take quite some time and a great deal more research before the best
uses of the new technologies in education are sorted out. What is clear,
however, is that change will happen -- and at a rate not seen in education
for a long time. In most colleges and universities, innovation has traditionally
been a term associated with research and scholarship, not teaching methods.
The new digital technologies now make bold and creative educational
experimentation possible, and some colleges and universities will take
advantage of the opportunities to innovate and become more attractive
for students as a result.
Will
the University of Phoenix Replace the Ivy League?
It is hard to find
a college or university that does not have some faculty, generally the
zealous pioneers, who are experimenting with the use of computers and
the Internet in teaching. For the most part, their experiments are evolutionary
in that they are using the new tools to teach the way they have always
taught, just more efficiently and effectively. What they are doing is
important but so far poses little threat to the football team.
However, truly
bold and revolutionary experiments using telecommunications to create
programs of distance education also are under way. The University of
Phoenix is one of the most provocative. A private, for-profit corporation
organized to serve working adults, the University of Phoenix takes a
very student-oriented approach (they surely call it a customer-oriented
approach). Phoenix holds classes in the evening, at times and locations
convenient for working students. Faculty primarily are practitioners
who actually work during the day in the fields that they teach at night.
Tenure does not exist, and faculty who do not teach well presumably
do not teach for long. Today, most University of Phoenix classes are
"real" in that they are based on real-time, synchronous classroom education
at distributed sites in locations across the United States. However,
it is clear that the University of Phoenix is shifting quickly to develop
asynchronous distance education programs delivered via the Internet.
Many faculty and
administrators at traditional colleges may be tempted to dismiss the
University of Phoenix as being just one step from a mail-order degree
mill and therefore not to be taken seriously, but to do so is risky.
Certainly, a major challenge for organizations like the University of
Phoenix is that of achieving a high quality of education for their students.
The University of Phoenix states that it carries out a rigorous program
of quality assessment, and it certainly is in their interest to do so.
Some critics may assert that the interaction that occurs between teacher
and student in a University of Phoenix-type context may in fact produce
training, but surely not education. In fact, the process by which study
leads to true education and not simply the learning of skills is elusive
in any setting and very much influenced by the motivations of the student
and teacher and the style of the program of learning. Assuming that
a different medium of interaction necessarily dooms the quality of learning
to that of skill acquisition would seem to be a somewhat hasty response
of the traditionalist to the new. Regardless, a key challenge for distance
education, just as for traditional residential education, is to stimulate
students to go beyond facts and skills and create in themselves the
deeper intellectual structures that define, however imprecisely, the
goal of a true education.
Despite these concerns,
the University of Phoenix is proving to be quite popular. It claims
to have more than forty thousand students enrolled, many of whom are
earning accredited bachelor's degrees in fields such as business, nursing,
and education, as well as MBA degrees. The credit-hour cost brings the
total for an undergraduate degree to approximately $20,000, much lower
than most residential institutions. In addition, the University of Phoenix
students can earn while they learn: they do not spend four years away
from real jobs while preparing to find one.
The University
of Phoenix model is quite challenging, even threatening, to traditional
institutions. The goal of the University of Phoenix is to deliver good-quality
education to students who need it and are willing to pay for it, wherever
they live or work and at a price they can afford. The University of
Phoenix will ultimately succeed or fail based on its ability to do just
that.
Granted, few would
suggest that an MBA from the University of Phoenix will open the door
to the executive suite as quickly as one from Wharton or Harvard will,
and few would imagine that the most capable and talented students will
soon choose the University of Phoenix over more traditional programs.
However, the University of Phoenix is still young, and the competition
has just begun. Clearly, the University of Phoenix is going for the
market in which it can succeed at this stage of its development. Competing
with high-end programs aimed at the country's top students would be
a bad business strategy, at least at the start; but what of the future?
Might a University of Phoenix find a way to deliver a program of undergraduate
education in, for example, business, mathematics, or engineering that
is comparable to those available at the finest traditional universities?
