Driving these changes have been society's expectations about what students need to learn--its changing definition of learning--as well as the delivery mechanisms, or the "technology," available to serve that need. Colonial colleges, whose mission centered on the moral preparation of civic leaders, relied on the residential campus to create a community of shared values. Shifting the emphasis of institutional mission to the practical application of knowledge, the land-grant movement used the lecture as an efficient mechanism for professors to share the results of their research. The teaching infrastructure that emerged remains the predominant pedagogical model at most of our campuses today.
Is our definition of learning changing? And if so, why? What now constitutes the learning we are seeking--e.g., is it mastery of a body of knowledge, critical thinking ability, communications skill, preparation for a career or useful life, the ability to find needed information, the ability to interact with others? If colleges and universities themselves change in response to society's definition of learning, how are our institutions responding to today's meaning of the word? Does our current teaching infrastructure, with its emphasis on the traditional classroom, provide an effective mechanism to serve a newly defined view of learning?
It seems to me that our definition of learning is changing in a number of ways. We are beginning to have different ideas about what students need to learn. Driven by the information explosion, or the knowledge explosion, our expectations about what a college student should learn at the baccalaureate level are changing. Increasingly, viewing a college education as mastery of a body of knowledge or a complete preparation for a lifetime career is becoming outmoded. Instead, we recognize that graduates need to have acquired skills, such as critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and effective communication, along with such abilities as finding needed information and working well with others.
For example, the Big Six accounting firms have declared that no one can master the content of their discipline in an undergraduate education. Rules change so fast that accountants must continually relearn them throughout their professional lives. The Big Six want graduates not who know everything, but who have the capacity to learn. It is difficult to think of a profession that does not share that requirement. How many of our institutions are rethinking and redesigning their curricula to reflect the shift from teaching content to enabling students to develop lifelong learning skills? How many of our faculty understand the implications of the information explosion and have reengineered their courses accordingly?
We are seeing dramatic changes in who is learning. Only 43 percent of the nation's undergraduates are under the age of 25 and attending a four-year college on a full-time basis. What we think of as traditional undergraduates--those who are 18-22 years old, attending full- time, and living in college housing--constitute less than one-fourth of all students in higher education. Adult students, who are primarily part-time and nonresidential, now make up higher education's "New Majority." Their view of higher education is frequently that of the consumer. As Patricia Kovel-Jarboe has noted, adult students are more likely to define quality in the language of the quality improvement movement--satisfaction of customer needs--than in the traditional measures of quality used in higher education: rich resources as represented by the size of libraries, staff-to- student ratios, and the number and size of grants and contracts won by faculty. Adult students look for increased competition between higher education providers to work to their advantage as consumers. How prepared are our institutions to serve this new majority? How well do we understand the consequences of not responding to their needs? Are our faculty ready to work with students who regard themselves as their equals, as purchasers of their services?
We are witnessing changes in where students learn. No longer confined exclusively to the classroom, credit-bearing learning now occurs in workplaces, from the office to the factory floor to submarines under the sea; in malls; in hotel rooms; and in the home. Enabled by the power of information technology, classroom learning now extends beyond a single campus to distant sites across the town, across the state, and across the country. How many of our institutions understand this profound shift away from the concept of the university as a place? How many of our faculty are thinking about new pedagogies that reach out to students, wherever they are?
We also have new tools available to assist us while we learn. Steve Ehrmann of the Annenberg/CPB project has pointed out that we live in a world richer in information and in the tools for using information than most of us can exploit because we lack the skills to use them. New visualization tools give us capabilities in addition to text in order to imagine, to analyze, to communicate. Powerful creative tools are available to produce newsletters, design homes and offices, create music. Electronic communication tools are creating global communities; computing and networking are shattering and reshaping individual jobs and entire industries. Are our colleges and universities preparing graduates not only to master these tools but also to enable them to acquire the higher-order thinking skills needed to use the tools effectively? How many of our faculty can use these tools skillfully themselves?
Another widely used tool, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), has contributed to our understanding of individual differences in the learning process. The MBTI describes four patterns of preferred learning styles: the ES (concrete active), the IS (concrete reflective), the EN (abstract active), and the IN (abstract reflective.) These patterns are not evenly distributed in the general population. The ES pattern is the most frequent, representing 50 percent of high school seniors; the IN pattern is the least frequent, representing about 10 percent. Recent studies have shown that the largest group of college students consists of concrete active learners, who learn best from concrete experiences that engage their senses, that begin with practice and end with theory, and so on. As Charles Schroeder recently pointed out in Change magazine, the overwhelming majority of college faculty prefer the IN (abstract reflective) pattern, creating an increasing disparity between teacher and learner. How many of our institutions are aware of the results of this important research and are moving to customize their courses? How can our faculty respond to diverse learning patterns when their primary pedagogy consists of classroom lecture?
