Quality education is a universal goal. It is common to hear arguments that instructional technology will be the key to educational quality as we enter the new millenium (cf. Fiske and Hammond, 1997). Investment in educational technology is urged upon policy-makers as the path to educational quality (Mergendollar, 1996). In fact, enthusiasts for educational technology argue that quality has and will continue to increase rapidly, creating a "new educational culture" (Connick, 1997). Whatever problems exist are seen as ones which can be handled through better administrative and technological planning - that is, technology believers perceive no intrinsic obstacles to total quality assurance using information technology in higher education (ex., Roth and Sanders, 1996).
Other voices question educational technology as a panacea. Cardenas (1998), for instance, has written on the problems associated with technology in the college classroom in terms of issues such as poorly functioning equipment, over-promotion of technology-based learning to students, and lack of quality in courses delivered by technology. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on critics of educational technology who say students choosing online courses are not getting the education they pay for, and question whether universities should be providing such instruction (Guernsey, 1998). The American Federation of Teachers and other faculty organizations have also raised serious cautions about web-based education (Mingle and Gold, 1996) and have even gone on strike over it.
The unruly growth of online distance education is the basis of these concerns. One has only to look at popular books like, The Best Distance Learning Graduate Schools: Earning Your Degree without Leaving Home (Phillips and Yager, 1998). This work profiles 195 accredited institutions that offered graduate degrees via distance learning as of 1997-98. It acknowledges that "diploma mills" are a danger. Even accredited programs from recognized institutions of higher learning may have been thrown together as experiments or simply in quick response to administrative fiat. "Caveat emptor" is definitely a precept for student consumers of online education.
In response to growing criticism of the recent, rapid, unregulated growth of distance education, a number of recognized higher education organizations have formulated quality standards and guidelines. A prominent example is the document "Principles of Good Practice for Electronically Offered Academic Degree and Certificate Programs, " from the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications; http://www.wiche.edu/telecom/projects/balancing/principles.htm; see Johnstone and Krauth, 1996; Zuniga and Krauth, 1996; WCET, 1997). These principles have been endorsed by a number of higher education governing and policymaking bodies in the western United States, as well as by the regional accrediting community. The core assumption of these guidelines is that, "The institution's programs holding specialized accreditation meet the same requirements when offered electronically." Since these guidelines are a widely-accepted definition of "quality" as applied to online education, they are quoted below:
* Each program of study results in learning outcomes appropriate to the rigor and breadth of the degree or certificate awarded.
* An electronically offered degree or certificate program is coherent and complete.
* The program provides for appropriate real-time or delayed interaction between faculty and students and among students.
* Qualified faculty provide appropriate oversight of the program electronically offered.
* The program is consistent with the institution's role and mission.
* Review and approval processes ensure the appropriateness of the technology being used to meet the program's objectives.
* The program provides faculty support services specifically related to teaching via an electronic system.
* The program provides training for faculty who teach via the use of technology.
* The program ensures that appropriate learning resources are available to students.
* The program provides students with clear, complete, and timely information on the curriculum, course and degree requirements, nature of faculty/student interaction, assumptions about technological competence and skills, technical equipment requirements, availability of academic support services and financial aid resources, and costs and payment policies.
* Enrolled students have reasonable and adequate access to the range of student services appropriate to support their learning.
* Accepted students have the background, knowledge, and technical skills needed to undertake the program.
* Advertising, recruiting, and admissions materials clearly and accurately represent the program and the services available.
* Policies for faculty evaluation include appropriate consideration of teaching and scholarly activities related to electronically offered programs.
* The institution demonstrates a commitment to ongoing support, both financial and technical, and to continuation of the program for a period sufficient to enable students to complete a degree/certificate.
* The institution evaluates the program's educational effectiveness, including assessments of student learning outcomes, student retention, and student and faculty satisfaction. Students have access to such program evaluation data.
* The institution provides for assessment and documentation of student achievement in each course and at completion of the program.
Similar guidelines may be found in connection with the world's largest experiment in online distance education, the Open Learning experiment in the U.K. In reviewing this experiment, Mayes and Banks (1998) concluded that three factors combine to maintain quality and integrity of Open Learning courses: (1) common, structured course materials; (2) open assessment using a competency-based methodology; and (3) an extensive support and monitoring network. Numerous other efforts exist regarding quality assurance in distance education (Tait, 1997).
An inspection of leading quality-in-online-education guidelines reveals three central themes.
1. Quality is defined in terms of "appropriate" and "complete" online education, with appropriateness and completeness to be adjudged by faculty. Faculty agreement, of course, is apt to refer to faculty with interests in promotion of online education, with tacit consent of peers in a typical academic culture which strongly encourages faculty course development autonomy and an administration more interested in "getting into the online education game" than in creating quality standards impediments to launching online offerings. Using the same textbook as the traditional course is often sufficient to meet this criterion.
2. Students must have access to support services (ex., library, computer, faculty access, peer interaction). In fact, most make available to online students only a fraction of the library resources, computer resources, faculty access, peer interaction, and other advantages of on-campus students. However, as long as the most important resources are available online in some form, this standard is ordinarily deemed to have been met.
3. Quality is defined in terms of "evaluation" of specific, measurable "learning outcomes" or "competency-based objectives." This is met by the instructor formulating a set of syllabus statements of the "At the end of the course, the student will be able to ...." type, and making sure examination questions relate to these statements. As in traditional courses, content of the objectives is the prerogative of the faculty member - having objectives, not their content, is what quality standards assess.