If the University
of Phoenix or an organization like it were to decide to compete for
the top students, its first step would be to choose a degree with a
high value. Then it would assemble the finest faculty, establish high
standards for admissions, produce an exceptionally fine program, and
deliver it to students wherever they live and work and charge them a
fair price for it. It would be critical to ensure that the faculty,
the students, and the educational program itself were truly outstanding
by conventional measures. If these steps were followed and the program
prospered, it would soon establish its own reputation for excellence.
In fact, at least one major corporation has already begun exploring
how to create an MBA program of this sort.
Among more traditional
institutions, the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University appears
to have taken steps in designing their new Global Executive MBA program
that is delivered via a combination of on-site and distance education
techniques. Though some traditionalists may sniff that it is not the
equivalent of a residential program, its success will ultimately be
determined by the marketplace. If it is intellectually excellent, attracts
outstanding students, and is perceived to be a good value for the price,
then it is likely to succeed and, in doing so, challenge traditional
programs that require students to live away from their homes and jobs
for twelve to twenty-four months. Its success will be the direct result
of harnessing the power of the new digital media technologies to deliver
education and facilitate interaction among students and faculty who
are widely separated in distance.
A half dozen or
more initiatives like the University of Phoenix have already been started.
One is the Western Governors University, in which several states in
the western United States are cooperating in using the new digital technologies
to bring undergraduate education to off-campus students throughout the
region and beyond, again through the power of telecommunications. Others
include University-On-Line (UOL), caliber Learning Systems, and Real
Education. These are all for-profit corporations whose goal is to make
money by delivering high-quality education to students who need it and
are motivated to pursue and pay for it. In each of these cases, the
main impact of the new digital and telecommunications technologies is
to make educational experimentationand innovation possible and therefore
to make competition with traditional institutions inevitable.
One reason these
new programs are promising is that their style tends to attract students
who are highly motivated to learn. Presumably most of their students
have full-time jobs, are paying for their own education, and thus are
keenly aware of its cost both in terms of money and time. These students
provide their own discipline to do the hard work that learning requires.
Can this approach
work with the average eighteen-year-old undergraduate? So much depends
on discipline and motivation. The years between the ages of about eighteen
and twenty-five are a time in which young men and women sort out their
options. Some do it in the Marines, many more do it in community colleges,
and a few do it in the Ivy League; but whichever way they spend their
time, it is the capstone of an extended adolescence. Not many first-year
college students -- even the smartest and most capable ones -- are mature
enough to succeed outside of a structured learning environment (particularly
those from more affluent backgrounds). A large part of what traditional
colleges and universities provide is the structure and discipline young
college students need to thrive. So the University of Phoenix and similar
organizations are unlikely to put the Ivy League out of business anytime
soon. Most traditional undergraduates are simply not sufficiently self-directed
to manage this kind of educational program.
However, the University
of Phoenix may prove to be a very attractive alternative for students
who would otherwise enroll in a local community college part-time while
working to support themselves. Another important role for the University
of Phoenix is in providing a second chance at a degree for students
who have taken a bit more time to recognize the importance of earning
one. Traditional four-year colleges and universities design their undergraduate
programs almost exclusively for fresh high school graduates, not for
returning adult students. Again, older students are largely served today
by community colleges. One suspects that University-On-Line, the Western
Governors University, and similar distance education undergraduate programs
also will tend to attract students who are somewhat older than is traditional,
students who have come to understand that education matters a great
deal to their future and thus are highly motivated to study.
It seems likely,
therefore, that the University of Phoenix and other programs like it
will provide the stiffest competition to many of the community colleges
and smaller private colleges that survive on tuition income from students
of many ages. Some of these institutions, particularly those that are
private, are financially fragile. One would hope that they recognize
the growing competition and are working very hard to compete in such
a way that their residential programs offer far more than can ever be
delivered over a telecommunications line.
New
Media and Traditional Education
Fortunately, many
fresh high school graduates will still choose to invest in a traditional
residential undergraduate experience and will be able to find the means
to do so. For them, undergraduate life at a residential college is as
much about learning to live as it is about learning from books. What
is most impressive about the residential college experience is that
it works so well and achieves both goals so effectively. Eighteen-year-old
students nervously tiptoe onto campus at the start of their first year,
and four years later they march out -- sometimes after a bit of prodding,
to be sure, but generally with the motivation, education, and confidence
needed to take on the world. The transformation is remarkable and is
as much the product of the general intellectual and social experience
on campus as the result of what goes on formally in the classroom. For
these students, late-night discussions are much of what college is about,
and the role of the football team is truly important. It is hard to
imagine distance education, howevereffective, being an equivalent.
