TechTalks Transcript
The Transformation of Higher Education - Five Years Later.
Where Are We?
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Donald Norris [DN] |
January 11, 2001
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JB: Welcome to the Spring series of the year 2000 and to this session-�
HS: 2001, Judith.
JB: Oh, I did it again, right? Well, welcome to 2001. I realize that today is a real zero-one day. It's 01/11/01 day, so it's really a very digital day. But welcome to the CREN Tech Talk series for Spring of 2001 and to this session on Transformation of Higher Education-Five Years Later. Just Where Are We? You are here because it's time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and our session is coming to you today with the support of the CREN member institutions.
Let me welcome back Howard Strauss-I'm very pleased-of Princeton as the technology anchor for Tech Talk. Howard is a well-known web technology and portal expert, and for those of you who are wondering about whether portals are still hot, they are! Welcome, Howard.
HS: Thank you, Judith. I'm Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts. In this webcast, I invite you to join Judith and me in a lively technical dialogue with our guest expert, Donald Norris, that will answer the questions you'd like answered and ask those very important follow-up questions. You can join in this dialogue by sending your questions via e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this webcast. If we don't get to your questions during the webcast, we'll provide an answer in the webcast archives.
If Benjamin Franklin were to appear here today, he would be totally baffled by modern surgery, an airport, or people walking down the street talking on cell phones. But if he walked into most university classrooms and saw a professor at the front of the room, scribbling on a blackboard, he'd recognize immediately what was going on. In fact, he could likely just pick up the chalk and continue many lectures.
While the last century has seen a complete transformation of medicine, transportation and communications, education has hardly changed at all in the last three centuries. But with the availability of affordable personal computers of incredible power, interconnected by high speed, often wireless networks, it appears that we now have the power and the right tools to finally transform higher education. In fact, many experts in the field consider this transformation so significant that they refer to it as the start of the Information Age.
Not everyone would agree that computers are such a revolutionary and positive force. Yale University computer science professor David Golarter says that, and I quote, "We are not in an Information Age and computers and the Internet are not a revolutionary development in human history." He points out that the Internet is not the first invention to overcome geographical bounds and bring people together. Railroads, the Panama Canal, telegraphs, radios, fax machines and flying machines, among many other great inventions, he says, have brought people together and are as significant as the invention of computers.
Don Norris, today's expert, thinks that the notion of an Information Age does not go far enough. Don says we are on the threshold of something much more far-reaching which he calls the Knowledge Age in which post-undergraduate education will begin to assume the form of barrier-free perpetual learning with pervasive interactivity. Will the transformation of higher education change the very nature of universities? Will there still be courses, semesters, classrooms or degrees? Don thinks we will at least have to rethink and redefine concepts such as adult education and lifelong learning. In fact, Don suggests that what we call IT, or information technology, should really be called ICT as we look to use it to transform higher education. Whether the "C" in ICT stands for Communication, Collaboration, Confusion or Chaos-or perhaps all of them-remains to be seen.
One thing is certain, though. There are many universities, organizations and commercial firms committed to making Ben Franklin's future peeks at education as amazing to him as watching a heart transplant today. Just how the transformation of higher education will amaze Ben will be our topic of discussion on today's webcast of Tech Talk. Judith?
JB: Thank you, Howard, and as we are all starting to experience the transformation, I have to share that vision of someone walking down the street with a cell phone. I was passing by some folks today and they were just sitting down in a chair. There were two or three of them, kind of lined up not too far apart from each other, and they were all talking. But they weren't talking to each other, they were talking to their cell phones and someone on the other end of their cell phones. So we are, in fact, really going to be experiencing some new modes of collaboration.
So with that, I'm very pleased to welcome to Tech Talks today Donald M. Norris of Strategic Initiatives and of George Mason University. Don is the author of a number of publications from SCUP, the Society for College and University Planning. He is most well-known-I think that's probably true-for a publication called Transforming Higher Education-A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century. Thousands of higher education leaders experienced that book as a wake-up call to begin addressing the issues resulting from the reality of massive information technology/communication technologies and fusion into higher education. We have the opportunity today to hear Don's view on the state of the transformation after five years. In short, we hope to talk about today, what do we know in the year 2001 that we didn't know about in 1995? Welcome to Tech Talks, Don.
DN: Thanks very much, Judith and Howard, it's a pleasure to be here. You know, much does remain the same but a lot has changed. Over the past five years, we've seen lots of new tools for learning and academic support, new competitors and enhanced competition, expansion of the focus of learning innovation beyond traditional educations to extensions and continuing ed divisions, professional societies and associations and even for-profit learning enterprises. And in the past several years, we've seen the emergence of this notion of e-business which is using the tools of ICT to change the way we do business, including learning enterprises. This has led us to the concept and the term of eLearning which is using ICT to extend, enhance and enrich all learning experiences. And pretty soon, all learning will to some extent be eLearning. eLearning to my taste has become the front line of transformation today.