To be sure, there are some online offerings which do not meet even the minimal hurdles of the foregoing guidelines. Overall, however, it cannot be said that "quality" guidelines such as the foregoing are difficult to meet in practice. By the same token, such guidelines leave the critical observer wondering what else might be involved by some higher definition of "quality."
Controversy over higher standards for quality in online education has emerged as a major distance learning conference topic. Hillesheim (1998), for instance, has written on "the search for quality standards in distance learning." Based on a review of historical quality standards and on a case study of Walden University's online psychology courses, Hillesheim distinguished three dimensions to quality standards: (1) managerial quality/organizational criteria (ex., leadership and record keeping; (2) functional quality/technological criteria (ex., student support via process teams); and (3) ethical quality/instructional criteria (ex., the relationship between students and faculty, faculty evaluation, and student and faculty empowerment). The first and second dimensions are those upon which promoters of distance education have focused, as discussed above. Achievement of goals in these two dimensions is necessary but not sufficient for quality education. Much more depends upon achievement of Hillesheim's "third dimension goals" such as establishment of authentic relationships and empowerment of students and faculty. This is the focus of the remainder of this essay.
The Borkian Vision of the Future of Education
Alfred Bork is a leading educational technology guru, having for years headed the Association for Computer Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Uses in Education and having advised on this subject for the National Institute of Education and having been named Outstanding Computer Educator by the Association of Educational Data Systems, among other honors. In 1999 Bork was interviewed by Educom Review, the journal of EDUCAUSE (formerly EDUCOM), the leading association of colleges and universities for the advancement of educational technology. In this interview (Educom Review, 1999), Bork set forth several aspects of his vision of "the future of education:"
1. Education will become highly interactive, engaging the student every 20 seconds or so for a response, much in contrast to present-day passive lecture methods.
2. Education will become highly individualized, with world-accessible records of learning attempts by particular students, to enable computer presentation of education tailored for each student's past learning experiences and styles.
3. Education will become highly flexible in interaction, enabling natural-language tutoring using the Socratic method of tutorial question and student response.
4. Education will become highly accessible, opening opportunities for the disadvantaged in this country as well as for the millions in developing nations.
5. Education will become highly computer-mediated, replacing (not supplementing, which would be an added cost) the lecture method in courses for 15 or more students.
6. Distance education will begin to displace campus-based education because the high costs of an interactive computer-mediated course can be justified only through their use by a large number of students than only distance education can provide.
In Bork's view, "Teaching faculty, in the sense we know them today, may cease to exist, except for in small, advanced courses" (p. 49). He foresees the conversion of large, lower-division courses - about 50% of university teaching - to online formats, resulting in "significant improvement in learning, at lower cost" (p. 50). He warns that those institutions which do not go this route may prove unable to survive the competition of the coming era.
Bork is hardly the only technology spokesperson who believes that computer-mediated distance education will spell the end of the traditional university as we know it. George Mason University's Peter Denning (1997) made such an argument before the National Science Foundation, basing himself on four arguments:
(1) The library as a physical place is soon to be replaced by digital libraries accessible worldwide by almost anyone.
(2) The "community of scholars" around the library is soon to be replaced by communities of specialists linked electronically, divorced from geographical location.
(3) The ideal-typical small undergraduate class has become unaffordable and cannot compete with commercially-provided education on the same subjects, such as computer science, nor can universities compete with commercial courses' glitz and entertainment production values.
(4) Job structure has changed such that universities can no longer hope to prepare students for or promise them a "lifelong career", the central selling point of higher education until recently.
Denning then asked, "What roles can universities fulfill that people would find valuable?" The answer, Denning argued, was increasingly Internet-based distance education for adult professionals. Similarly, futurists often see an inevitable economic shift from local material goods to global knowledge services, forcing education to move toward electronically-mediated education (cf. Alic, 1997). "A revolution is taking place in education," wrote Donald Norman and James C. Spohrer (1996: 25-6) in Communications of the ACM, the nation's premier computing journal. Norman and Spoher noted that though distance education has been around forever, only in recent years has new technology been available to fuel the hyperbolic growth of the Internet and energized a new vision of how to deliver distance education. Gerald van Dusen, in his The Virtual Campus: Technology and Reform in Higher Education, sets forth an optimistic view of how technology will transform education from faculty-centered to learner-centered, making instruction better by replacing the "sage on the stage" with interactive, individualized learning possibilities; will improve scholarly research by enabling far greater collaboration as well as information access; and will improve educational organization by facilitating interdisciplinary connections and encouraging academic "total quality management."
The hope Bork, Denning, van Dusen, and others of this school is that online education will do for the masses in the twenty-first century what the public library movement did in the nineteenth and the expansion of public universities did in the twentieth. Online education potentially may be disseminated to millions who previously could not have hoped for a college education due to circumstances. With the erosion of job tenure and job security, moreover, the challenge of twenty-first century university education will more and more have to do with dispersed adult learners who must remain at work but retool for career changes. This audience may be reachable primarily and often only through online education.
The Legacy of Programmed Learning
It is trite but true that those who fail to remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In assessing the future of online education, it is easy to forget lessons associated with the relative failure of the programmed education movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Programmed learning was based on many of the same principles to which Bork and other enthusiasts of educational technology allude: clearly stated behavioral objectives, small frames of instruction, self-pacing , active learner response to frequent prompts and questions, and immediate individualized feedback to responses.