Our current system was developed to serve a different student population and is based on old assumptions about teaching (e.g., viewing the teacher and the classroom as the only delivery method) and learning (e.g., mastery of a body of knowledge as the way to prepare for life.) What was once the most effective and efficient way to teach and learn--the research university model of faculty who create knowledge and deliver it to students via lectures--now cracks under the strain of meeting new learning demands. As an old technology, the traditional classroom suffers from severe limitations, in both its on-campus and its off-campus versions. We need a better system of learning to enable students to acquire knowledge. We need to create a support system for faculty who want to teach in this new way. We need a national learning infrastructure.
How effective is our current system of teaching and learning in serving the new definition of learning? Not very. Inhibiting its effectiveness are outmoded assumptions about who students are and about the teaching and learning process. Classroom-based, residential institutions were developed to serve a relatively homogeneous student population, a population quite different from today's students. Prior to the 1960s, college students were similar in age (young), sex (male), ethnicity (white), and economic means (affluent.) The size of the nation's student body was relatively small, reaching about 3.2 million in 1960. The collegiate experience, itself a homogeneous one, constituted a rite of passage with widely accepted milestones along the way. Notions about the small liberal arts college as the best form of higher education reflect that long-past era of shared purpose in educating, or socializing, a common student body.
Today's student body is characterized by heterogeneity: in age (only 43 percent are under age 25), sex (women account for nearly 55 percent of all undergraduates), ethnicity (more than one student in six is nonwhite), and economic means (students from all socioeconomic classes attend college.) Now that approximately 14 million students attend college, American higher education is a mass phenomenon. Residential education alone simply cannot serve the needs of today's students: it is too restrictive, it is too expensive, and it is often inappropriate. Clearly, residential education remains a suitable option for the minority of college students who match the pre-1960s profile. But for the millions of working adults who have already experienced their own rites of passage as they entered adulthood, all-night bull sessions in dormitories, pep rallies, and football games somehow lack in appeal.
Old assumptions about teaching and learning go hand in hand with old ideas about a homogeneous student body. Our current system supports a process whose focus is on teaching. Its premise is that students need to be taught a body of knowledge that enables them to prepare for a lifetime career. That system is, however, a relic of the past, when the teacher and the classroom were the only means available to deliver information and knowledge. That outmoded delivery system can be described as a teaching infrastructure.
Our highly autonomous institutions are organized according to a teacher- centered model of education. The rationale for the campus, and for maintenance of its extensive physical plant, is based on the assumption that students must travel to a place in order to be taught. Contrast that idea with its opposite expression--students must travel to a place in order to learn-- and the emphasis on teaching versus learning, as in today's system, becomes obvious. Students clearly do not need to travel to a place in order to learn. Under the current system, it is convenient for faculty to have students come to them in order to learn what faculty have to teach. Because students are confined to learning what a particular faculty attached to a particular institution have to offer, this arrangement in itself limits what students can learn. Our institutions are reminiscent of other kinds of industrial age organizations such as the factory and the department store--characterized by size and centralization--in contrast to the distributed, networked organization and mail-order shopping services of the 1990s.
Faculty-centered curricula
Faculty members and their interests dominate the teaching infrastructure. The infrastructure is based on the abilities and interests of faculty members themselves, who then build individual courses, curricula, and requirements around those interests. Faculty members have great latitude in organizing courses, selecting teaching and learning materials, and making conscious decisions about how best to represent and communicate their evolving views of their academic and professional specialties. Faculty members also select course materials for students based on highly individualistic judgments about such materials' educational value. Design all too frequently begins with the question, What do I want to teach? rather than, What do students need to learn? The concept of course design itself is indicative of a faculty-centered approach: faculty design, faculty select, faculty present. In the process, the student is often little more than a passive recipient of the outcomes of the faculty member's decision-making process.
