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Ruth, Stephen, Educom Review, Sept/Oct 1997, "Getting Real About Technology-Based Learning:The Medium is NOT the Message"
Brown, Duguid, Educational Technology Publications 1992, "Stolen Knowledge"
Brown,Duguid, Heldref Corp 1995, "Universities in the Digital Age"
Project 25 at North Carolina State University
Building Asynchronous & Synchronous Teaching-Learning Environments: Exploring a course/classroom Management System Solution
IBM Higher Education, "Fast Forward -- The Digital Future of Higher Education"
Steve Krause, Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, Vol.2 No.5, 5/1/95, "How will this improve student writing? Reflections on an Exploratory Study of Online and Off-line texts"
Alan S. Blinder and Richard E. Quandt, Computer and the Economy, "Will information technology ever produce the productivity gains that were predicted? ", December 1997
Neil Munro, "Campuses
Challenged by On-Line University Higher education via on-line services is growing and may
force the nation's universities to make painful changes ", Washington-Technology
Online, 1/11/96
|
 | "University Online's leader Kannan "believes on-line education will transform
the nation's higher education system. Smaller colleges will lose customers to on-line
education and more prestigious universities. In this sense, institutions of higher learning may face a challenge familiar to other industries -- the newspaper business, for instance. Given what investment newspapers have made in their physical plants, it is not surprising that many see themselves in the printing and newsprint business. For them, on-line newspapers are a threat. But one might argue that the newspaper's core strength is gathering, editing and distributing news -- in any medium. So, too, with education; the institutions that see themselves as educators will embrace new media as a new outlet for selling their talents. And some argue that rather than upstarts dominating the new media, established, brand-name institutions in older media will eventually rule. There is some evidence that this is already happening in the on-line news business. "I don't think the traditional university structure... is in any way threatened," said Corrigan. On-line education will act as a complement to the universities, partly because people will be slow to accept computerized education, and partly because colleges offer a very valuable social environment where students can meet lifelong friends and business partners, he explained. Jones said that academics fear their replacement by computerized education and are reluctant to share their brand name -- the reputation for quality held by Stanford University for example -- with on-line education efforts. That resistance should help slow the spread of on-line education, he said. Nevertheless, Kannan pointed out that rising costs at prestigious institutions, such as Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., will prompt more people to pursue on-line education, especially for career education. These trends will force universities to compete for customers by specializing in particular areas, such as science or business, he said. That specialization will cut funding for the many boutique courses now offered by universities, such as American Constitutional History. "It is sad really.... We'll be poorer for that," he said."" |
| "It is upon this fragmented scene that the Internet is about to burst, with all its
institution-transforming potential. Peter Drucker, a management guru with a record of
getting some big things right, recently forecast that information technology will bring
about the demise of the university as currently constituted. Insofar as the
university’s physical manifestation is a response to scarcity—the scarcity of
great minds capable of imparting what they know—the Internet logically renders its
continuation in that form redundant. Indeed, higher education already has a history of
fruitful experimentation with distance learning. Britain’s Open University, and
imitators in countries as different as India and Israel, have demonstrated, even without
the benefit of the Internet, that technology makes it possible to deliver a good—and
relatively cheap—higher education beyond a physical campus. Although still in its infancy, the Internet is giving such efforts a powerful new stimulus. In America, more than a dozen western states arecollaborating to create the Western Governors University, a “virtual regional university”. With offices in Denver and Salt Lake City, this institution intends to offer accredited degrees by means of video courses and tutorials delivered over the Internet. A group of Danish universities is pursuing a similar scheme. The Globewide Network Academy has catalogued thousands of on-line courses contributed by hundreds of traditional universities. The World Lecture Hall, a three-year-old Internet website organised by the University of Texas, also contains links to teaching material from many other universities. Would-be students can use this site to download course lecture notes, multimedia textbooks and the like for virtually any course they wish. Could the Internet and its associated magic solve the problem of numbers and quality in mass higher education? That is certainly the great hope. The chief aim of most of the experiments now under way is to cut costs, often simply by making existing coursework and materials more widely available by means of the new technology. America’s Athena University, founded in 1995, is a private-sector attempt to build a wholly new virtual university from scratch. Still seeking accreditation, and with a small staff, Athena already offers a variety of courses that are traditional in content but delivered via the Internet. The Internet has also caught the imagination of for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix. Once established, a true “virtual” university should be able to add students at a negligible marginal cost." .......The advent of cyberspace is less likely to destroy the university than to offer it novel ways of reaching out to more students at lower cost. And instead of dismantling the community of scholars, it may give it a new lease on life by creating new connections between academics working in adjacent disciplines but in unadjacent places. It is possible, too, to put a positive gloss on the changing nature of research funding in the universities. University scientists are naturally aghast at any dilution of the idea that they should be paid by taxpayers to pursue whatever questions they are curious about. In the fullness of time, they say, their labours are likely to add not just to the wisdom of mankind but also to their own country’s economic well-being. Some governments are becoming understandably sceptical about such claims as the cost of accommodating them rises, and are pushing the universities towards more applied work. But it is not impossible that the resultant blurring of basic and applied research, allied to the emergence of the core-and-cloud university, will turn out to revitalise university science rather than damage it. All of these are grounds to be optimistic about the future of the universities. As in the past, however, their health will depend on their ability to adapt. This will not be easy. Even the great American research universities that have come closest to creating the core-and-cloud university of the future find it difficult to define the core and to manage relations with the cloud. It will be harder still for foreign admirers to import this model." |