These principles were in turn based on the behavioralist precepts of the noted psychologist B. F. Skinner, and were implemented in the United States at the University of Illinois in 1960 in the PLATO system (Programmed Logic for Automatic-Teaching Operations).(1) The original PLATO was a mainframe system primitive by today's standards, but it reflected most of the basic Borkian elements: interactivity, individualization, and computer mediation. Using PLATO, students could be tested repeatedly for understanding and then could be prescribed additional appropriate remediation or enrichment materials. At great expense, over 15,000 hours of instruction were developed for PLATO based on the behavioral model, representing perhaps the largest single investment in educational technology content ever made, even to this day.
PLATO was a limited success at best. During the 1960's, PLATO was a small system for a single classroom of terminals, but around 1972 new mainframe technology supported its transition to a system capable of serving up to one thousand simultaneous learners. Online chat and bulletin board notes features were added in the early 1970s, long before the Internet. In 1975, Control Data Corporation (CDC) entered the picture, establishing PLATO as a commercial educational product which, by 1985, had established systems in over 100 campuses around the globe. However, by the end of the decade, CDC found that the PLATO business model was not profitable and it shut down most PLATO operations, in part due to competition arising from the "microcomputer revolution" of the 1980s. By the 1990s, PLATO had ceased to exist as such, though remnants still remain.(2)
PLATO's lack of success does not erode the enthusiasm of current-day computer technology advocates because of several differentiating factors. PLATO tended to be linear in presentation, lacking hyperlinkages now common in learning software; it was weak in terms of multimedia usage; it antedated natural language processing; it antedated the Internet; and its reliance on mainframe computing was itself an obstacle to dissemination. Moreover, the PLATO philosophy involved long lists of behavioral objectives for each lesson, and long test-and-drill sequences for each objective, all of which could make for a tedious form of learning. Later educational technologists emphasized the importance of non-behavioral "active learning" approaches to learning, notably games, simulations, Socratic dialog, problem solving, discovery activities, and other forms of inductive rather than didactic education.(3)
Can creative approaches to online learning succeed where the objectives-drill-practice programmed learning model failed? On the plus side, there is no doubt that bright examples exist, ranging from MECC's "Oregon Trail" history simulation at the elementary school level to popular "psych lab" computer replication of classical experiments in psychology at the university level. On the negative side, several caution flags have been thrown out on the educational technology raceway. Hypermedia has proven much less popular than originally expected as it has been found that online learners minimize their use of non-required exploratory hyperlinks and instead prefer clear objectives arranged in a linear fashion. Computer gaming has made some inroads in business education but in most fields remains seen as peripheral or condescending. While educators love the notion of inductive learning through exploration and experiment, students typically take a utilitarian approach to courseware, wanting a more direct path to knowledge. An anecdote in this regard is the author's work with political science websites for Prentice-Hall, where market feedback has shown the most popular web features are the traditional drill/review sets.
The Legacy of Simulation Approaches to Education
Simulation is the most-often-cited example of new, creative, computer-enabled pedagogy in online courses. This crops up primarily in the writing of educational technologists, whereas actual online simulations are rather hard to find online in most fields, and when found, tend not to be the central elements of an online course. This disparity is less surprising when one considers the history of simulation as an instructional technique. As with programmed learning, the legacy of computer simulation is more cautionary than encouraging to educational technology enthusiasts, in spite of notable pockets of impact as in econometric modeling or replication of scientific experiments.
Simulation is not a new topic. In fact, a case can be made that it is one which peaked in interest over two decades ago during a period of funding agency support. Simulations were sponsored by the Office of Education under its REACT (Relevant Educational Applications of Computer Technology) program and through the CAUSE and LOCI programs of the National Science Foundation, and as a priority of the EXXON Foundation. In spite of these examples of large-scale subsidy of computer simulation in education, the main arenas in which simulation has had "staying power" and substantial impact have been in (1) advanced, specialized courses (ex., econometrics, microsimulation in public policy, demography models, operations research); (2) military applications (Raytheon's TEMPER model for the Joint War Games Agency, ARPA's funding of the Inter-Nation Simulation, Rand Corporation strategic models); and (3) replication of classic experiments (ex., in physics, statistics, genetics, psychology). With the exception of the third arena, simulation has generally not been in lower undergraduate courses as targeted by Bork and other educational technologists, and even there it plays a peripheral course role in nearly all cases.
One of the most funded simulation efforts came out of priorities of the EXXON foundation a quarter century ago. EXPER-SIM, sponsored by EXXON, grew out of MESS, the Michigan Experiment Simulation System and LESS, the Louisville Experiment Simulation System. FIRM, the Florida Interactive Modeler, was distributed by CONDUIT as an EXPER-SIM system rewritten for microcomputers. These systems allowed students to create experimental simulations or to take simulations created by others. Likewise, MICRO-DYNAMO was a microcomputer version, distributed by Addison-Wesley Publishers, of a simulation language which was used for the famous "Club of Rome" predictions of world resource crisis iin the early 21st century. Both FIRM and MICRO-DYNAMO came with numerous built-in classroom simulations on such topics as ecology simulation, urban growth models, frustration-aggression theory, drug addiction, and many others.
