Access and/or Quality?
Redefining Choices in the Third Revolution
by Stephen
C. Ehrmann
In
my eighteen years as a program officer with the Fund for the Improvement
of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and with the Annenberg/CPB Projects,
I often saw two types of proposals. One type wanted to use distance-learning
technology to increase enrollments, often by reaching out to certain
types of people who would not otherwise get an education. Some reviewers
charged that these proposals were cheating students of most of the support
needed for excellence: laboratories, well-stocked libraries, interactive
seminars, and informal interaction on campus. The other type of proposal
wanted to use computer technology to change what students learned or
how they learned. Some reviewers accused these proposals of promoting
tiny bastions of expensive exclusivity; hoarding resources for the lucky
or the strong and excluding the vast majority of learners who were most
in need of excellent teaching.
In other words,
most technology proposals were designed either to enlarge the number
of learners or to enhance what some learners could learn, but not both.
Applicants and reviewers seemed to believe that improving access might
damage quality, and vice versa. It is obvious why they thought so. Key
resources in education exist only in limited quantities: seminar table
space, one-of-a-kind books in the research library, expensive laboratory
equipment, faculty attention, dollars. Should we concentrate those resources
or spread them thin? Should we improve quality or improve access? Or
perhaps we should raise the price of education so much that we can afford
more of those resources for each of a larger number of learners. Those
seemed to be the only three options.
Improving both
quality and access, simultaneously and affordably, may seem impossible.
And it is impossible to do so painlessly. But this dual improvement
has happened before, at least twice. Each time, however, access was
gained by many while being lost by some. Each time, quality was improved
in many ways while declining in others. And each time, the total cost
of higher learning certainly increased but probably without a proportional
increase in the cost per learner.
Two Previous
Revolutions in Higher Learning
The two previous
changes both enlarged and reorganized higher learning:
1. From the oral
dialogue of Socrates' day toward educational forms that included reading
and writing
2. From independent
scholars teaching independent learners in ad hoc settings in the early
Middle Ages toward a new mode of learning in which organized scholars
and students worked together within college or university campuses
The Reading-Writing
Revolution
Imagine a tutor
teaching small groups of students who learned only by explanation and
conversation. Now imagine such learners and teachers beginning to rely
on reading and writing too. Access certainly would have increased. No
longer would the words of a teacher be limited to the small group of
learners fortunate enough to be present at a particular place and time.
Hundreds of learners, eventually hundreds of millions of learners, could
learn from a teacher like Plato, even millennia after his death. Reading
and writing, aided later by the printing press, laid the foundation
for enormous increases in the scale of education, even at the cost of
increasing the distance between the learner and the teacher. In fact,
it has been said that distance learning was born the first time a scholar
said to a learner, "Take this manuscript, go away, and read it."
Thanks to that
"distance," each reader-learner could now learn about more subjects.
Within each subject area, reader-learners could benefit from more opinions
and more versions of the facts. Students and scholars were leaving the
limits of the groves of academe for a larger intellectual universe.
The single scholar-teacher no longer was responsible for everything
the student learned. Paradoxically, the increased "distance" between
the student and the teacher could also improve their conversation. When
talking with Socrates, many of us would either have blurted out the
first thing that came into our heads or have remained prudently silent.
In contrast, readers can take the time to interpret a scholar's question
and then, as writers, compose a reply at a thoughtful pace. And preparing
for a seminar by first reading and writing could enrich their oral interchange
as well.
These and other
gains came at a price, however. Although huge numbers of learners gained
access to a scholar's thinking, reading is not the same as conversing
(as Socrates warned): no one could be sure that the reader had understood
the writer if the two did not also talk with one another. Some scholars
and students, unable to read or write, would now be barred from education
even if they had previously had full access. In addition, books and
their errors were sometimes mindlessly copied and spread, and many oral
traditions were lost. But the revolution went on. The gains in access
and quality were too important to be abandoned.
The Campus
Revolution
Almost two thousand
years later, the campus revolution brought scattered scholars, learners,
and academic resources together. Campuses attracted both scholars and
students from great distances to a community where they could interact
spontaneously. Because medieval Latin served as an international language
for books and lectures, students could more readily come to college
and university towns from other countries. This is one reason some cities
funded the creation of medieval universities: to attract scholars and
students. Large lecture halls and the library were just two mechanisms
that increased students' (and scholars') access to education.