HS: Don, if we were just to look at the university today and then we were to look at it a few years from now, what - how is this going to look different to Ben Franklin or anybody who pops in?
DN: Well, I think that what really is going to be happening, Howard, is that the use of ICT will enable-�
HS: What do you want the "C" to be?
DN: I use communication, but you're right that it could be collaboration. And if it's chaos, it probably is going to be an interesting kind of chaos. But the use of ICT will enable us to create pervasive interactivity and what this is, is this is really sort of taking today's term of ubiquitous computing and expanding it into the communications piece. What will it be like when we are all connected with hand-held devices of various kinds, as well as those on our desks or in our homes, in our clothes and are able to communicate with one another, share information and insights?
HS: Isn't that just ubiquitous computing? All these wireless devices all interconnected. What's different about pervasive interactivity [inaudible]?
DN: Well, part of the difference is what we're going to use it for. The use of the term "computing" suggests that we're going to use it to manipulate information, engage in computation. What we're going to be doing is we're going to use this pervasive interactivity to change our relationships with one another, to be able to interact with people with a degree of frequency and intimacy that we haven't experienced. You only have to look at eight-year-olds and teenagers in Finland, the way they travel around in packs linked by their cell phones, to see how this kind of interactivity changed the way the social patterns and other patterns occur. And this is going to affect not just the way we work and live and recreate, but it's going to affect learning and all phases of our activities.
JB: You know, after we had our session preparing for today's session, it occurred to me that we may want to be thinking about surround learning. You know, we've got surround sound. We're almost going to be at the point where we're constantly surrounded by these communication tools such that we can be surrounded by learning as well as communication at all times.
DN: That's not a bad point at all. And it also hearkens to the fact that what really occurs is we're going to fuse these activities together in different ways. And what people are going to insist on is that they have the capacity to shape, not just the content and the mode, but the feel of these activities that they're engaging in.
HS: Don, do you see other forces besides ICT that are going to transform higher ed? I mean, are there going to be social changes-�
DN: Absolutely.
HS: --economic changes, other forces that are out there, the fact that we're becoming more of a global economy kind of thing? Are any of those things going to have a big impact on this transformation?
DN: Absolutely. The global economy has a huge impact, not just because it's raised the bar on learning and required people to learn a lot of new skills, but because it's created all sorts of hybridized new disciplines, both in the sciences and in the practice of business and other things that have required people to enhance their learning capabilities. But there are a number of other trends, too.
The biggest one, frankly, and the biggest social trend in the past 50 years is the changing role and capabilities of women and their place in the workforce and one only has to look at the numbers in American higher education to see how the number of women at every level has increased dramatically to the point where they are the majority force at the undergraduate level and many graduate programs that have not been traditionally the province of women. And this is being reflected in the continuing learning and lifelong learning as well, so that's a huge development. And then of course, you have this notion of using pervasive interactivity-this is a social trend-to be able to telecommute. And for people not only to use telecommuting to only go into the office two or three times a week, but only come to campus periodically. And many institutions in metropolitan settings are now running into cohorts of students who want to negotiate with the campus so that they only have to come to campus one day a week.
HS: Don, how do you see this playing out in undergraduate vs. graduate vs. postgraduate education? Is this transformation going to look different in those settings?
DN: Yes, it will. In some ways it will look the same, and of course, it's impossible to talk about undergraduate learning or graduate learning or postgraduate learning as though each of those is monolithic. Each of them is very diverse and rich within each of those categories. But eLearning will affect each of them differently. Undergraduate learning for 18 to 22 year olds is still something that a great many people are going to want to engage in on campus because, after all, campus is more than just a learning experience. It's an incredible socialization experience as well as probably the greatest entertainment venue for young people that's ever been created.
HS: But I've heard that the number of what are called non-traditional students, students who are not 18 to 22 who are involved in undergraduate education is just skyrocketing. There's a huge number of folks who are working and trying to get their undergraduate degrees in the evening. Are they going to be treated differently than the 18-to-22's who are going to this expensive camp you're talking about?
DN: Well, the interesting thing is that people are going to be able to make choices about what option they choose and how they're treated and what they receive. And they're going to really make those choices about whether they're going to be on campus or off, how they're going to blend work and learning and what the choices they're going to make about the patterns and cadences of their lives as it affects work and learning. And we have never seen the complexity of combinations like we're going to see within the next couple of years as learners demand that institutions create for them that diversity of experience.
HS: Do you think that there will be more people getting their undergraduate education without being on campus?
DN: I think there will be. I think people will make those choices. Some people who want to engage in it that way will do so, but others who want a traditional experience will continue to do so. Now, we have to realize that traditional institutions over the past 20 years have experienced tremendous enrollment growths, not largely through traditionally aged students but through older students. And it's with those older students and the continuing growth in older learners where you're going to see the greatest impact of these learning choices and many, many more of those people will choose to engage in eLearning experiences that are largely virtual, where they do not have to come onto a campus.