Student services provided by professionals
Because the American professoriate has decided that its primary business consists of research and teaching, a panoply of student services are provided by an ever-increasing corps of student service professionals--services that were once provided by the faculty. The entire admissions process, from recruitment of prospective students to their selection and orientation, is handled by an admissions staff. Once admitted, students have their housing arrangements and classroom assignments managed by still more staff. Core student academic needs such as advisement and counseling, once an important faculty domain, are largely--and poorly--met by professional staff (or sometimes by computerized degree audits). What little faculty involvement there is in the advisement process all too often consists of nothing more than an impersonal sign-off on a registration card. The poor quality of most student services and the total abstinence of college faculty from the process are indicative of a teacher-centered environment; that is, student services exist to free the faculty rather than to serve genuine student needs.
In addition, the pedagogical model utilized in the current teaching infrastructure, based on industrial age concepts, cannot offer a high-quality learning experience. Fixed in time and space, the model declares that an academic year of two semesters together with courses that meet for 50 minutes on alternating days of the week is the only way to structure learning. Most students pursue their courses in large, on-campus groups, where lecture is the primary teaching paradigm. Credit hours serve as the standard of achievement, as in "I received three credits for that course." This one-size- fits-all model may have been appropriate to a homogeneous student population mastering a relatively standardized curriculum, but it conflicts with what we now know about the nature of learning. By their very nature, courses simply cannot respond to individualized learning issues. The lecture method prohibits student involvement and active learning. What we know about high-quality learning--the use of such techniques as mastery learning, cooperative learning, and discovery learning--implies a learning-by-doing model rather than the passive, classroom-based model that typifies the teaching infrastructure.
Finally, a teaching infrastructure is expensive to maintain. In addition to the high cost of maintaining a physical plant, the instructional model based on teaching is costly because it is labor-intensive. The often cited analogy of the Mozart symphony (it takes the same number of person-hours to perform a Mozart symphony today as it did when Mozart was alive) tells the tale. Used as a justification for arguing that higher education is one of those activities whose efficiency can be increased only at the margins, the Mozart analogy implies some kind of Platonic ideal of fixed full-time-equivalent (FTE) ratios. Most higher education funding schemes follow that assumption as well. This teaching model is simply incapable of meeting the learning needs of the twenty-first century at a reasonable cost. Think what it would cost the California State University System to serve its anticipated 700,000 new students using a fixed FTE-ratio model. But why would we want to perpetuate a model that suffers from such severe shortcomings in student access and quality, even if we could afford to?
Institutions of higher education
Institutions of higher education will continue to assist students in organizing their learning experiences and in linking them to appropriate instructional resources. The provision of high-quality student services will move to the top of the list in a learner-centered environment. Institutions will retain their degree-granting authority, determining the learning outcomes required for the degree and certifying that graduates have achieved them. But an institution's role of providing instruction for its "own" students will be radically different. The role of the physical plant will diminish as networked learning resources become more available. Faculties will continue to be important, but not as teachers: rather, as mentors, group project leaders, and designers of instructional experiences. Because of the widespread availability of self-paced learning materials, direct faculty intervention throughout the learning process will lessen.
Student-centered curricula
In a learner-centered environment, curriculum development will begin by asking what students need to learn. Through a process of individualized assessment, we will find out what students already know and how they learn best. Assessment will be both holistic--comparing where students begin in relation to the outcomes needed for the degree--and particular--repeating the process for the skills and knowledge needed for specific subject matters. Vast quantities of information and learning materials will be easily accessible via the network. Learning materials will not be course-based, but, rather, will be modularized to respond to individual learning needs and preferences. Materials will be delivered in a variety of formats depending on the individual's learning style. Evaluation of student learning will be an integral part of each set of learning materials, thus eliminating much of the labor- intensive grading process.
Just-in-time learning
A national learning infrastructure will support an information age pedagogical model in which learning can occur anytime and anywhere. Institutions will operate year-round; semesters and fixed class meetings will be a distant memory. Students will take as much or as little time as they need to complete the learning required. Just-in-time learning will be the norm. Students will access only those learning modules they find necessary, whenever and wherever they need them. Self-paced, independent study
A national learning infrastructure will make possible a new kind of student. Tomorrow's students will resemble today's research faculty and will possess qualities of increased independence and self-reliance. No longer will students be passively taught by teachers who organize the learning experience for them. Students will learn how to find and use learning materials that meet their own individual learning needs, abilities, preferences, and interests; they will learn how to learn. Faculty will encourage and guide students to use the rich information resources available to students and to work collaboratively when appropriate.
Electronic collaboration
Physical contact will be less important to students, except perhaps on residential campuses designed explicitly for 18-year-olds. Even on those campuses, however, physical contact between students and faculty will be reduced, while video-based electronic contact across the network will increase. Students will spend time in small discussion groups or working on collaborative projects with their peers when appropriate. Again, faculty intervention will be limited, for one of the explicit goals of a learner-centered environment is greater independence for students.