Meanwhile, in terms
of quality, intellectual resources were collected, guarded, and organized
by a growing patchwork of specialized departments. Generation after
generation of these specialized communities grew and subdivided. Students
and scholars could spend decades inside the walls, learning and sharing.
As depth increased, so did the possibilities both for intellectual isolation
and for intellectual cross-fertilization.
Once again, the
bridging of space and time had a fundamental impact on our organization
of knowledge for research and teaching. For a second time, higher learning
had broken out of a smaller, more intimate space into larger worlds
of learners and learning. Of course, the transformation again exacted
a price. Access was increased for many, but some were shut out -- for
example, those living in towns whose scholars had left for the big university
cities. Quality increased in many ways, but so did the risks of passivity
and pedantry, especially as lecture halls grew larger.
The Third Revolution
Today a third revolution
is under way, striking in its parallels to the first two. The signs
of this third round of improvements in access and quality are appearing
all around us:
- Presentations.
Live and prerecorded video and audio presentations stream out across
the Internet (a facility with some of the same strengths and weaknesses
of earlier "broadcast" technologies such as textbooks and lecture
halls).
- Libraries.
Once again the lode of intellectual resources is growing in size and
accessibility. The World Wide Web and online library catalogues provide
access to gigantic collections of information. Students and scholars
can use this information from great distances and at times when traditional
libraries are not open. Of course, the new library does not contain
all the information of the old, just as the first manuscripts could
not contain all of Socrates' knowledge.
- Seminars.
The first revolution reshaped the seminar when participants alternated
periods of talking and listening with periods of reading and writing.
The second revolution enriched the seminar in part because scholars
and students worked and lived together for long periods of time. Today,
asynchronous seminars enable learners to participate more conveniently,
improving access. Even more striking are the potential improvements
in quality, stemming from more diverse student backgrounds and the
ways in which students can open up when they are no longer worried
about interrupting or being seen.
- Educational
structures. Reading and writing brought the need for copyists,
librarians, and later, publishers. Campuses mobilized, enriched, and
focused the efforts of scholars by providing them with new support
structures (e.g., laboratories, janitors, and administrators). Today
even larger-scale educational structures -- such as Western Governors
University, the University of Phoenix, and state networks -- are providing
new contexts for higher education.
In 1987 I suggested
the label distributed learning environment to denote all the
tools, resources, instructional materials, and experiences currently
within a student's or scholar's reach. Each revolution has radically
expanded and redefined the distributed learning environment of the day,
thus enhancing both access and quality (while also harming them in certain
ways). All three revolutions used their technologies to help more scholars
teach and more students learn, enable new kinds of scholarship and specialization,
alter the relationship of scholars with the larger society, increase
the uniformity and diversity of teaching resources, and change the character
of academic conversation.
These parallels
may be startling because the three revolutions depend on such different
technologies:
- In the reading-writing
revolution, key technologies included paper, pen, and later, printing
presses.
- In the campus
revolution, important technologies included lecture halls, chalkboards,
dormitories, laboratories, and libraries, as well as roads that could
bring scholars and students to colleges and universities far from
their birthplaces.
- In the Third
Revolution, key technologies include silicon chips, a globe-spanning
network of optical fibers and satellites, telephones, fax machines,
video cameras, and the communications and data-storage agreements
that undergird the World Wide Web.
However, empowering
technologies such as paper, buildings, and computers don't cause change
by themselves. Our choices of how to use the technologies determine
those consequences. Because these three different families of technologies
have been used in similar ways and for similar purposes, both the gains
and the losses have been similar.
The striking parallels
are fortunate for us. They suggest that today's educational innovations
can be designed to change both who learns and what they learn. We can
reorganize learning around digital technologies in ways not unlike the
methods by which we took advantage of reading and writing and of campuses.
Unfortunately, most of today's proposals are still single-mindedly pursuing
either access or quality improvements, but not both. So let's consider
how to rethink access innovations so that they also improve quality,
and vice versa.
Access Proposals
That Can Improve Quality Too
The typical proposal
for a virtual college or university program often describes in detail
how access can be improved, but it makes only vague claims about improving
quality. How might we transform such a proposal so that a virtual program
also creates substantial improvements in quality relative to what single
institutions have offered in the past?
The first step
usually is to make sure that enrollment expands enough, justifying larger
investments in program quality. A virtual program serving fifteen students
has few options not open to a traditional campus program serving fifteen
students. In the past, enrollment growth has justified enlarging libraries
and laboratories, assembling a more diverse instructional staff, purchasing
equipment for the machine marking of exams, and making other investments.