JB: Don, I think the big message from the '95 publication is the fact that we're in a period of really tremendous growth in the education as an industry. What do we know about how, number one, are we still going to be growing just dramatically and what do we know now about the kind of growth that's happening from the perspective of five years?
DN: Well, it's hard to make some of the comparisons because the statistics, some of the non-traditional learning areas are not as good as the traditional learning statistics. But let's take masters' degrees, for example. Masters' degrees over the past 20 or 30 years have been an area of huge growth and the masters' degree has really become sort of a surrogate for a whole bunch of learning experiences that people wanted to achieve after they received their baccalaureate degrees. Well, the big growth areas now are two kinds of learning that are substitutes for formal masters' degrees, namely certificates and diplomas often offered by traditional institutions through their extension divisions and continuing ed divisions, and many of them taught not by faculty but by distinguished practitioners. And then the second category of post-baccalaureate learning is advanced tradecraft learning taught by associations and professional societies.
HS: What do you mean by "tradecraft?" Tradecraft sounds to me like carpenters and plumbers and things like that.
DN: Yes, well, it can be that, of course, but it also can be surgeons. Hand surgeons, neurosurgeons, engineers in advanced computing areas. Some of the societies that are doing the most exciting things in learning these days are outfits like the computer society of the IEEE which has 100,000 members and 150 conferences a year at which they offer tutorials in advanced computational topics. And these are some of the most active and immersive learning environments and experiences that are occurring and they're growing precipitously.
HS: But just a question about these tutorials. These tutorials last for, what, a couple hours?
DN: Most of them last for a couple hours, yes, associated with one of these special conferences. But they are in the process of moving them online as well so that people will have the choices of doing them physically, virtually or in a mixed mode.
HS: When you call them tutorials, you don't mean that they are necessarily computer tutorials, you just mean that they are a structured learning experience?
DN: They're structured learning experiences, typically a half day.
JB: Okay.
DN: Dealing with an emerging, hybridized concept in a particular area, be it a science, be it a technology discipline or a practical discipline. And these are, as I said, the most active, immersive learning experiences that I've seen.
HS: But don't we need to hook a bunch of these things together to turn them into a course? I mean, it seems like it's a good idea to sit down with people in your field and learn some technique or skill, but if I wanted to turn myself into a webmaster or Java programmer or whatever, it's going to take me more than a couple hours.
DN: Absolutely. And what professional societies and associations in partnership with leading edge universities are doing is figuring out how to tie these things together, either for academic credit or for competencies that are certified by the professional society.
HS: You talk about the professional societies doing this kind of thing. How does this help the universities, or what role do you the universities play in doing this if this is being done by the professional societies?
DN: Well, typically what's happening is the professional societies are looking to work with universities as partners so that the universities can provide the infrastructure and the knowledge of e-pedagogy so that they put that together with the content, the expertise and the practitioners from the association and that combination is like putting peanut butter and chocolate together. And that's going to be probably the framework for most of these programs in the future.
JB: So you are predicting that, say, in the next five years the universities and associations will start building alliances for this kind of training?
DN: Yes, they're doing it now and as the eLearning expands in capability and popularity, these sorts of things are going to take off.
HS: Are alumni associations going to be pushing this? I mean, where's the impetus to make this thing happen?
DN: Absolutely! Well, you know, Charlie Steger, the new president of Virginia Tech has announced Virginia Tech's aspiration to be the continuing learning agent for their alumni and I think as alumni associations portalize their offerings and activities, they will provide a platform for doing this sort of thing, in collaboration with the institution and perhaps in collaboration with professional societies and other groups. Partnerships are going to be magnificent.
HS: What about the role of commercial firms? I've heard it said that for the first time in history that commercial firms see education as a way to make money.
DN: Yes. Well, most of the commercial firms are interested in the big-ticket item courses in high demand areas. They're interested, for example, in the top 25 undergraduate courses and in high demand undergraduate and masters' degree programs in business and nursing and engineering and other areas where they think they can make some inroads. Most of the things we're talking about in the certificates and diplomas and advanced tradecraft learning do not have a huge base but they are a niche that continues to grow and expand and can be, I think, very lucrative.
HS: Wouldn't companies like Lucent or Sony or whoever actually put together niche courses to get people that have just the skills they really need? It seems like there's a shortage of lots of high tech skills and I mean, if I were a company, I might think of offering a course just so I could get some people.
DN: It's a good point, Howard. Most of those opportunities are going to be at instrumental level skills, things that are [inaudible] out with by Microsoft, Novell certifications, things of that nature and other kinds of technical skills. There are some companies out there in the technology-in the introductory and intermediate level technology training that are looking to make some inroads and I think that's going to be interesting to see how successful they're going to be.