Today it is difficult to find any trace of the effects of the large amount of funding which went into simulation earlier. EXPER-SIM, FIRM, and even CONDUIT itself are gone. Although DYNAMO is still available, systems dynamics simulations are mostly associated with tiny-enrollment specialized higher courses. Of the many simulations reviewed by the author in his 1987 work, Academic Microcomputing: A Resource Guide (Garson, 1987) , practically all are now unavailable. The author is on the board of Simulation & Gaming, one of several currently available resources for simulation, but it must be noted that the reality of this journal and its related annual conferences is that in spite of decades of effort, it attracts a cadre of enthusiasts rather than serving as an outlet for a major educational emphasis in higher education. Even at upper undergraduate and graduate levels, leading simulation languages (ex., SIMSCRIPT, GPSS, DYNAMO) are rarely part of methodology training for majors in any field. To be sure, there are pockets of activity such as econometrics in economics or running-a-firm simulations in business education, but on the whole there is little encouragement for the belief that Internet-based simulation will have a transformative effect on higher education where earlier well-funded efforts have failed.
Mandated Standards versus Empowerment in Online Education
Technology enthusiasts believe online methods will liberate learning from the confines of the lecture hall, but it can be difficult to reconcile distance education with empowerment of students and faculty. One common tactic where empowerment is a goal of distance education at all, is to keep guidelines-from-on-high to a minimum and to rely on local autonomy. Recent position papers on quality assurance in distance education, however, have noted with dismay the drift toward standards imposed from above. Ewell and Wellman (1997: 1) write, for example, "As public funds decline and the political climate changes, accountability and quality assurance are important issues for U.S. colleges and universities, and institutional leaders are concerned about a shift away from the established institution-centered structures, toward government-mandated, standards-driven systems." That government-mandated standards is today on the ascendant is illustrated by the education agenda of the Clinton administration (Clinton, 1996), which calls for a system of mandated accountability and partnership with business: "(1) standards should be accompanied by accountability--an assessment system with consequences; (2) the system should reward and demand higher standards of teachers; (3) schools should be held accountable for results; (4) the business community can help school districts reinvent their budgets..." While the standards movement is much broader than the arena of online and distance education, it very much applies to it.
Mandated standards and empowerment stand in tension to one another. Australia is an example of a nation whose national policy has set educational self-management as a fundamental organizational principle. Townsend (1998) recently reported on the "Schools of the Future" program, which included the use of multimedia and computer-mediated learning. Disappointments with school achievement under the this program led to a new initiative, "Schools of the Third Millenium," which will also focus on innovative use of multimedia in education but which will be guided by "a core of state-mandated requirements for all students. " Moreover, given that the initiative was part of a funding-reduction plan, many observers feared that the "Third Millenium" would substitute inferior online education for rich, traditional education. The political opposition's press release stated,
Mr Mildenhall said the Kennett Government's plan for "remote learning" would simply lead to students staying at home in front of computer keyboards instead of being taught in a school environment.
"Under the Schools of the Millenium project, schools will be organised into groups and managed by financial executives while students are increasingly based at home," he said.
"This is way out of touch with the expectations of parents who want their children to develop both socially with other students and educationally under the guidance of qualified teachers." (http://www.werple.net.au/~bruce/press97a.html, 9 April 1997).
As the Australian case illustrates, what begins with advertisement of empowerment through autonomy can end with imposed performance standards in a resource-poor environment. While this is not intrinsic to online education, there is a bias in this direction due to its association with competency-based learning objectives evaluation and with the drive to find more cost-efficient forms of mass education.(4)
Online Education and Community
The "community of scholars" was central to the traditional concept of higher education. The thrust of online education advocacy is to broaden the concept of community in non-traditional ways, particularly through partnership with or even contracting out to the business community. Dancing with the Devil: Information Technology and the New Competition in Higher Education (Katz et al., 1999) is but one of many examples of the argument that in the world of online education to come, universities will be forced by sheer competition to transform themselves in radical ways which challenge the traditional community of scholarship. As Martin (1999) discusses in Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University, higher education is already well along the road toward adoption of a corporate model. Online education both reflects and will accelerate that trend.
The Australian "Schools of the New Millenium" initiative, discussed above, also called - as many in the US do today, including President Clinton (1996) - for close alliance of educational institutions with community organizations, particularly private sector partners. This initiative has been strongly critiqued in Australia as a cover for governmental de-funding of education. However, educational institutions in all advanced countries encounter strong incentives for private sector partnering since the high costs of multimedia-rich online curricula are often beyond what a single local college can afford. Partnering raises quid-pro-quo issues with which academic organizations may feel uneasy. An example is the website of Channel One, offered as a free education-centered news bureau resource for public school teachers who may lack the time to assemble their own news pages. An evaluation of this program by the Center for Media Education, however, found the Channel One website to be a forum for advertising and self-promotion compromising educational principles (Pasnik, 1998).
The impact of "partnering" in online education remains in the future, but a taste of what is to come is reflected the views of an EDUCAUSE National Learning Infrastructure Initiative panel, articulated by Wendy Rickard (1999), who has noted the growing awareness that online education spells radical restructuring. "Despite expectations to the contrary," she summarizes, "few if any institutions have the resources to support each individual faculty member's unique efforts to incorporate technology into his or her pedagogy...The management of network-based learning requires sophisticated back-office systems and staff support structures. Investments on this scale imply major financial reallocations...we see emerging new business models and new modes of collaboration of teaching and learning" (pp. 36-37) including outsourcing the function of distributed instruction with the hope "to improve academic productivity."
