Ivory Tower, Silicon Basement:
Transforming the College

Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D., 1996

Many institutions are searching for a unifying vision to guide their investments in teaching, learning and technology. Some of them hear a thundering herd of innovations collectively referred to as "distance learning" and "learning anytime anywhere for anyone" and are wondering if their campuses even have a future.

This hunger for a useable vision of the future is one reason why so many two- and four-year institutions are organizing Teaching Learning and Technology Roundtables (Gilbert, 1997). Roundtables are typically internal advisory and coordinating bodies that bring together educational and technology leaders including faculty leaders who are not techno-zealots and (often) students. This essay describes an emerging common vision of the institution's and campus's future (and one for distance education, too) and, in the process, identifies a set of pressing strategic questions now facing Roundtables and other educational leaders.

Why Change?

The first element of the emerging common vision of teaching, learning, and technology has to do with motive. At the growing (bleeding) edge, institutions are changing because they believe they have no choice.

First, today's workplace requires new intellectual skills because of the digital technologies on which that workplace increasingly depends, e.g., the use of modern statistical techniques, composition of computer-based music, use of geographic information systems. In order to learn these skills, students must use the same or similar technologies as part of their education: learning by doing. Can a proto-technician learn to think about the capabilities of new computer chips in a lab equipped only with vacuum tubes?

Several other pressing teaching/learning needs also compel many educators and legislators to see as essential the use of computers, video and telecommunications in the rebuilding of the ivory tower:

• the need to widen and enrich educational access for a variety of currently under-served groups such as working adults, the homebound (including homemakers), the handicapped, and others;
• the need for institutions to draw on and share a wider range of intellectual resources than they can afford to acquire and maintain locally;
• the need to implement teaching techniques that are far more feasible when technology is used (e.g., use of computer and video-based airplane simulators for the education of pilots, for example);

Many of the needs described above can be summarized as a triple challenge (Ehrmann, 1996a), a triple challenge that educators always face in one form or another: how to

1. extend access, and increase the fairness of access, to learning, i.e., improve who can learn,
2. enrich and update what students are to be taught, and
3. control what it costs for those students to learn.

The Ivory Tower

Under the pressures described in the first section, institutions are gradually rebuilding their structures and practices. It is useful to think of any educational institution as an ivory tower: a structure of a basement and three stories, each resting on the structure below -- first floor on the basement, second floor on the first (and the basement), and so on. (Figure 1)

Figure 1. The Ivory Tower

The basement of every ivory tower (institution) is a foundation of various sorts of infrastructure, e.g., campus buildings and textbooks. These technologies are ordinarily reliable and familiar enough that they can be used almost without thinking.

The first floor consists of four basic dimensions of learning support (Ehrmann, 1990; OECD, 1996b), each of which is made possible by distinctive technologies in the basement:

1. Directed instruction (explanation). Traditional "basement" technologies for supporting this first floor teaching-learning function include lecture halls and textbooks;
2. Learning by doing. Traditional technologies in the basement for supporting this first floor activity include the chemistry laboratory, the typewriter, the research library, the internship office -- all the "hardware" and "software" used in apprentice-like activities by learners as they acquire skills by practicing them;
3. Real-time conversation: Traditional technologies include seminar tables, faculty offices, and the campus itself (in that campuses make it more likely that people who live and work on or near a campus are more likely to meet accidentally and to be able to schedule meetings easily); and
4. Time-delayed exchange, such as homework exchange. This kind of conversation unfolds over time at a pace far slower and more thoughtful than the rapid fire of seminar talk. The discussion begins with the formulation of an assignment, continues when the assignment is handed in, and often ends with a grade. Traditional technology for supporting time-delayed exchange is, again, the campus itself in its role of attracting students and faculty to live and work near each other.

On the second floor of the traditional ivory tower are teaching-learning practices made possible by the four types of learning support, e.g., courses of study.

The third (top) floor of our metaphorical ivory tower represents the large scale structures of education: the campus and the distance learning program.

How is this Ivory Tower being rebuilt?

Foundation: The technology foundation of modern education develops incrementally.

The most basic fact about the transformation of the foundation is also the most surprising: the basement is not being transformed into a library of computer-assisted instructional materials.

For decades it was predicted that the coming technological revolution would rest on a foundation of computer-assisted courseware (e.g., Levien, 1972). This courseware, somewhat analogous in role to the textbook, would be designed at least in part by faculty members (as textbooks are), would be nationally published, and would complement or else replace the efforts of faculty. This interactive courseware would be designed for specific assignments or courses, individualized, self-paced, visual, and dynamic.

Such courseware has been developed and evaluated continually over the last thirty years and has often received stunningly strong educational evaluations. (e.g., Kulik, 1994) Nonetheless it has failed to play a leading edge role in educational change, for reasons that have more to do with the dynamics of change and economics than they do with educational effectiveness. To over-simplify, the underlying computer technology changes so rapidly that courseware usually becomes obsolete before it can find enough of a market to justify its upgrading and support. (Morris et. al., 1994)

It is almost impossible to build a cutting edge educational program on cutting edge technology -- such "basements" must operate reliably, almost invisibly, on a large scale for a relatively long time. Cutting edge technology is often expensive, fragile, and likely to become obsolete in a few years.