JB: One of the phenomena we saw really happening five years ago, Don, was the development of virtual universities, you know, the Western Governors, California Virtual, the southeast or-there was something in the southeast that was put together.
DN: Yes.
JB: We haven't - you know, that movement seems to be being halted just a little bit, or at least pausing a bit. Why is that so? Is that a good idea or not such a good idea?
DN: Well, I think some of the early virtual universities ran into problems with capitalization, namely the California Virtual University and the Western Governors, I think, ran into some difficulties with their focus. Others, the southern regional one looks like it's going right well. The Kentucky program is apparently doing well. The biggest market for the products or the learning experiences from virtual universities is, I think, on traditional campuses. So many of our major public universities, it takes students five years to get a four year degree, some of which of course is due to bad choices on their part, but a good part of which is due to their not being able to get the courses that they need. And I think over time, public policy and legislators are not going to smile kindly on public institutions that don't use virtual learning to make it possible for people to finish in four years.
JB: But who do you think is going to win out, you know, if we put the commercial folks on one hand that are developing those 25 base courses, you know, that constitute a huge percentage of course credit hours and then the virtual universities? Do you have a sense as to how those are going to play out over the next few years?
DN: Well, I think it's going to be a mixed bag. I think some of the commercial providers, if they're able to-and this includes some of the commercial ventures being spawned by the major universities - if they're able to create some really fine offerings in the very popular courses, they may be very, very successful. I say the very popular courses because the way they're going about it, investing in high production quality materials, focusing on the traditional undergraduate or graduate market, you have to have a large base for that to be attractive.
HS: You mentioned, Don, the commercial arms of universities, and in fact a lot of universities are starting what amounts to dot-coms controlled by universities. Is that going to become a more common thing? And in fact, is that going to be a necessary thing to make this transformation of higher ed work?
DN: I think it's going to be more common. It's going to be a good thing. Not all of them are going to succeed. The most important things that universities and their skunk works that they spin off are going to find is they're going to develop the competencies and how to make all this work. And those competencies are very important because five years from now, institutions are going to have to have essentially made every learning experience to some extent eLearning.
HS: So do you think that universities have to have these things to pick up these competencies and learn enough about the stuff? They can't do it without spinning these things off?
DN: Well, there are other ways to do it, such as through partnerships and through engaging their faculty. Part of the reasons that in the past the faculty software and faculty learning products have not really succeeded is that they've not been scalable beyond courses of 40 or 50 or even 500. And recently, through the good work of the Center for Academic Transformation at Rensselaer and the P program and a variety of others, there has been some very good work done on what has to happen to scale up courseware development so that it appeals to broader and is financially attractive for broader audiences. And also how to utilize information technology to reform and reengineer, essentially, large lecture sections. There's some very exciting things going on in that venue that both improve the quality of learning and reduce the cost and the things they're doing at Rensselaer and at the Math Emporium and programs at Virginia Tech and others are examples of that.
JB: Let me just jump in here right now and invite our listeners that now would be a good time to send questions in to expert@cren.net with your question for Don. With that, Howard?
HS: Yeah, Don, a lot of people have said - especially a lot of faculty, a lot of faculty I talk to - have said that we've invested a fortune in information technology for instruction and a lot of folks see very little return on that. I mean, if that's an accurate perception, how's that going to change as we transform higher ed?
DN: Well, you know, when you look back over the past 30 years, Howard, at the investment in technology in different sectors, in most sectors it's taken a while for that technology to pay off because essentially people have used it to do the same things somewhat more efficiently and it takes a while to figure out how are we going to do things truly differently?
In higher education, what we've done is we've created a technology base and turned loose all these wonderfully creative faculty to use it and many of them have done that, but as I said, have not created applications that scale up in any way or create any real economies or enhancements. And what we're starting to do through the reengineering of large lecture sections, through the cohort-based approach that institutions like University of Maryland, University College have done where they are creating online cohorts of learners, 25 learners per cohort, dealing with a faculty mentor or a practitioner/mentor who is not a talking head but rather a learning guide and there's a whole body of knowledge available online for that cohort to use. And the cohorts are learning as much from one another as they are from the faculty person. Those kinds of advances are going to change both the nature of the learning experience and are going to improve the economics.
JB: Who do you think the faculty will be that will be the - you called them the practitioner. Are you saying that we're going to have a lot more part time faculty?
DN: Well, I think in the scope of things, as certificates, diploma, tradecraft learning expand, serving people who are 22 to 122, and as people have the chance to do more and more of that learning through their lives and for people who are in professions that are changing all the time and hybridizing, having to do that actively all through their lives, it makes sense that the numbers will start to shift so that you have more and more of that kind of learning ongoing and the traditional preparatory track of learning, bachelor's, masters, Ph.D., postdoc, or bachelor's, specialization, postdoc - those traditional modes are going to be a smaller proportion of the total learning enterprise. They're still going to be hugely important, but the balance of power, if you will, is likely to shift.