In the traditional "community of scholars" the student was mentored as an apprentice and eventually became a coinvestigator in research and creative activity. Advocates of online education argue that this notion of academic community will be enhanced through the wonders of technology. Palloff and Pratt's Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace (1999), for instance, present "proven strategies" for academic community-building in an online environment. In principle it is possible to maintain and even extend such values as mentoring and coinvestigation by means of telecommunications. Faculty themselves increasingly rely on the Internet rather than the library for research dissemination and collegial interaction.
However, the reality of online education intrudes upon the pipe dreams of theory. The reality is that online education, with a few notable exceptions, is pursued most vigorously by those institutions least known for scholarship and development of academic community. The University of Phoenix, the nation's largest experiment, relies for instruction on the part-time contributions of practitioners, intentionally eschewing research faculty. Online education is frequently the province of the campus adult education unit, not the academic departments. Often instructor participation is an overload, potentially seducing faculty away from research. Administrators seek to use online education "to increase academic productivity" and, as discussed elsewhere in this essay, seek cost savings in an atmosphere unfavorable to the research function. Moreover, most institutions have found that online education is intrinsically very demanding of valuable faculty time (ex., handling e-mail at all hours, solving technical glitches, updating websites, etc.), which can also take away from research. On the student side, the social distance inherent in online education seems to make students want clear, precise, objectives-oriented curricula which may represent a narrowing of education, and may make them unlikely candidates for collegial work on faculty research projects.
The reality of online education is that it favors a transition from traditional notions of academic community toward a much narrower, transactions-based model. Farrington (1999), observing the realities of the University of Phoenix model, notes that its customer-orientation is central to the competitive strategy of purveyors of online education. Critics of online education likewise focus on resistance to the passing of the academic "community of scholars" in favor of the academic "marketplace of customers."
Cost-Cutting Motives in Online Education
The advocates of community over marketplace are weakened in their arguments by the realities of budgetary cutbacks and constraints in traditional education, eroding the quality of the on-campus experience. The popular press frequently touts online education as a cost-saving way for government to cope with spiraling enrollment projections (ex., Hamilton and Miller, 1997). Facing a rising tide of registration demand, threatening to overwhelm existing resources, many governors, state legislators, and board of regents members see in online education the possibility of delivering education on a mass basis without the need to provide the expense of physical infrastructure once thought necessary. Many others also believe that enormous salary costs could be saved by restricting high-paid expert faculty to content while actual mass online course delivery is mediated by technicians, graduate students, part-timers, and other lower-paid staff.
Still, online education is not cheap. The experience of Britain's Open University, the largest such experiment in the world, shows clearly that online education (once past the grants, subsidies, and enthusiastic volunteers phase) is viable only when one can assure large class size (they target 200 or more). The upshot is that thoughtful administrators see online education as a strategic response to increasing demand in an era of budgetary restriction but are aware that realization of cost savings is premised on mass delivery of online courses in ways that involve radical restructuring.
The Social Impacts Project of the University of Texas at Austin noted that many see "virtual education" as the wave of the future. They summarized proponents who were quite blunt in laying down the economic gauntlet: "Much of the funding," they wrote, "will have to come from the incredible amounts of money currently being spent on the maintenance of traditional schools" (E309M Project, 1995). It is commonplace to note that the rise of computer-mediated multimedia training in the corporate world has occurred in no small part because "multimedia training can be less expensive than bringing employees and instructors together in one classroom" (Hall, 1996: 40). As Denning (1998: 33) notes, over half of all states froze or cut high educational expenditures in the mid-1990s, and when in the late 1990s there has been some restoration of funds, it has come "with strings attached: engage with high technology, workforce, and technology-transfer initiatives." The technological strings reflect the increasingly popular belief that higher education's problems can be solved by applying technology and business methods, avoiding the needs to appropriate funds commensurate with increasing demand.
Carole Barone (1996: 28), Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology at the University of California-Davis wrote of traditional disciplines, "Can our campuses afford to teach those disciplines in the same manner as they have for decades or centuries? I would argue that most cannot...Technology costs money, lots of money...To pay for it planners and managers, at all levels, must engage in the unpalatable exercise of budget reallocation." Thomas West (1996: 35), Associate Vice Chancellor for the California State University System Office, extends this cost-benefit argument to its logical conclusion by noting the major savings to be achieved by not building whole campuses and instead relying on networked delivery of education. Similar are plans by Colorado Governor Roy Romer to create a "Virtual University" in western states.(5) A corollary of budget reallocation is the formation of university corporations or other alliances with the private sector to sell online courses for a profit (ex., UCLA) or even sell online courses under corporate logos (York University, helping precipitate a faculty strike).
Utah's Michael Leavitt is another state governor who has proposed radical reforms of higher education. Leavitt would go farther, envisioning electronic systems in which the faculty member plays no role at all after the authoring stage. His proposal stated, "Entire courses should be obtainable on compact disk. For that matter -- entire majors could be placed on disk. The lectures could be filmed live, spliced with video clips, enhanced with pop-up graphics. Students could be prompted and quizzed by interactive exercises throughout. None of this is new technology. What is new is its universal affordability" (Davis and Kick, 1996: 175). In this vein, the Utah State Board of Regents has endorsed the principle of "a major paradigm shift" in education, involving substantial new investment in technology, and has adopted a formal plan toward that end.
