Pressures on Higher Education: Transformation of the Enterprise at Port 80: Boardwalk

What pressures is the Internet putting on the features of the higher education industry? How are the trends affecting both the Factory Model and the Apprentice Model? Where are the institution and both teaching processes vulnerable?

Where does the Internet put pressures on these models? Are all pressure points equally vulnerable? What forces will resist the pressures?

What parts of these processes are most likely to be disintermediated? Where will new business models reintermediate?

Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be.
- David Thornburg

If the Internet succeeds in reshaping these models, what will they look like afterwards? Can they survive with enough coherence and integrity to even keep the names factory and apprentice, or will we need new names for these new models?

The Internet lets the teacher break down the classroom walls and throw away the clock. Students can access a virtual classroom anywhere and any time.

The Factory Model scales. It works for ten students in a small room, a hundred in an auditorium, or a thousand online. Texts-on-demand; machine-graded objective testing. Who needs live teachers, printed books, humane assessment?

The Apprentice model doesn't scale. Exceeding twenty students to one teacher is perilous. It, too, benefits from extending learning's place and time.

Present

Just as Napster clones threaten to disintermediate the traditional delivery of atom-based music, so the Internet threatens to disintermediate the traditional delivery of atom-based information.

What features of the Internet are putting pressure on the old models to disintermediate live teachers, printed textbooks, and physical lecture halls?

small, fast, cheap

Schools can afford more networked computers. The ROI for new library books compares very unfavorably to the ROI for new computers to access the billions of pages on the Internet.

Soon your belt buckle will do more than Windows does now. You will be able to walk up to any flat screen and go to the personal web site of anyone you recently stood near.

visual

Of the three types of learning and communicating -- oral, verbal, visual -- education has favored the oral transmission of knowledge and the written word. With high-bandwidth networks, visual learning and communicating can become more important. Many, especially highly verbal people who have succeeded because of that, will decry our lost literacy.

broadband multimedia; streaming media; two-way streaming media; interactive two-way video

In the factory model, the teacher can be replaced by an expert who is also an entertainer. A Nobel prize winner with Robin Williams' presentation skills will be available via video anytime, anyplace. Who needs to sit in a drafty lecture hall straining to hear tenured dead wood drone on?

networked

In a classroom where everyone has an open Internet connection and a mouse, who is going to listen to a lecture and take notes? At a Registrar's Office where all student records are online, who's going to stand in line?

Printed textbooks distributed through a bookstore are on the way out. Until recently, schools and libraries had far more information than the home. Now the average middle-class teenager online has access to more information in her bedroom than has ever existed in any library or school anywhere.

converged

Two separate networks for voice and data will quickly diminish. IP telephones will replace standard phone sets and, together with desktop computers, will increase workforce efficiency by letting the databases interact with the voice systems.

vulnerable: traveling to campus and waiting in lines for administrative records; the physical infrastructure of offices and clerks.

embedded

Less obtrusive in the classroom. The classroom no longer has to be set up like a piecework factory with the students staring at the backs of each other's heads from behind a forest of monitors.

Common objects have IP numbers and a full-fledged operating system. They'll be able to listen and speak. Paranoid, anyone?

universal

If not in this generation, then in the next, all students will have Internet access and know how to use it to both gather and publish information.

Policy-based management (access, quality of network service, etc.) on centralized policy servers.

Now that information is abundant, our challenge is no longer how to gain access to information, it is deciding what to make of it when we get it. ... This is not to suggest that knowledge is unimportant, only that it is not the end goal of our activities. The real value in this new era will come from what we add as human beings: our creativity.

The implications of this for education are profound. First, "teaching as telling" is dead in this new world. Instructivism needs to be replaced by constructivism, not because Piaget said so, but because it reflects a fundamental paradigm shift in how human beings will function in the world. ... Anyone who thinks they can "instruct" students and fill their minds with the information they need to last a lifetime is living in a fantasy world. The future is changing at light speed, not because it is evolving at the force of some hidden hand, but because we are actively inventing the future every day.

There is no question in my mind that education will transform itself to meet the needs of this new era. Whether schools will make the change is an open question.

A little-known proposal by U.S. officials to remove international trade barriers to higher education has infuriated many college leaders, who say federal policy is being unfairly set by for-profit-education providers, including distance-education institutions. The college officials say the proposal could end up undermining many institutions' independence.

A U.S. document submitted a year ago to the World Trade Organization ... asks WTO member countries to begin formal negotiations to reduce barriers that keep colleges, adult-education centers, and training services from offering courses to students in other countries.

ubiquitous

Students can get to the online classroom any time. With hand-held wireless connections, they can get to it anywhere. The new models break down the traditional classroom walls and throw away the clocks by providing current and timely information and interaction.

Lectures vs. Laptops
by Ian Ayres, Professor, Yale Law School
New York Times, March 20, 2001 (free registration required)

Something alarming happened in my contract law class. I asked that laptop computers be used only for note taking, and my students went ballistic.