What, then, might
be the reasons to use the new digital media in traditional residential
undergraduate programs? There really are two: one is to make residential
education better, and the other is to reduce its cost. Imagining ways
to use the media to make residential education better is easy; making
it less expensive will be more challenging.
Experiments in
the use of the new technologies in undergraduate education are going
on in most institutions of higher education. A good example is the use
of campus networks to broadcast course information, class notes, and
homework assignments. Another is the growing use of chat groups to supplement
in-class discussion. Still other uses exploit the powerful ability of
multimedia to enhance learning.
At the University
of Pennsylvania, where I was previously dean of the School of Engineering
and Applied Science, such uses of multimedia and telecommunications
are already common. In some departments it is hard to find a course
that does not have a Web page, and increasingly the Net is being used
as a medium for class discussion. For example, intense conversations
about language and meaning go on at all hours in a listserv run by Professor
Al Filreis of the English Department to support his class in poetry.
He has found that students often will talk to a screen more candidly
than to one another in class, particularly those students who have missed
class. On a keyboard, the thoughtful have time to think and the shy
have courage to speak, and the tedious can be deleted by the merciful
stroke of a key or two.
The Web has liberated
many faculty in Penn's History of Art Department from old-fashioned
slide projectors. Their students can now access the rich collection
of visual materials needed to study art by using the campus network,
which makes a big difference the night before an exam.
Many other applications
of the new media to make education better can be conceived. Few of them
are likely to make it significantly more efficient or less expensive.
If anything, they increase the cost of running a campus, what with the
demand for fast networks, wired dormitories, computers that regularly
need fixing and upgrading, and a staff of highly paid professionals
to keep all the technological systems humming.
Another characteristic
of these first-generation experiments is that they are mostly variations
on the traditional model of teaching, which assumes that faculty deliver
information to students through the medium of the lecture and that students
and faculty interact mostly in the formal classroom.
Of course, the
traditional combination of lecture, recitation, and homework can be
extraordinarily effective and efficient. Some universities -- very fine
universities, in fact -- have lecture classes of five hundred to eight
hundred students, each featuring a true faculty star. The lectures are
then augmented by extensive recitation sessions handled by graduate
students. The large lecture may not be a very personal experience, but
it certainly can be powerful in the hands of a real master of both substance
and technique. Certainly, from an educational standpoint, it would be
more interesting to have the same lecturer stand in front of only fifty
students and actually engage them in conversation and debate. However,
an institution that chooses to offer a course with one star and five
hundred to eight hundred students is making a decision that is both
economical and intellectual. What is lost in terms of the personal touch
is, one hopes, gained by exposing a larger number of students to the
exceptional professor. The total educational impact, as we all know,
can be very effective, if the star is really a star, the recitation
leaders know their stuff, and the students are smart. It is hard indeed
to imagine doing better with multimedia.
However, not all
faculty are stars, not all recitation leaders know their stuff, and
not all students thrive in such big classes. In addition, relatively
few subjects can attract five hundred to eight hundred students at one
time.At many private institutions, classes tend to be relatively small,
each enrolling between ten and forty students. In addition, the idea
that "one size fits all" -- that is, that one method of instruction,
the lecture-recitation model, is best for all subjects -- seems intuitively
illogical. Yet few, if any, classes are ever designed by first posing
the question of how students might best learn. It somehow is assumed
that, whatever the topic, a professor should stand in front of a class
and deliver information, students should feverishly take inaccurate
and incomplete notes, and teaching should be done as it always has been
done.
Some subjects invite
far more radical experiments in learning using the new media. Beginning
science and math are good examples. It takes an optimistic professor
indeed to believe that first-year students learn much physics by sitting
through a set of introductory physics lectures. In fact, most students
actually learn beginning physics (and more advanced versions as well)
when they sit down and grapple with the course content, either in the
form of a text or notes, and the problems that accompany it. The lecture
may actually be mostly a waste of everyone's time, but it is a ritual
that is followed out of habit (on the part of faculty) or out of fear
of missing something that might be on the exam (on the part of students).