In the United States, the leading and much-cited current example of such a virtual university is the "Online University" of the University of Phoenix, a for-profit private enterprise. The University of Phoenix is the sixth largest private university in the United States, with 40,000 students and over 5,000 staff. It offers three undergraduate and three graduate degrees in business administration entirely online. What is not often highlighted when the Phoenix model is mentioned, however, is the fact that its budgetary logic depends upon its relying exclusively on part-time faculty, mostly practitioners in their fields, earning less than the typical rate for exploited graduate student teaching assistants in traditional universities (paying even the TA rate would plunge the model well into the red.). The University of Texas paid far less than the Phoenix rate when the author checked with administrators by phone. While some may utilize tenure-track faculty, most models rely on supplemental pay to add "grocery money" to faculty members' or graduate students' regular income.
The Phoenix model is one well suited to the specific task of delivering training to adult professionals at job sites and at home, but it is one which could tear apart the traditional mission of universities as institutions of higher learning in the full sense of that phrase. For this reason community colleges may be in a better position to implement "virtual education" than are universities which hope to survive as communities of educators engaged in expanding the sphere of knowledge. Many community colleges, such as Florida's Brevard Community College, are assuming regional and even national leadership in just that mission.(6)
Even if faculty salaries and loads for online education upheld current standards, there is the "retooling" issue. The paradox of online education is that when one envisions electronically "canning" a college course as a product to be marketed online to large numbers of students, one wants a prestigious product to sell. That is, a course from a flagship university, carrying its authoritative legitimation, will sell better than, say, a community college course on the same subject. Yet, as Davis and Kick (1996: 179) write of Utah's plans for electronic courses, it is precisely at research institutions where the "impact on faculty of the career shifts necessitated by the initiative may be far more pernicious. What is called for, it seems, is a fundamental retooling that will distract some faculty, primarily at research institutions, from one of the fundamental aspects of their profession and their life."
Retooling to deliver educational technology is a major effort. It will become more so in the future when educational technology products (courses) have to compete in the marketplace, giving a premium to video glitz, bells, and whistles. Already whole new university professions and administrative units have grown up around educational technology. Professionals in these areas have skills marketable in the corporate world and command salaries higher than most faculty. Proposals for electronic teaching require diverting limited university resources from traditional areas into new academic empires to be based on educational technology.
Davis and Kick predict an exodus of research faculty from the state's flagship research institutions if it is demanded they sacrifice research in favor of "ed-tech retooling." I believe, however, that marketing logic does not point to such an exodus. Rather, what will happen is that electronic courses will for the most part will be prepared and delivered by campus educational technology units, but with faculty providing nominal content guidance and lending their names to the resulting product. Products (courses) will sell based on a peculiar mix of factors: the prestige of the sponsoring institution, the cost of the course, the effort required to get educational credit from one vendor versus another, and the "edutainment" value of the course. These factors are not goals with which research faculty can identify. In fact they are likely to scorn them.
The administrative vision is one in which fewer faculty teach many more students -- a process in which there will be more losers than winners. As happens in any new industry during its initial phases, at first there is an explosion of new entrepreneurs, many competitors enter the market, competitive confusion reigns. Later there will be an industry shake-out in which a smaller number of vendors become preeminent and consolidate their lead. Toward the end of the process, huge capital investments become required to play the game with the big boys and few new players can enter the marketplace. Many early competitors withdraw from the market and are consigned to a marginal position or go out of business altogether. The economics of education are not so unique as to prevent the emergence of these long-term patterns which have marked other economic sectors.
This is a vision in which the alleged efficiency gains from educational technology are up for grabs. It is far from obvious that even the winning vendors will be able to capture the profits for traditional research and instructional objectives. Motivation is coming from legislators, governors, and others seeking to cut costs while delivering more education to meet growing demands from an expanding population and from adult learners more in need of retooling than ever before. It is doubtful that university presidents will be able to fund the necessary massive investment in educational technology, keep the legislature and governors at bay, and still capture the profits for faculty uses. More power to those who will be able to do so, but they will be the exceptions, not the rule. A likely outcome will be the seduction of higher-paid faculty into overload teaching of online courses at pocket-money rates, distracting them from traditional research functions. An even more likely long-run outcome will be an increasing exploitation of a class of lower-paid workers (an "intellectual proletariat," one might say) delivering electronic instructional materials which are legitimated by a reduced number of higher-paid traditional faculty who play an oversight role, sometimes substantive, sometimes nominal.
Online Education and Learning Autonomy
Even when cost is not an issue, online education faces the paradox that it is best undertaken by students with strong autonomous learning skills, yet at the same time the disconnectedness of students from teachers seems correlated with insistent student demands for clearly structured learning assignments and schedules (Carnwell, 1998). Students frequently feel the need for ongoing communication with their instructor (Blakeley and Curran-Smith, 1998). A commonly expressed student need is that for very clearly and explicitly articulated course learning objectives (Stevens, 1977). That is, online pedagogy seems more associated with "cyberdistance" than with "virtual community," and students quickly become motivated to seek to overcome cyberdistance through increased course structure, reducing learning autonomy.
Unfortunately, something is lost when the rich complexity of what faculty teach and inculcate is reduced to a printed list of learning outcomes and test items used to assess each objective. Education is narrowed toward training. Studies show that lack of personal contact with a professor is associated with educational losses in role and process training (Eddy, Burnett, Spaulding, and Murphy, 1997). Moreover, a tremendous pressure is created to "teach to the test", which is what the assessment instrument in effect becomes. When online education is part of a cost reduction effort, requiring human resources to be stretched to cover more credit hours, faculty resignation to the training mentality of outcome-based evaluation is all but assured except, of course, in environments which do not even bother to attempt to enforce quality assurance standards.