Therefore, the program's content, marketing, and capacity must be adequate
for significant numbers of students.
How can we use
these capital investments to create distributed learning environments
superior to what a small campus could once have offered?
- Build a well-structured
Web library.
This effort will usually include collecting and creating new materials
(e.g., primary sources, tools for inquiry or design available over
the Web). Equally important is the creation of mediating pages to
help students find and use extant sites around the world. These mediating
Web sites might include specialized search engines, reviews, organization
of sources, and self-instructional materials. The students themselves
could help create and update these structures on a regular basis,
under faculty supervision. Institutions could specialize. Each institution
could gain a reputation for tending a specific part of the intellectual
garden. Courses of study could be organized to help students gradually
learn the complex skills they need to discover, evaluate, and organize
information. The peril, as ever, is the risk of investing heavily
in specialized materials that are rendered obsolete too quickly by
changes in computer operating systems and the Web. The Instructional
Management Systems Cooperative is seeking to make this process of
incremental, long-term growth more feasible; its standards would make
it easier for bits of instructional material to be developed in one
place and to be used at (and sometimes purchased by) other places.
- Enrich and
diversify the instructional support.
For example, lecturers might work closely with specialists in the
development of instructional materials and Web sites. Experts from
the outside world could lend their expertise and prestige to the assessment
of student projects. The faculty member's role ought to be redefined
so that he or she can be rewarded for being an effective part of such
a team. This kind of division of labor is nothing new: think of the
specialists and organizations that create and publish mass-produced
textbooks, an earlier innovation made possible by the growth in scale
of education and the technology of mass copying of text and images.
- Seek a more
diverse student body. Organize and teach the course so that students'
differing backgrounds, values, and settings create more energetic
debates and inquiries. Make the varied settings where students work
and learn into assets for the course. If the course is about the art
of the Southwest, include students from different locations, have
them research the art that is near them, and let them share what they
learn with other students.
- Exploit the
slower pace of e-mail.
A teacher of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology once
remarked, only half-jokingly, that he would never again talk philosophy
with an undergraduate. "Ah, but e-mail," he continued. "With e-mail,
students have time to think about what they've heard, time to think
about what they say next." Students who are inarticulate face-to-face
sometimes converse clearly and thoughtfully in the slower pace of
the electronic seminar. Such courses might thus be made more challenging
as well as more accessible.
- Improve assessment
and feedback. Unfortunately, many faculty members don't know enough
about assessment. One result is that they hope students will learn
one thing (e.g., higher-order thinking, academic values) but they
unwittingly test students for something else (e.g., memorization).
As we work on a larger scale, the advantages of appropriate assessment,
and the dangers of inappropriate assessment, grow. We also need to
make assessment faster and thus more effective. Some institutions
are making greater use of online practice quizzes. Several years ago
MIT instituted, for freshman classes, a program of online teaching
assistants available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
- Teach students
how to learn. This doesn't happen by accident. Courses of study
need to be organized to help students gradually become conscious of
their theories of learning and then to improve those theories. Some
students enter an institution believing that their job is to listen
and repeat, working alone. Changing that paradigm is as difficult
as challenging their ideas about philosophy or physics. Nevertheless,
we must teach students how to learn on their own, and we must be able
to assess whether they are able to do so, before they graduate. Students
with that skill can help large, accessible programs also become superlative
programs.
Quality Proposals
That Can Improve Access Too
Suppose, on the
other hand, that a proposal focused on improving the quality of education
for a very small number of students. As an example, let's imagine a
management program that is investing in technology for role-playing
simulations and specialized business software. How can that idea be
revised to also improve access?
- Let more
students know that the course or resource exists. Working
through a "virtual university" is one way to inform a new group of
students about the existence of an innovation. Another is to enlarge
the innovation by working with one or more other institutions and
then drawing on the student bodies of all the partners.
- Attract more
students. "Location, location, location" used to be the hallmark
of many college and university programs. Students often chose an institution
mainly because it was nearby. To expand enrollment today, institutions
often will need to create accessible programs that are more distinctive
and valuable, perhaps by combining one's strengths with those of other
institutions, certainly by taking a fresh look at needs. The business
program, for example, might improve how its students master the interpersonal
skills needed to mobilize colleagues and employees over the Internet.