HS: So we're not going to have Ph.D.'s teaching people with no degrees?
DN: Um-�
HS: I mean, I'm just wondering what's - are we going to have more Ph.D.'s, fewer? The idea, is it going to seem outdated and will go away?
DN: The interesting thing is impossible to say what'll happen to the Ph.D. because it's not a simple demand phenomenon of whether people want the Ph.D. It's that we've tied the Ph.D. programs into the production and the teaching program so much-�
HS: What do you mean by the production?
DN: Well, the Ph.D.'s, people who are pursuing the Ph.D. who are graduate teaching assistants or graduate research assistants are such an important part of the lives of our traditional research universities.
HS: So they're part of the teaching labor force.
DN: Yeah, part of the labor force and that model is likely to continue. Rather, even for people who receive Ph.D.'s, the way they learn through the rest of their lives is not just to learn more and more about less and less, but if you're applying that Ph.D. on a [inaudible] way, you have to go forward and learn other things. And I mean, the model I use is that rather than a pyramid - which is the Ph.D. model, more and more about less and less - you're talking about an inverted truncated pyramid with people in an active, practitioning professional life or scientific life have to bounce around and learn all sorts of new things, some of them at a highly specialized level, in order to practice a profession these days.
HS: When we do this kind of tradecraft learning, how are we going to do assessment? How are we going to determine who's done good stuff and how are we going to - I mean, when are we going to replace - you said we were going to replace, I guess, degrees or diplomas with certificates for this tradecraft learning.
DN: Well, there'll be-�
HS: How's that all going to look different?
DN: It's a good question and I don't - my crystal ball's a little cloudy there, but I think what's going to happen is that the professional societies and associations are going to play a bigger role in identifying competencies and when you go through one of these advanced tutorials, you'll have a competency assessment directly associated with it. And with that competency assessment, it may have to be repeated, and the record of it will be kept by the professional society in sort of a perpetual transcript of competencies.
HS: So the IEEE will say that this is what you have to do to prove that you can design digital circuits of some flavor or other? I mean, they'll set the competencies.
DN: They will set the competencies. They will set the competencies and there, of course, are limitations to that and all sorts of barriers to be overcome, but most of the professional societies are looking at playing greater roles in that and figuring out how they can do it.
HS: When you talk about this pervasive interactivity - and I think you even mentioned some kind of learning space that kind of surrounds you - could you tell us a little more about this pervasive learning thing that's wherever you are, all the time?
DN: Well, what's going to happen is that learning spaces are going to be everywhere. Every place is going to be a potential learning space. And in fact, public buildings, we are now building public buildings that support the fusion of activity. They have places where you can go and hook up, places where you can go that are quiet places, places where you can go if you have a team and work on things. And you only have to look at university buildings like the University Center at George Mason University which is sort of like an academic mall to support work, learning, recreation, commercial activities, all these things together so that people can switch easily from these activities. And in that environment, it's easy to see how you can learn most anywhere.
Most community centers are going to have a learning component to them. They won't just be community learning centers. They'll deal with the social services, they'll deal with job issues, they'll deal with training and placement and other things. This is all going to be possible through this pervasive activity and the capacity to engage in this anywhere, but especially in physical places that are conducive to it.
HS: Okay, we have a question that just came in from a Vice President of Information Systems at Graceland University, Dennis McElroy, and Dennis says, "How do you balance on-site learning on campus vs. distance learning in respect to the experience for the student? Many universities have developed reputations based upon" - I guess this is an image question - "on-campus resources. How do we get the look and feel of a specific university across to the student? If we don't, it seems that any university will do, as they will appear rather generic?" So I think Dennis is asking us a "how do we maintain the image of the university" question.
DN: It's a good question, Dennis. You know, remember that in the Internet world, many dot-com companies have been harshly surprised to find that bricks and mortar enterprises have been much more effective in moving into the dot-com world to become bricks and clicks. And the same way with universities. Universities are physical places and colleges that are attractive, they are fun, they are exciting. There are things going on there that are in many ways distinctive to particular places. People are going to continue to go there to engage in that or to figure out how to tap into that experience from a remote location. And don't forget for a minute, it's not just the learning. It's the learning experience and the nature. All of the learning is embedded in an experience and we are in an experience economy. And I think that the successful institutions will be ones that nourish that physical placement and that proximity and figure out how to project it to other places so that people can experience it from afar.
HS: To follow up on Dennis's question, a number of folks at prestigious universities have told me one of their concerns about distance learning is that it kind of dilutes the image of the university. That is, you want the university to be very exclusive, so you actually have to come out here and you actually have to go here and you actually have to scale walls and things like that. If you can just come in electronically, well, then, hey! Anybody can do that. It's not such a special place anymore.