Online Education and Critical Thinking
It is often said among believers in online education, that the striking acceleration of social, economic, and technological change in the modern era is a powerful force for the ascendancy of online teaching methods since these can convey instantly updated information everywhere on the globe, delivering it to learners when and where they want, in their homes and workplaces for purposes of lifelong education. However, this same rate of change devalues instruction-to-facts (which are soon outdated) and instead places a premium on the more adaptive capabilities associated with education for critical thinking. Unfortunately, online education can handle instruction-to-facts more easily; drill-and-practice is the forte of computer methods. Ironically, in contrast, traditional education with its supposedly uncreative lecture hall methods has prided itself in its ability to inculcate critical thinking skills.
Distance education administrators are aware that critical thinking may be an Achille's heel of online methods. Therefore it is not unusual to find that quality assurance standards for online education make reference to student thinking skills, independent learning skills, teamwork and communication skills, and other aspects of critical thinking (cf. Wisconsin State Department of Public Instruction, 1998). Moreover, intelligent-agent and workgroup collaboration software often are targeted directly at encouraging critical thinking skills (ex., in mathematics, see and Charnitski, 1998). Jonassen et al. (1999) argue that critical thinking can be inculcated using technology such as cybermentoring and video theater.
A love-hate relationship exists between online education and critical thinking skill development. Wheeler (1996) notes the online information explosion demands students learn critical and evaluative skills to be able to sort the gold from the garbage, but many fear online information access overwhelms students and dulls their ability to differentiate.. As another example, geographic information systems (GIS) is a visually-oriented discipline taught online at the author's university and elsewhere. However, Rose (1996) cogently argues that the focus should be on critical interpretation of visual information through group discussion methods her than on mastery of specific GIS software, as is typical of online courses on the subject. Writing assignments are thought to help develop critical thinking and while online methods can enhance collaborative writing, in general online courses are associated with less writing, not more. Socratic discussion with faculty is also thought to inculcate critical thinking, but while online methods in theory could enhance discussion, in reality online courses are associated with far less instructor-oriented discussion. Critical thinking is also thought to be associated with problem-solving going beyond computational mechanics to consideration of complex causal and value systems, but while intelligent tutoring software does exist, the open-endedness of creating problem-solving together with the asynchronous nature of most online education mean that in practice online courses rarely develop the problem-solving approach.
Because of the usual limitations of online methods, some of the best designs are based on using technology to supplement but not supplant traditional methods. A good example is CaseNET, a Web-based environment for teacher education, focused on case studies (Bronack and Kilbane, 1998). The online component of CaseNET is comprised of the cases, discussion groups, journals and reference materials. However, students involved with CaseNET physically meet with one or more instructors at regularly scheduled times at a designated site. Instructors use reflective decision-making with a case methodology to guide through a five-step process which involves perceiving issues, problems, dilemmas, and opportunities; recognizing values and perspectives that drive actions; applying appropriate knowledge; suggesting an action one might take; and examining the possible consequences. The CASENET model and other hybrid approaches like it seek "the best of both worlds" of online as well as traditional educational methods, but in doing so they call upon universities to incur the costs of both methods, which explains why hybrid approaches are not part of the vision of online education as articulated by Bork and other enthusiasts. Likewise, the hybrid model, by requiring physical meetings, cannot aspire to be the global solution to mass education that is central to the Borkian vision.
Online Education and Educational Quality
In comparing computer-mediated distance education with traditional face-to-face teaching experiences, Cravener (1999) has found that while distance education increases access to education, one may well find decreases in instructional quality brought about by increased faculty workload, problems of adapting to technology, difficulties with online course management, and related obstacles. Down "in the trenches" the rank-and-file online instructor finds grinding courseware development time costs, burdensome maintenance requirements, intrusive student e-mail demands, open-ended needs to stimulate and supervise online discussion, and other practical difficulties. Online instructors must put forth more effort and are likely to receive less reward, whether in recognition or compensation.
Problems from the instructor viewpoint do not necessarily translate into lower student performance on output measures. In fact, a common finding in the educational technology evaluation literature is that online courses do not have a differential performance impact (ex., see Blakeley and Curran-Smith, 1998; English, Harrison, and Hart, 1998; Plasschaert, A.J., J. G. Cailleteau, and E. H. Verdonschot, 1997; Day and Payne, 1987). By focusing on instruction to learning objectives, as with traditional instruction-to-test approaches, test performance standards are usually met by online courses.
Although tested output of electronic education is often on a par with conventional teaching, this does not mean educational quality is unaffected however. Many observers find in typical online education offerings a substantial narrowing of the concept of education to the detriment of students. To illustrate, Modiba's (1997) analysis of the quality of distance education for in-service teachers, based on in-depth interviews which go beyond simple cognitive testing, noted the narrow view of education theory generally presented and lack of consideration for the experiences and views of practicing teachers.