The difficult task before us is to navigate the transition from a teacher- centered environment to a learner-centered one. But the time is right, and new voices with a vision of that future are raised every day. More and more of our community are beginning to understand and to agree with Alan H. Leader, dean of the School of Business at Southern Connecticut State University:
"The purpose and outcome of our educational enterprise is learning, not teaching. Teaching is what we do. Colleges do not exist in order for us to teach but so that students can learn. We should be able to describe the outcome of our educational activities in terms of added value to our students, i.e., additions to a student's knowledge and skills as he or she progresses through our degree program. The focus must be on the student, not the instructor."
This is the difference between a teacher-centered environment and a learner- centered one; these are the ideas that will guide us as we create a national learning infrastructure.
During the past decade or so, a variety of technology-mediated learning environments have emerged, including stand-alone, computer-assisted instruction (CAI) applications; networked information resources; experimentation via new modes of communication (e.g., computer conferencing); and distance learning developed by both individual institutions and consortial or statewide efforts and offered primarily, though not exclusively, via television.
These new technology-mediated learning environments illustrate possible solutions to higher education's problems, but they do so in a piecemeal fashion. Some increase access (e.g., distance learning and networked resources) and some improve quality (e.g., multimedia, interactive learning applications) but few control costs. Instead, most of these applications "bolt on" to the traditional classroom structure, thereby adding to the cost of instruction.
Ever since higher education became a mass phenomenon, colleges and universities have made significant use of cost control measures. The 200-seat lecture hall, graduate student teaching assistants, adjunct faculty, and the like exist for purposes of controlling costs rather than improving educational quality. Because they tend to mirror their on-campus counterparts, distance- learning applications that extend the classroom via telecommunications do a reasonable job of controlling costs. But while decades of educational research have proven that these approaches are "as good as" the face-to-face classroom, they fail to improve on the inherent limitations of the lecture method, thereby sacrificing quality. Clearly, it is not difficult to meet one of higher education's goals of increased access, controlled costs, or improved quality by itself. The trick is to find a way to achieve all three at once.
Building Advanced Networks
To realize the vision of an information age pedagogical model in which learning can occur anytime and anyplace, we must have a robust national information infrastructure (NII)--an advanced, broadband network--as proposed by the Clinton-Gore Administration.
Why is the network so essential? After all, we can point to many examples of stand-alone, self-paced, immersion learning applications that improve educational quality. But the problem is that they stand alone: in one class, in one room, at one institution. They are neither replicable nor scalable. As long as students have to go to a lab, as long as faculty have to move equipment to a space separate from where they work and from where students learn, logistical problems will continue to dominate. In a non-networked environment, the need for staff to manage the process creates further obstacles: either there are not enough support staff to do the job, or the costs of providing sufficient staff are prohibitive.
By contrast, Internet-based applications such as e-mail, gopher, and mosaic servers are widely diffused in higher education. The Internet, forerunner of the NII, represents new possibilities in communication, collaboration, and delivery. But until today's limited-bandwidth Internet expands to a widely accessible broadband network, stand-alone approaches, with their attendant logistical problems, will continue to present a significant obstacle.
Creating New Instructional Materials
Peter Drucker has pointed out that in order for a new technology to be successful, it must do the old job ten times better. This makes a lot of sense to me. When we think of successful deployments of technology in higher education--word processing, electronic mail, course registrations, and electronic card catalogs--it is clear that each "does the job" at least ten times better than what it has replaced. By comparison, currently no instructional software application at the collegiate level comes even close to meeting Drucker's requirement. A national learning infrastructure requires the creation and widespread availability of high-quality, self-paced learning materials.
Such materials must have two fundamental characteristics: they must be modularized into small components, and they must include assessment of student learning. Modularization is necessary in order to respond flexibly to individual learning needs and preferences, thus improving the quality of learning. Learning modules must be available in a variety of formats that correspond to differences in individual learning styles. Via the network, students should be able to access the learning modules they need, whenever and wherever they need them, and to take as much or as little time as necessary to complete the learning required.
As a strategy, modularization offers advantages beyond responsiveness to students. A national body of learning materials, if modularized, can be used flexibly by individual institutions. Modularization avoids the whole course problem, with its attendant difficulties of gaining agreement among diverse faculty and institutions about appropriate content. The best example of how a national body of learning materials might be created can be found in the CUPLE project in physics. Participating physicists create instructional modules according to an agreed-upon standard. These modules are reviewed by national peers before they become part of the body of material. Thus, both creators and users are assured of consistency and quality, and the result is a growing body of instructional materials that can be used in diverse settings.