DN: You know, part of the old mystique of medallion universities is the selectivity and one of the reasons that people go to very selective places is to be selected. And what they're getting is not just a learning experience, but they're networking with other people who have been selected and you are known for the rest of your life as the one who's been selected in that way. You can still select people to be part of a virtual learning community that's tapping into a physical one. So selectivity can be there. It is true that if you made the Stanford experience available to everyone in the world, it would cheapen the experience because there would not be the selectivity element there.
HS: Yeah, but I mean, really, even adding a few people makes it less exclusive. If there's only 1,000 people who get this wonderful honor each year and suddenly you make it so that 2,000 are able to do this, it kind of dilutes it. You know, like too many people owning a stock or something.
DN: And I think for that very reason, undergraduate degrees, for the medallion institutions that are getting involved in distance activities, there probably are going to be - their brand is going to be two tiers. One, the brand, the on-campus highly selective brand and, if they get involved in other activities, that brand is likely to be diluted or to be viewed as a different brand.
JB: Or is the brand of the alumni programs and continuing education, that becomes a different brand than the undergraduate or masters' brand?
DN: Well, it could be a different brand and it could be using learning experiences from faculty and practitioners other than the faculty at the alumni base, the institution for which one is an alumni.
HS: Okay, we have another question and this is a question from Richard Danielson, Laurentian University in Canada. Really pleased to have folks coming in from Canada here! Richard says, "What is the present status of the IMS project with regard to this whole issue? Certainly, the idea of a large amount of interchangeable education packages is attractive."
DN: Yes. I can't pretend to speak with an immediate knowledge of where IMS is right now. Where I understand the whole movement to be is that we are moving very rapidly toward the creation of an environment that will support an industry, if you will, for learning objects and a marketplace for learning objects and there are a variety of enterprises being formed to help facilitate marketplaces for learning objects so that the content and pieces for snippets of learning support can be shared, assembled, aggregated and made available to folks. This will apply not just to online learning materials but to materials that can be printed into print-on-demand textbooks, course packs and other things like that. And all of that is moving forward with great dispatch. And I think within three years, there is going to be an active international marketplace for learning objects and for aggregations of learning objects.
JB: Do you think we're going to actually, then, be able to reduce the "cost of developing" a course once these learning objects start becoming more available? I mean, will it have a true impact on cost?
DN: Yes and no. We will resist-�
JB: That's a great answer!
DN: And I'll tell you how. I won't just leave it at that.
HS: You left out "maybe" in there.
JB: Right, yes, no and maybe.
DN: I think it's a definite yes and a definite no, and the yes is that the cost of content is going to go down. There will be a commoditization of e-content, but there also will be different strata of content and there'll be a lot of freeware. People will, some people-we know there are a lot of people in universities that believe in freedom of content and information. Some people will make their freeware available and many people will choose to use it. However, many publishers, many associations and professional societies and other groups will collect, will provide particular collections of content that have their particular stamp of approval or imprimatur and for that, they will charge a premium. So the cost of content, though, will go down. The cost of interactivity will go up, though, because people will be paying not just for the content but for the privilege of interacting with a variety of faculty and experts relating to that content.
JB: You know, that's a really good phrase. We probably shouldn't lose that, the idea of the "privilege of interacting."
DN: Yes. Our programs, the metaphor for learning is going to change from program delivery group, delivery to interactivity.
HS: Okay, we have another question from David O'Keefe at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma. And he says, "An interesting issue involving electronic delivery of learning is that of assessment of student outcomes. Those outcomes are in turn related to learning styles. Would Don comment on this aspect of the exciting transformation in learning?"
DN: Well, you know, part of the choices that students or learners are going to be able to make is not just the nature of their experience and the content, but all sorts of issues relating to pedagogy, how I learn, what is the type of learning I want to have. And with today's level of development in this area, it's hard for us to believe that we're going to be able to achieve the kind of personalization that I think we will. But with the changes that are happening, I think three, five, seven years from now, learners are going to be able to make a lot of choices relating to that. And so it'll involve a greater degree of self-paced learning in some cases and in other cases, people will want traditional learning.
HS: Are we going to have to do something different at K-12 to make students ready for this different kind of higher ed?
DN: Absolutely, and I think many of the students are, in their K through 12 years, are developing habits of mind, body and spirit that will-�
HS: I thought they were just learning how to play video games.
DN: Well, there are habits that are developed thereby. I think K through 12 is an important change in that we're going to have to see a lot of these practices reflected down there. And I think they will be, by the way. There are a lot of groups that are working very actively, a lot of professional societies like the National Council for Teachers of Math is doing some terrific things to push these kinds of ideas down into K through 12. It also is important that we figure out how to use this kind of transformed learning to deal with the remediation problem. There's no way that we should be receiving on our doors in higher education the level of under-prepared folks that we are. There should be ways-and there are ways-using transformed learning to address this issue in the K through 12 schools.