One of the recurring problems of computer-mediated education is that it is programmed around concrete learning objectives. Many educational technology writers, in fact, explicitly argue that quality education using computer methods must be built on a foundation of clearly-defined competency-based curricular objectives (ex., Bergeron, 1996). This is, in fact, the prevailing view. Moreover, when computer-mediated curricula lack such clear articulation of competency objectives, students tend to demand they be provided. Yet competency-based objectives are composed of domain-specific facts, knowledge, and cognitive skills which may be summarized as the science of whatever is being taught but not its art. That is, teaching to competency objectives encourages, even forces instructors to neglect the diffuse in favor of the concrete. Not only is this the opposite of the ancient concept of a liberal education but it is also sharply at variance with learning needs in an era of rapid change when the specific is transient and the abstract is that which must carry the learner through a lifetime of education and re-education.
The bandwagon for online education has begun, pushed by rising costs of computer technology in times of austere budgets, creating a compelling logic that calls for using that technology to reduce educational costs per credit hour -- which is often tantamount to reducing faculty costs (Barnard, 1997). Popular works such as The Monster Under the Bed (Davis and Botkin, 1994) and The Digital Economy (Tapscott, 1996) portray education as slipping out of the hands of universities and into the hands of business organizations better able to make the hard economic choices involved in exploiting online technology to its potential. Yet as noted by Martin Ringle (1996: 32), "Being able to read an electronic text, examine a digital image, or conduct a video-conference on the Internet, is not the same thing as sitting in a circle on the lawn and reading passages of The Iliad aloud." As a supplement to face-to-face education, online technology is useful. As a replacement, it is a threat to liberal education.
It is small wonder that online education is now arousing academic resistance. The American Federation of Teachers, for instance, has gone on record against this and other forms of distance education unless and until there is assurance that faculty standards will be upheld (Blumenstyk, 1996). The head of the University of Maine system was recently ousted amid the furor that developed when he proposed that a distance learning operation receive full-blown degree-granting status as an additional "university" within the Maine system. In Spring, 1997, the faculty at York University, Canada's third largest college, went on strike for two months, settlement of which included formal contractual protection against mandatory engagement in online education.
There is great skepticism in academia that online education is pedagogically sound. A recent strategic forecasting exercise involving eighty university administrators at the University of Pennsylvania concluded that "academic brilliance is fostered in the social ambience of the university which cannot be replaced by computer teleprograms" (DeLoughry, 1995). This is consistent with the findings of authors such as Shields (1996) and Noble (1997), who argue that computer-mediate learning is exacerbating cross-institutional inequalities, compromising the traditional autonomy of universities vis-a-vis the corporate sector, and therefore should not be used in substitution for traditional methods of education. They condemn the practice of UCLA in the United States or York University in Canada of establishing for-profit alliances with private corporations for the purposes of purveying online education.
In its May/June, 1998, issue, Educom Review's cover satirized those who criticize online education as believers in "neo-Luddism," referring to nineteenth-century English factory workers who smashed machines to protect craftsmanship, guilds, and pre-industrial forms of the organization of production. The critics, in turn, might portray the educational computing establishment, represented by Educom, as being similar to the nineteenth-century radical utopians, who wrongly believed the reorganization of production could lead to democratic communities capable of solving all basic social problems. Amid such name-calling, and mundane as the middle ground may be, the evidence suggests that online education carries both sound pedagogical positives and serious pedagogical negatives.
Given a choice, students themselves are rightly prone to want a mixed model, providing all that both traditional and online education can provide. Implementation of that mixed model, however, will carry higher economic costs than traditional education - costs society may not be willing to bear. Institutional inertia suggests the "online revolution" will be slow in coming to most campuses, with most faculty using email and the web for only modest purposes having few measurable effects. The eventual danger, however, is the emergence of a two-tier educational system - a more expensive upper tier with sound traditional education supplemented with the benefits of full online access, and a cheaper inferior tier dispensing programmed training which meets objectives far narrower than the traditional goals of liberal education.
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Endnotes
1. The programmed learning movement was also influenced by the Keller Plan for personalized higher education. This plan envisioned freeing students from the constraints imposed by the lecture method, replacing it with an environment in which each student could progress at his or her own speed, progressing to each next level based on demonstrated 'mastery' or the current level. Though not explicitly computer-based, the individualization requirements of mastery learning fit in well with programmed learning and with exploitation of the capabilities of educational computing. Keller's own "Personalized System of Instruction" (PSI), however, relied on human proctors to administer repeated testing and to provide tutoring, stessed written teacher-student communications, and differed in other ways from PLATO and similar computer-based systems. See Keller, 1968; Keller and Koen, eds., 1976.
2. TRO, Inc., owns the PLATO name but does not maintain any mainframe PLATO systems.
The CDC PLATO systems has evolved into CYBIS, which operates at about a dozen campuses
and government sites. A CDC spin-off company, IMSATT, offers Homer, a CYBIS-based
system, for home use. The University of Illinois PLATO systems has evolved into NovaNET,
which is still widely used on that campus. Note, however, that PLATO had a strong influence on
such microcomputer-based systems as Macromedia Authorware and Lotus Notes, both still
widely-used general-purpose tools for courseware authoring.
3. In actuality, PLATO and other "didactic" software often included online games and other
"active learning" elements, so the contrast is not as clear as is sometimes alleged.
4. The U. S. Army's reliance on educational technology in training as a response to budget
reductions is often cited as a successful model. For instance, see Alexander and Jeffries (1997);
Degnan and Jacobs (1998).
5. The site for the Western Governor's Association and Western Interstate Commission for
Higher Education is http://www.wiche.edu/telecom/telecom.htm. See also the SmartStates
Virtual University site at http://www.concerto.com/smart/vu/vu.html.