| "Indeed, where experts see on-line education growing is with the crowd that has
made it popular now: people with little time on their hands. Robert McClintock, director
of the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University, agrees with that
sentiment. In professional and technical fields, he says, people will need to continually
update and document their skills in emerging technologies and other areas. And these
professionals will be looking for efficient ways to pick up these certificates. But how do
those degrees hold up in the real world? Surprisingly well,graduates say. Academically,
accredited courses must pass the same muster as traditional ones. Mr. Spangehl says his
accreditation group tries to apply the same accreditation criteria to all candidates,
which boils down to demonstrating the teaching of students. "Actually, you can check more of it [at an on-line program] than you can at a traditional college," Mr. Spangehl says. He notes that interchanges between students and instructors are recorded in computer files, whereas accreditation inspectors often have to rely on secondhand or thirdhand accounts of teaching methods at traditional schools. And anecdotal evidence suggests that employers treat long-distance graduates the same as campus-bound ones. John Bear, an author and on-line-learning consultant, handles U.S. marketing and other matters for Heriot-Watt University, an Edinburgh, Scotland, school that offers a popular on-line M.B.A. Part of his job is meeting with businesses to sell them on the idea of distance learning, thereby smoothing the way for Heriot-Watt graduates." |
| "The modern research university has become far too expensive to accommodate all the
young people who are nowadays eager for a higher education. The obvious response to
“massification” should therefore be to create a system in which some
institutions specialise in traditional research and scholarship and others in more
vocational teaching. Such a system could be both cheaper and better able to adapt to
students’ varied needs and talents....The other big thing that charging can do is to
give students more influence as consumers. Designing a regime of fees to do this
effectively is far from easy, given the complex pattern of subsidies and cross-subsidies
that underpin a university’s various activities (for some universities in America,
undergraduate teaching seems principally to be a way to earn money that will pay for the
staff’s research). Nonetheless, some such counterweight to the universities’
highly developed producer mentality is sorely needed if they are to rid themselves of
their expensive fixation on research. When Adam Smith taught at Glasgow University in the 18th century, teachers there were reimbursed directly by their students. The great economist admired this system. A teacher’s diligence, he observed, “is likely to be proportioned to the motive which he has for exerting it”. Alas, on today’s campuses there are few Adam Smiths with a strong pecuniary incentive to heed their students’ real wants. On the contrary, few other contemporary institutions possess such a solid sense of their own purpose, combined with such a haughty disregard of what their users and paymasters expect of them. Where does the university’s enormous self-confidence spring from? " |
| IT eases the limits of time and space for education activities. A state with an extensive distance learning program reports that many faculty have discovered that good communication between teachers and students remains important but direct physical contact is less so. IT will bring the best lecturers to students via multimedia anytime and anywhere so that, like the recordings of the country's most celebrated artists, those of the best will drive out those of the merely good. This sort of access is especially important for the increasing numbers of nontraditional students in higher education, who often have job or family responsibilities limiting their possible school hours. Finally, IT enables self-paced learning with sensitivity to different learning styles and continuous assessment of student progress. The areas that can profit most from IT-based strategies are those subjects that have a high volume of students, a standardized curriculum, and over whose content faculty are less possessive. Examples of good target subjects include remedial and basic math, general education courses, and composition courses. IT enables students to work at their own pace with continuous assessment, in contrast to the traditional post-secondary education method, which can be described as batch- processing with episodic assessment. Continuous assessment allows teachers to pinpoint the areas where students falter--and in the case of some multimedia programs, those areas trigger further practice automatically so that students receive more instruction "just in time," when they need it most. Because of its capacity to focus on individual assessment, IT will make the teaching and learning enterprise much more outcome-oriented, a change that has important implications for learning productivity. In fact, the areas that have made the most inroads with IT are subjects like foreign languages, math, and writing, whose outcomes can be most easily delineated. Continuous assessment provides the data needed to map the relation between cost and benefit, thus opening the way for experimentation and innovation |
| Communication, computing, and networking technologies expand the reach and range of
traditional residential colleges and universities and enable students to synthesize
on-campus with online experiences. Some learners seek a mixture of face-to-face
experiences and network-based education. For example, the on-campus student who wishes a
more individualized, self-paced, self-directed learning experience finds that technology
helps achieve that desire. With the goal of reducing the time to degree, some students
choose to complete courses in residence while simultaneously fulfilling other graduation
requirements online. The network expands the number of options for interaction among
faculty and students; external experts are more easily accessed; and the opportunity for
faculty to individualize and personalize contact with students is increased. Other students, especially working adults, are opting entirely for online educational experiences that provide them with the education and flexibility they need. The online experience enables colleges and universities to project themselves far beyond their physical locations. Already, hundreds of institutions offer courses online. Those experiences offer educational opportunities to millions of learners constrained by time, location, or other factors. The online experience is well suited to learners who cannot or do not wish to access education through traditional means. The online format can significantly expand the availability of continuing education programs and offerings for recreational learners as well. |
| "For communications to take place, at a bare minimum, there must be a sender, a receiver, and a message. If this message is intended as instruction, then besides student, teacher, and content, we must also consider the environment in which this educational communication occurs -- an environment that benefits the educational system in some ways and constrains it in others. Part of this learning environment can include various technologies and media. If "the medium is the message," that is, if technology changes what we can do and how we think about it, then the various media enabled by instructional technology also change both what we can do in education and how we conceive of it." |