HS: Right, so the idea is you shouldn't get people unprepared because you're going to make some K through 12 changes?
DN: Absolutely.
HS: So remediation won't be an issue because you're going to nip it in the bud.
JB: That sounds awfully optimistic, Don.
DN: Well, see, part of it is, suppose we created web communities where we could post the standards, for example, that a student going to the University of Maryland is expected to be able to do these things. And make those standards available to the students and their parents and say, "Here are the tools. Work with your schools to overcome the barriers to make this happen." Don't just go through the schools. Hit the parents and the groups outside the educational establishment to say, "Here are the competencies that you need to have and here are sites where you can go to develop them." Don't require going through the textbook selection process in public high schools to do this.
JB: Okay, we've got another question that links, I think, to this question about just what kind of learning and how much learning will be done and it comes from Dan Price who is a professor for the Center for Distance Learning at the Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio. And he asks if you would say a little bit more about the different kinds of learning that will occur, I think probably as the result of this pervasiveness of interactivity. And he goes on to say, "How will hypertext and hypermedia change the very meaning of knowledge? The tradition university is primarily text-based."
DN: Yes. I think the biggest change in the nature of knowledge these days is that there is so much drivel out there that purports to be information that is factually wrong or otherwise misplaced. That we are finding that one of the great skills that we have to impart to learners is the capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff, which was a lot easier when we just had a few recommended texts and people weren't out there navigating through all this faux information. I think one of the real challenges is what's the architecture of the body of knowledge in different professions and different disciplines and areas going to look like in several years? Will there, in the professional societies and publishers and other groups, be these vetted repositories of vetted information and knowledge rather than the free market that exists now where so much of what's out there is questionable?
JB: That's an interesting thought.
DN: I think that's a huge issue and every one of the professional societies and groups is dealing with that and one of their special cachets that they have is that they are able to warrant, if you will, the knowledge that they are purporting to put forward.
HS: Okay, since we're getting close to the end of this session, we'd like to ask our "what should universities do about all of this" question.
JB: Our practical question. What does all this mean?
HS: To put a little bit more meat on the question, what should universities be doing right now so that they can be part of this transformation of higher education or so that they can move it forward?
DN: Well, there's several things. There's a whole set of issues and Mark Olsen and I wrote a book for Nikubo in July of '99 called E-Business and Education and in there, we had 20 initiatives that institutions needed to do to move into e-business and into eLearning. The biggest thing that they have to do is create this infrastructure to support pervasive interactivity and to begin to deal with strategies for getting faculty involved and not just using the faculty model of 1,000 points of light, but figuring out how do we create these new learning venues and experiences so that they are scalable, so that they do change and enhance the quality of learning and reduce the cost where appropriate. And so the campus has to build infrastructure and get the faculty and other interested parties participating in a real community of practice around the topic of eLearning.
HS: Talk a little bit more about this infrastructure. I mean, on campuses already we have networks, we have PC's, we have wireless, we have stuff all around us. Seems like we've got tons of infrastructure here. Do we have to do something with this infrastructure, or do we need more things that we don't have?
DN: No, I think what's happening that's really exciting, Howard, is the work that you and other folks are doing around the notion of portals because what we have on the campuses that have the network, that have the application layer and now are creating portals around that is that we are really identifying how important it is to build communities where there is within the community a repository of knowledge, best practices, help desks and people can get together around topics of interest. And one of the topics of interest that has to pull people together is eLearning. And I think Steve Gilbert and the folks at AHE and at the teaching and learning round tables are doing some wonderful things in that area, developing on campuses communities of reflective practitioners about the use of eLearning.
HS: So you see portals playing an important role in this transformation of education, then?
DN: Absolutely, because portals are about communities, and through the portal experiences that we're creating, we can create these communities of reflective practitioners where you can find out the good things that are being done in your disciplinary area in eLearning because you'll be sharing examples not only on your campus, but with professional societies and other groups and faculty at other institutions. A portal is a place where communities and practices can be nurtured.
HS: Besides getting these portals up, it sounds like it's really important that we have pervasive wireless on campus. It sounds like the kind of learning you're talking about is going to occur everywhere so you don't want to be tied down to any particular spot.
DN: Yes, and I think wireless is going to be a very important part of it. And campuses and other venues are going to be moving in that direction. And I think a lot of students will be coming to campus with their own devices-not computational devices, but their own wireless communication and PDA type devices, unless I miss my guess, as their practices change.
HS: They're probably doing it already.
DN: They're doing it already and-�
HS: It seems as soon as we think people are going to do something, they've already done it.
DN: They've already done it.