Possibly a better approach might be to convert the entire course content
in introductory physics into a Web-based format, in a Web site that
includes text, illustrations, and even an audio lecture broken into
five- to ten-minute segments. Students could then access the core information
on their own schedule, repeating sections as much as they choose, and
then devote classroom time to discussions of recent research results,
problem sets, questions, and all the topics that only humans can address.
In other words, use the Web to do what it can do well, which is to present
information in a variety of formats twenty-four hours a day, and save
live class time for the intellectual interactions that only humans can
provide.
Professor Keith
Ross of Penn's School of Engineering has already created a very interesting
course designed around these principles. He produced a complete one-semester
course that uses Internet-based instruction, appropriately on the topic
of telecommunications and designed for upper-level undergraduates and
master's students. His goal was to eliminate the classroom as the focus
of teaching and to make it possible for a heterogeneous group of students,
including some who live on campus and others who are employed full-time,
to participate on their own schedules, while maintaining a lively intellectual
interaction between the students and the professor.
Professor Ross
began by recording his regular class lectures, editing them, and rerecording
them in more polished form. Each lecture was then divided into audio
segments, each approximately ten minutes long, and then supplemented
by appropriate simulations and illustrations. Each student accessed
all of this material over the World Wide Web and could listen to the
lecture clips and review the material as many times as he or she wished.
The Web also served as a medium for discussion. The professor and students
posted discussion topics and questions, and all participants joined
in an asynchronous discussion of the class material. Papers and homework
exercises were also dealt with over the Web.
This class was
offered for the first time in complete form during the regular fall
semester of 1997, and more than forty students chose it over a conventional
live version presented at the same time. The class met once at the start
of the semester and then twice more for final examinations. At the end,
most students were quite enthusiastic about the experience, in particular
about the freedom they had had to study on their own schedules and to
interact closely with the professor, albeit online. In addition, there
was no indication from student performance that the online students
were at any intellectual disadvantage because of their nontraditional
experience. The course is unquestionably a provocative model for making
education in appropriate subjects more effective.
What this approach
did not do was to save the professor . the university, or the students
any time or money. Professor Ross estimated that he spent about 50 percent
more time than usual in teaching, mostly in direct interactions with
the students through Web-based discussion. In fact, the course was more
interactive and more personal than it would have been had it been presented
traditionally, a point that is actually not so surprising, even if some
find it counter-intuitive. It would be virtually impossible for one
professor to deal with more than forty or fifty students in this way,
simply because of the intensity of the discussions that go on. However,
larger classes could be accommodated through the use of online teaching
fellows or through more careful organization of the online discussion.
From a pedagogical
standpoint, there are many advantages to this type of Web-based teaching.
One is that a course can be improved steadily, screen by screen and
lecture by lecture, and thus grow in effectiveness and quality each
year in a way that simply does not happen in the traditional format.
In addition, guest lecturers can be easily incorporated, so that a truly
superb version of a course can be built up over several cycles and then
still be available for students even if the originating professor goes
on sabbatical or needs a break. Another key advantage is the high intensity
of the student-student and student-professor interaction. This approach
also lends itself quite nicely to the sharing of a faculty member from
one institution among several others -- certainly more easily than does
the more sophisticated technology of live distance video production.
Perhaps the most
successful use of this teaching style could be in a hybrid form, in
which the Web is used to deliver fundamental information that would
otherwise be the subject of a lecture and as a medium for extended discussion.
Class time would not be eliminated but would be replaced by more informal
meetings of a seminar type and devoted to more free-ranging discussion.
As mentioned earlier, this model might be particularly appropriate for
teaching introductory math and science courses to large numbers of students
who may have quite different backgrounds. It would allow those with
more experience to move ahead quickly and those who need more time to
take it.
Another reason
for exploring the use of the Web as a medium of instruction is the rapid
growth of simulation software for education. Software for teaching foreign
languages is just one example. These programs are already so sophisticated
that it is hard to imagine learning a new language without one. They
virtually compel the redesign of traditional foreign language instruction.