This is an important skill in today's international business, when
one may not, initially, know the culture or background of the unseen
people with whom one is working electronically. What business program
can claim that it knows the skills needed for such intercultural communication,
that it teaches them, and that it assesses them? If one could make
such claims, mightn't it attract larger numbers of students?
- Handle more
students. Many boutique innovations in management education are
marked by high costs per learner. But often there are ways to handle
more students while reducing costs per student. One method may be
as simple as renegotiating site licenses for specialized software
so that costs per student can be lowered in exchange for serving more
students. Sometimes this goal may require changing the organization
of academic work. Virginia Tech, for example, created the Math Emporium.
A former retail store was converted into a massive facility for supporting
a variety of math courses that share a common corps of tutors for
operation seven days a week at almost all hours of the day and night.
- Provide instruction
in more accessible formats.
Traditionally campuses have incurred enormous costs to bring students
face-to-face but have not used that opportunity very efficiently.
Students had to stand in line, commute often to campus, and sit silently
in classrooms, generally shoulder-to-shoulder rather than face-to-face.
When instructors lectured, there was usually no recording made (other
than students' notes) for the student to review. Now many students
are under more time pressure. Our management program's use of technology
could be strengthened by rethinking why and how much students and
faculty really must be face-to-face. Fortunately, as we've seen, education
can sometimes improve when distance is increased (e.g., by creating
the option of rewinding a tape of a lecture and listening to it a
second time).
- Control the
long-term costs of materials.
Courseware in the past has often been educationally quite effective
but expensive in the long term because it was used by only small numbers
of students for a small time. Ironically, computers themselves have
been the worst enemy of homegrown courseware. Rapid changes in operating
systems and hardware render educationally effective courseware obsolete
long before it ever gains wide acceptance. One response is to use
worldware, such as spreadsheets and more sophisticated business software,
as the foundation. Because instructors can usually rely on such software
(in new versions) to be around for a decade or two, they can gradually
reshape courses of study to take advantage of it. The standards proposed
by the Instructional Management Systems Cooperative, mentioned above,
are intended to improve the viability of courseware.
Summary: Visions
Worth Working Toward
Steven Gilbert,
president of the TLT Group, coined the phrase "visions worth working
toward" to describe images of the future that can mobilize action.1
There are at least four levels of vision for using technology to improve
access and quality. Think of these as stages in the development of our
imagination.
The first vision
-- almost always a mirage -- imagines that technology is magic. A few
academics and people in government still believe that if they merely
provide enough hardware or network connections, education will automatically
become better, faster, more accessible, and cheaper. But showering technology
on instructors and students without providing adequate training, support,
and reorganization is almost always frustrating, wasteful, and demoralizing.
This makes as much sense as giving children paper, pencils, and a library
card and expecting that millions of them first will learn to read and
then will learn calculus.
The second level
of vision is the one with which this article began: use technology to
increase access to learning (with the hope that quality will be damaged
little, if at all), or use technology to improve the quality of learning
(while unfortunately benefiting only a small number of students for
the time being). Attend any conference on technology and learning, and
you will notice that most presentations boast of one type of gain --
either in access or in quality -- but rarely both. We ought to leave
this kind of vision behind as quickly as possible. Transforming learning
almost always results in some losses in both access and quality. Proposals
that focus solely on access may create net losses in quality when they
could have made net improvements. Proposals that focus only on quality
may create wider gaps between "haves" and "have-nots" when the gap could
have been narrowed.
The third level
of vision suggests using technology in activities that simultaneously
increase both access and quality by linking larger numbers of learners,
scholars, and resources together in a richer, more effective distributed
learning environment. This is a truly transformative vision. A number
of institutions have begun taking steps along this path. It's a good
path.
The fourth level
of vision, however, is the one I recommend. It is much like the third,
but with an added touch: its proposals recognize, from the beginning,
that each step forward involves tradeoffs and damage. When the innovator
can predict potential damage in advance, the proposal can include steps
to limit the harm.
Such predictions
are made easier by exploring parallels with the two earlier revolutions.
For example, we know that each revolution has immersed learners in a
larger set of possibilities for learning while increasing their distance
from a single teacher to which they are accountable. Thus each revolution
increases the chances for student passivity, floundering, and cheating.