JB: Or they've done it somewhat differently than we thought they were going to do it.
DN: Always differently, but the thing to do is to think about where things could be in three to five years with the next three generations of these kind of devices and that's going to be both exciting and perplexing in terms of how to deal with it.
JB: Before we wrap up, Don, can we go back? You said that in the one publication, you had 20 initiatives, one of which was creating that infrastructure. Can you just share a couple more of those with us?
DN: Well, the others relate to - some of them are specific e-business type things or particular, you know, e procurement initiatives and initiatives in areas where the business officers can take the lead. But with regard to learning, the main things are relating to the infrastructure, to strategic planning for how to enhance eLearning on campus and the creation of these communities of reflective practitioners where you really do have a place where people can share their best practices on the use of eLearning and figuring out how to use eLearning to do things other than to just digitize the [inaudible].
JB: Okay.
HS: Judith is certainly going to ask me if I have one last question.
JB: I usually do! Do you have one last question, Howard?
HS: And I do have one last question! I've been saving it, thinking if I couldn't fit it in, I wouldn't. But Don, you said that in the Knowledge Age, learners are going to learn every day. I almost accept will learn most days, but when I'm on vacation hiking off in the woods, like hiking the Continental Divide or something like that, I don't take a cell phone with me. I don't take a PDA. I don't take any way to communicate. In fact, you know, the only electronic thing perhaps I have with me is my watch. How's this learning every day? Aren't you just pushing a little hard on that?
DN: Well, I probably am, but I suspect that when someone like yourself acquires the habits of mind, body and spirit to learn all the time, even when you're disconnected from your pervasive interactivity, you're going to be learning other things when you're in the woods engaged in that kind of a holiday.
JB: Just think about Thoreau and Walden Pond.
DN: You make one excellent-�
HS: That's a whole other - I was at Walden Pond. Really disappointed.
JB: Isn't it your reflective time?
HS: Yeah. No, and I'm really pleased to hear Don say that we can actually still in the future do some learning without a bunch of electronic gadgets.
DN: Oh, when I get around-�
HS: I absolutely agree that when I'm hiking out in the woods that I learn all kinds of things and it's a chance to reflect and distill stuff that I've, you know, picked up before. But it's nice to hear a technologist say that you don't need the electronic gadgets to learn. That's a wonderful answer.
DN: Absolutely, and the other thing - the other good point that you make is that we are more and more going to have to practice the art of decoupling. And disconnecting from this pervasive interactivity, which is more than just cellular phone etiquette and getting people not to have their cellular phones on when they're at the opera. It's really a matter of when we have this pervasive interactivity, we have to learn when to shut it off and to be reflective and contemplative.
Or, for example, if we want to focus on learning one thing and don't want to have our senses assaulted by all the things that we're getting through this pervasive interactivity, we're going to have to be able to create the zone of silence around ourselves and focus on the things we want to focus on. And that's going to be one of the necessary survival skills. It is so today, even more so in three to five years.
JB: Maybe that hearkens to, remember, wasn't there kind of a semi-cocooning-�
DN: Maxwell Smart. The Zone of Silence.
JB: Right, okay. Well, Don, I usually ask if Howard has a final question.
HS: But you did already.
JB: But I did. But then I usually let Don say, do you have a final comment that you'd like to make before we kind of wrap up and say thanks to everybody here?
DN: Well, my final comment is that all of us that work in this area are continually humbled by our inability to really predict what's going to happen and I've learned to take what we call an expeditionary approach to doing this because this is really an expedition and most of us are finding that we use our eLearning experiences and programs to discover the future and it really is an expedition. We are perpetually surprised by what really works and what doesn't and by where we end up. And I suspect three to five years from now, the balance of learning experiences that exist will both thrill and surprise us.
JB: Okay, well thank you. And with that, I'm glad you talked long enough because my machine went to sleep and I almost lost our closing comments! But it is time and I'd like to thank everyone for being here today, and to go ahead and send any follow-up questions to expert@cren.net and Don will answer a few of those there. Be sure to plan on joining us two weeks from today when we'll be making a return visit to Northwestern University and Bob Taylor and catching up with what they are doing with some instructional applications using video streaming technologies.
Many thanks to all the institutions who support these Tech Talks and one of these institutions, by the way, is Baylor University that's been featured in a short story available from the CREN home page. Thanks to all the Tech Talk folks who helped make this event possible today. A special thanks to our Tech Talk expert, Don Norris; to technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, Tech Talk Web guru; to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit Network; to Susie Berneis, audio file transcriber; and finally, a thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it's time. Bye, Don. Bye, Howard.
HS: Bye, Judith. This was great fun.
DN: Bye, Judith.
JB: And thanks gain, Don. This was great.
DN: My pleasure.
JB: Okay, see you all.
HS: Bye-bye.
DN: Bye-bye now.
END OF WEBCAST