This ability of the computer to interact with a user as if the computer
were a real person makes it possible to develop increasingly powerful
learning programs for many other subjects as well, including science,
math, and medicine. It is inevitable that such programs will become
more and more sophisticated; the market is so large that the investment
required to create them is justified. It remains for educators to determine
how to use them in traditional programs of instruction.
The fact is that
educators already have at their disposal a great variety of new software
tools for teaching, and the number will only grow. Using them effectively
requires fresh thinking. Truly improving education with the new media
will require faculty to start with a blank page, to explore how best
to teach each course, and to listen closely to students as they comment
on whether it really works.
Taking advantage
of the new media to improve education in this fundamental way is not
a casual business. Exploiting the power of the World Wide Web in teaching
is not necessarily simple or inexpensive. Faculty will need substantial
help in terms of staff support and equipment. Most importantly, faculty
will have to payfar more attention to innovation in teaching than has
been common in the past, and administrations will have to reward them
for it.
The overall goal
should be to make residential undergraduate education more effective
by using computers to do what they do best and freeing faculty to devote
more time to students on an individual basis. The goal should be a more
personal educational experience, not a dehumanized system of learning
by machine. Ultimately it is human interaction, discussion, debate,
experimentation, and inspiration that are truly worth four years of
time and tuition. If multimedia can be used to make undergraduate education
more personally interactive and more effective, then faculty should
lead the way in redesigning undergraduate programs to achieve these
goals. . . .
Innovative
Institutions Must Change
Arguably the most
important consequence of the new digital media for higher education
is that they make major innovations in education possible. In the past,
traditional educational methods and institutions have had a monopoly
on higher education. Even if the capstone intellectual and social experience
provided by residential undergraduate education is indeed one of the
finest preparations a student can receive for the rest of his or her
life, it is clear that current models of that experience are expensive.
High cost invites innovation and competition, and the new media provide
tools that make both possible.
Of course, traditional
faculty are generally very creative individuals. Campuses bubble with
innovation, but its focus is more on scholarship than pedagogy. Outstanding
faculty scholarship is essential for high-quality education, but so
is faculty and administration commitment to innovation and excellence
in teaching. Too often, faculty are paid for teaching but rewarded for
scholarship. Their creative energy is therefore primarily focused on
the latter. This asymmetry in creativity, in which the activities that
pay the bills receive the least creative energy, should be brought into
greater balance.
The new media invite
a thoughtful rethinking of how students are taught, not simply a nudging
and tweaking of the established curricula. The marketplace will help
make this happen. Traditional institutions, driven to demonstrate that
their educational programs are better than the competition's and enticed
by the use of digital media to do so, are likely to invest more resources
in pedagogical innovation than they have in the past.
Through all of
these changes, residential undergraduate campuses will be challenged
to truly be what they generally claim to be -- rich and lively intellectual
communities in which students and faculty collaborate to discover, understand,
and apply new knowledge. Scholarly and learning communities of this
sort thrive on live, personal interaction. A network of high-speed telecommunications
lines can never replace that interaction. Colleges and universities
that understand that outstanding personal education is arguably their
principal mission in society have little to fear from the Internet Age.
Will some institutions
be at risk? Yes, particularly those that fail to understand that students
will increasingly have alternatives and that the comfortable and rather
monopolistic world that educational institutions have enjoyed for so
long is shifting and changing. The market for education is large and
growing. For-profit corporations will enter it aggressively and give
traditional institutions real competition. Heightened competition will
force educational institutions to be much more aware of the niche each
fills or chooses to fill in the educational marketplace. Strategic decisions
that may have been made by default in the past will have to be made
far more deliberately. It is likely that colleges and universities will
become more differentiated and have more distinct strategic missions
in terms of the type of students they work to attract, the programs
they offer, and the role of research and scholarship in their academic
life.
Although the directions
that change will take are not so certain, it is clear that the coming
several decades will be times of major innovation in education at all
levels. Traditional institutions can be leaders or spectators. The smart
ones will choose to be the former.
Educom
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