The first step
toward limiting the harm is to explore current best practices. What
have been our best responses to passivity, floundering, and cheating
in the past? For example, we've challenged students with realistic projects,
used faculty with deep insight into student learning and life, offered
discussion sessions and seminars so that students could be observed
and challenged in small groups, paid attention to advising, and used
authentic assessment. In the Third Revolution, we'll need to think even
harder about how to help instructors (some of whom may no longer be
resident on campus) to work together to deal with these problems, which
are simply going to get worse. This is just one of the new "grand challenges"
posed by the Third Revolution -- research and experimentation challenges
that are too big for only one institution to handle.
Paradoxically,
while this revolution makes education more accessible, it also creates
new barriers to entry. Unfortunately, this risk is heightened when proponents
and government representatives hype virtual education mainly as a way
of saving money. The potential losers could include the same kinds of
people who have been slighted in the past: minds and talents we cannot
afford to lose. There is no one solution to this problem. The state
of Maine demonstrated one strategy by creating a virtual college based
on video and computing with points of access in high schools, helping
to ensure that the rural poor would not be shut out. Another access
problem is that each enlargement of the distributed learning environment
gives students more options and thus puts more stress on their ability
to take responsibility for their own learning. Many of today's adults
and young adults were not well served by their upbringing or their school
education and will need extra help. If every institution and every state
legislature says, "Right, but that's not my department," we're in for
trouble. How to help such students is another grand challenge.
A third challenge
is one of organizational fragmentation. Technology is no longer a niche
activity. But many universities and colleges are still organized as
though technology were the preserve of a few experts and can be handled
apart from the main academic concerns of the institution. The structure
of the institution thus blocks its ability to make major improvements
in teaching and learning with technology. This is one reason why hundreds
of colleges and universities have begun Teaching, Learning, and Technology
Roundtables: to share information and coordinate strategies as their
institutions prepare to make major improvements in teaching and learning.
These three challenges,
and others like them, pose serious barriers to the success of the Third
Revolution. We do not know whether the Third Revolution will be good
or bad for most learners and scholars. It may be affordable, or it may
bankrupt us. It may narrow the gap between "haves" and "have-nots,"
or it may widen the chasm. It may enrich education, or it may eviscerate
learning. In this period of uncertainty, evaluation is becoming more
crucial. We are less likely to make real progress if we do not take
the time to see what we've just done and where we're going. The Flashlight
Program of the TLT Group is working to provide tools and training for
institutions and instructors who want to take a hard look at just what
is going on in their programs.
The educator Clark
Kerr wrote: "The most enduring institutions of Western civilization
are the Roman Catholic Church; legislative assemblies and other government
entities in Great Britain, Iceland, the Isle of Man and Switzerland;
the Bank of Siena; and 61 universities."2 Those institutions,
and thousands of others like them, are no longer quite so stable. They
are in the early stages of a profound transformation. There is no "Iron
Law of History" that will determine the outcome of that transformation.
The direction and the results of the Third Revolution will be determined
by thousands of thoughtful and thoughtless choices being made today
by institutions, governments, and corporations around the world.
Endnotes
1. Steven W. Gilbert,
"A Vision Worth Working Toward," in TLT Group, TLTR "Levers for Change"
Resource Book, vol. 1.0 (Washington, D.C.: TLT Group, 1999), 131 - 44.
2. Clark Kerr,
Higher Education Cannot Escape History: Issues for the Twenty-First
Century (Albany: State University of New York, 1994).
Resources
A different version
of this article, "Technology in Higher Learning: A Third Revolution"
can be found at the TLT Group Web site: http://www.tltgroup.org/resources/dthirdrev.html.
This site includes a free worksheet that you can use with groups at
your institution to explore the parallels and differences among the
reading-writing revolution, the campus revolution, and the Third Revolution.
See also Stephen C. Ehrmann, "Improving a Distributed Learning Environment
with Computers and Telecommunications," in Robin Mason and Anthony Kaye,
eds., Mindweave: Communication, Computers, and Distance Education (Oxford:
Pergamon Press, 1989), 255 - 59. The Flashlight Program is described
on the Web at http://www.tltgroup.org/programs/flashlight.html.
The Instructional Management Systems Project is described on the Web
at http://www.imsproject.org.
The Pew Grant Program in Course Redesign is a $6 million institutional
grant program that focuses on large-enrollment introductory courses,
which have the potential of influencing significant numbers of students
and generating substantial cost savings. See http://www.center.rpi.edu.
Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtables are described on the
Web at http://www.tltgroup.org/programs/round.html.
Virginia Tech's Math Emporium is detailed at http://www.emporium.vt.edu.