A second characteristic of effective instructional materials is the integration of student learning assessment. Built-in assessment accomplishes two objectives: it facilitates individualization of learning, thereby improving quality, and it reduces faculty intervention, thereby containing costs. First, students need to be assessed to determine how they best learn. Next, students must be assessed to find out what they already know. Throughout the learning process, students need to be assessed to find out how much they have learned. Finally, students must be assessed once they have completed the material in order to certify that learning has happened. No teacher-based learning environments are able to individualize the learning process in this way. Again and again, the literature argues that the ability to individualize the learning process represents perhaps the greatest potential of computer- based learning. The problem is that few computer-based materials currently in existence include even some of the four stages of assessment; none includes all. Despite all the talk, despite all the anticipation, we have yet to see college-level learning products that fulfill the promise.
Result: Alternative Learning Environments
Approximately 80 percent of the costs of colleges and universities are attributable to personnel costs; consequently, controlling costs means reducing the direct, personal intervention of faculty where possible in the teaching and learning process. The availability of a vast quantity of learning materials easily accessible via the network will make possible the creation of new kinds of learning environments. By lessening the need for direct faculty intervention in the learning process and by increasing the ability of students to find and use learning materials on their own, we can create more-cost- effective instruction.
Administrators love to blame the faculty for their inability to bring about change. But it is clear that the changes most needed to create a learning infrastructure must take place at the institutional level. Individual faculty members can conduct individual experiments that point the way to systemic change, but they cannot make significant, systemic changes by themselves. Furthermore, in many cases, faculty have little control over the institutional factors that inhibit the creation of alternative learning environments such as class meeting times, contact-hour requirements, registration systems, classroom assignments, and equipment purchase and deployment.
The weakness of focusing on individual faculty members as a strategy for change can be demonstrated by assessing two approaches to stimulating new learning environments at the national level. The National Science Foundation curriculum reform program has spent millions of dollars on awards to individual faculty members to improve individual courses at individual institutions. Similarly, in the 1980s, IBM spent millions funding more than 3,000 individual faculty projects in its Advanced Education Projects. Both the NSF and IBM meant well, but both of their programs failed to achieve results beyond the individual classroom.
By comparison, the NSF's advanced networking program began with a vision of a national high-speed communications network, and it leveraged federal dollars to stimulate public/private partnerships to build it. That strategic approach led to the creation of the Internet as we know it today. Higher education needs to begin with a clear vision of what it is trying to accomplish in the field of technology-mediated learning. Too often, discussions about the integration of technology and instruction begin with the question, Why hasn't it worked? This is usually followed by, How can we get them to use it? Technology is an enabling mechanism; it is not an end in itself. Until institutional leaders can clearly state why we want "them" to use "it," or what we want them to use it for, we will fail to make significant progress.
When we move to the public policy arena, we find regulations and funding formulas based on this paradigm of quality, this time in the form of FTE counts, contact-hour definitions, and financial aid requirements. Each of these policy positions reinforces the idea of credit for contact. The fact that distance learning students are frequently ineligible for various kinds of federal and state financial aid is indicative of the problem. While alternatives to the credit-for-contact standard do exist, these outcome-based standards need to become the rule rather than the exception. We need to create a better framework at the public policy level for stimulating new approaches to instruction and for measuring institutional effectiveness.
At the same time, we need to help those industries develop a strategic understanding of how to create a market for their products. Currently, content experts and their publishers rely on hard-coded approaches to developing software for learners. Such approaches do not scale, however; that is, the resulting materials do not readily transfer across hardware platforms, operating systems, networks, and institutions. As Bill Graves has observed, the Internet succeeds precisely because of its non-proprietary, open-systems approach to networking. No one owns the Internet's transport and middleware standards and protocols, but many profit from them. Similarly, the creation of a national learning infrastructure requires a non-proprietary, system-independent approach.
The need for standards and common protocols is catalyzing new partnerships almost weekly in the digital industry. That partnership philosophy must be extended into the educational arena, making it possible for many operating system companies and telecommunications companies to participate in development activities.
It is time to turn our attention to creating something new. It is time to move beyond the walls of our individual colleges and universities to join forces with other institutions, with corporations, and with public policy makers to revitalize American higher education. Together we can create wealth. Together we can create a national learning infrastructure that will serve the learning needs of our nation as we enter the twenty-first century.