Solitaire and Minesweeper are everywhere now in university classes. At Yale, where classrooms are wired to the Internet, students can also surf the Web, send e-mail or even trade stock. Soon the wireless Internet will make this possible at all schools. ...

Admittedly, students can mentally check out of class in other ways — for instance, by daydreaming or doodling. ...

Still, I was surprised at how brazenly my own students resisted my laptop restrictions. ... They argued that they were multitasking, staying productive during dead or badly taught portions of class. They said classroom surfing reduces sleepiness, increases their willingness to attend class, allows them to research legal questions being discussed, and so on. They said the professor has an incentive to teach more effectively when he or she must compete against other more interesting claims on students' attention.

Their arguments could apply equally well to the opera hall, the jury box or the church pew. Will the lure of technological stimulation someday overwhelm current mores about paying attention in those places, too? At least, we should try to stem the tide in the classroom. Few students say on their admissions applications, after all, that they intend classroom solitaire to be a central part of their educational experience.

distributed

intelligent

We call it the infinitely patient professor - the professor who will review it with you over and over again.

easy

adaptive: speech recognition, gesture recognition, text-to-speech conversion, language translation, and sensory immersion

trusted

standardized

OCW will make the course materials that are used in the teaching of virtually all of MIT's courses available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. Depending on the particular course or the style in which the course is taught, this could include material such as lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists, and assignments for each course.

MIT courses themselves will not be offered online. Rather, the goal of MIT OCW is to provide the content that supports an MIT education. We are hopeful that many people all over the world, particularly teachers, will find it to be a hugely valuable resource.

Backlash: restraining forces

people don't like change, especially when things are going well

organizations don't like change

people in power don't want the rules changed

people don't see the future clearly so they go the wrong way

people see an impossible future

people see the future quite clearly and work against it

The Web is yet another fad in education.

The Web-based classroom is too impersonal.

Putting lectures on the Web gives away the store; why would students come to class?

Webmaking is too hard to learn (and too expensive to outsource)

The Internet And Education
by Robert O. McClintock, Columbia University
Briefing the President, September 2000

The situation in industry is different from that in schools. Corporate workers lack tenure. When the boss says that the office is moving to computerized record keeping, for example, employees are given the choice of acquiring new technology skills or cleaning out their desks before being escorted out of the building. This approach (while a tad draconian) is extremely effective in ensuring that new technologies are adopted effectively by all who may benefit from them.

In schools, a different approach is taken. Tenured educators can resist wholesale attempts to force them to acquire new skills, and the idea that change is voluntary is so ingrained that the attitude applies across the board, tenure notwithstanding.

Paradigm shifts come when technologies are disruptive to the status quo. On this basis, it is safe to conclude that technology has thus far not produced a paradigm shift in education. Our underlying model of how teaching should be done remains much the same as it was in the pre-computer days. In fact, it remains almost unchanged since the time of Horace Mann.

Why do we persist in maintaining a structure in which it is hard for teachers to do the right things with their students?

Why do we persist in thinking that student performance can be reduced to a page full of numbers on a transcript?

Why do we allow schools to treat learners as pieces of a system rather than as sensitive human beings?

Future

The Internet. How is the business model of higher education being blown to bits? The unlimited reach of the Internet will disintermediate the very limited reach of the lecture hall. The real-time computing power of computers will disintermediate the hand-graded objective test. How will the Internet compete with the richness of the studio?

What new business models are arising? What richness in the classroom will be worth trading for the Internet's reach? How much will that added value be worth in tuition? Enough to support the institution?

productivity

Driving out costs is one thing the Internet is good at. Paper is the lowest-hanging fruit; eliminate it. But productivity is different.

Rather than ask how we can use computers to teach, we should be asking what we can teach now that we have computers. This is a fundamentally different question.

The point is simply this: If we truly want to see productivity improvements in education based on computer use, we need to think about the new opportunities that computers afford educators to explore topics that couldn't be addressed before. As long as we use computers to replicate curricular projects that could be done efficiently with paper and pencil, productivity enhancements are out of the question.

control

What happens in the classroom when the students, not the professor, do all the clicking? The lecture hall comes to resemble the painting studio, where the students do all the painting.

At a fundamental level, the Web challenges the authority of the professor in the classroom by democratizing information. It shifts the focus from production and delivery to customer and content -- from professor and lecture to student and information.

The original university was based on scarcity of knowledge. The post-Industrial Revolution university was based on hoarding knowledge. The traditional test is based on the teacher having all the "correct" answers and the students being punished if they cooperate to get them.

security

The traditional secrecy (the mumbo-jumbo of Latin) and scarcity of knowledge provided the security. Will such security be feasible or even desirable on the Internet?

privacy

Mass education has already made privacy problematic. If the professor doesn't know your name, if you identify your test by a student number, then your privacy is already assured.

Internet-based higher education will ask you to trade that privacy for personalization. Will privacy legislation empower government at the expense of liberty?


people and communities on the Web


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modified: February 15, 2002 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/port80/boardwalk/highered/pressures.htm

Pressures on the Model

Higher Education: Where teachers meet learners