"Worldware" (Morris et.al., 1994) is hardware or software that is developed, marketed and used mainly in the workplace (e.g., research tools and resources, communications media, productivity tools). Worldware dominates our silicon basements, both for "campus" and, increasingly, for "distance" programs. More than courseware, worldware usually is relatively familiar to faculty, desired by students, well-supported, reliable, and stable. By "stable" I mean that capabilities are added incrementally, and only rarely lost, even when one's vendor goes out of business (worldware more often has direct competitors than does courseware, and those competitors can usually step in with hardware or software quite similar to that of the lost vendor).

Computers, video and telecommunications are not the only infrastructure in the basement of the ivory tower -- there are still also buildings, research libraries, wet laboratories and the like for campus-based programs, for example -- but silicon plays an important role in supporting improvements in the upper floors of the ivory tower.

Policy Question for Roundtables and Other Decision Makers

Should the institution make it a general (but perhaps not inviolable) rule to invest only in technologies that have enough support and competitors to be stable over long periods of time?

First floor: Enriching and extending four dimensions of support for learning.

As described above, the basement usually supports learning by providing:

1. facilities and/or media for direct instruction (explanation);
2. tools, resources, and facilities for learning by doing;
3. facilities and/or media for real-time conversation by a pair or small group of people; and
4. facilities and/or media for time-delayed exchange.

In each of these four dimensions, technology can help meet the triple challenge of access, outcomes and costs. (See figure 2) For example, electronic mail can:

1. extend access to faculty and students who would not otherwise have been able to participate,
2. enrich quality in a variety of ways such as offering a more thoughtful pace of conversation, while
3. doing so at little cost for users, at least little cost for those users who already have a computer and modem, and who can check their electronic mail at no cost. For these users, electronic mail can be cheaper and quicker than paper mail, and cheaper than toll telephone calls. Not all such users are well-to-do, obviously. Some get e-mail access through local schools or public libraries, for example, or through their jobs.

Figure 2. Second Floor: IT and the Triple Challenge

Policy Question for Roundtables and Other Decision Makers

Choosing technologies for the basement must be done in order to support the first floor teaching and learning functions. Notice the variety of technologies that support the following sorts of real-time conversations:

• seminar rooms on-campus,
• seminar rooms at off-campus sites,
• coffee houses on campus,
• dormitories and on- or near-campus housing options for faculty,
• audioconferencing via audio bridge on the telephone system,
• audiographic conferencing over similar media,
• telephone,
• audio over the Internet,
• real time writing on Local Area Networks,
• real-time writing over the Internet,
• chat rooms on the Campus-Wide Information System,
• etc.

The institution might invest in a large range of basement technologies for each of the four first floor functions. Each technology has its own requirements for maintenance, training, support and replacement. Or perhaps the institution should focus, specializing in certain technologies. Focus can be valuable not only for economic efficiency but also to enable staff and students more time to become wise in the educational uses of each technology. We have had two thousand years and more to learn to use lecture halls. We'd learn to use electronic mail more quickly if we used it a lot.

Second floor: improvements in content, access structures, and teaching/learning practices.

Building on these improvements in the foundation and first floor, many institutions are reconstructing the second floor of the ivory tower by making at least three improvements in their teaching and learning practices, and in associated services:

1. They can teach content that requires student use of computers, video or telecommunications (e.g., approaches to statistics or political science that require statistical software and off-campus databases; graphic arts content created with computers and associated printers)
2. They can create services and structures that help extend access to working learners and others who find traditional campuses at traditional hours to be difficult or impossible to use fully (e.g., online library catalogues, online registration, high speed Internet access for staff and students who live near the campus)
3. They can implement Chickering and Gamson's "seven principles of good practice in undergraduate education" more fully. (Chickering and Gamson, 1987; Chickering and Ehrmann, 1996). These principles include active learning (e.g., project-based learning), collaborative learning and other forms of student-student interaction, student-faculty interaction, rich and rapid feedback, time on task, high expectations, and respect for varied talents and learning styles. The seven principles were originally formulated as an answer to the question, "What does research tell us about how to improve learning?" They're often cited now in answer to the question, "What uses of technology seem to be working for your staff and students, uses of technology that are also cheap enough and attractive enough that they're likely to keep spreading at your institution?" The implementation of the seven principles links back to what we said about new content: these practices make it easier to teach the higher order thinking skills and values that are often required to use powerful technologies wisely and well in the workplace.

Policy questions for TLTRs:

1. The power of these changes is often not apparent until whole courses of study are reformulated. This does not necessarily require advanced technology. In the early 1980s, the University of California Santa Barbara created a new minor in applied mathematics, supported by new courses, a computer lab equipped with Apple IIs, and an internship program that challenged students to apply new math techniques to problems of businesses and government in the area around the University. Such changes in entire courses of study are more likely to manifest benefits such as observable change in the careers and capabilities of graduates, increased percentages of entering students who attain degrees, and so on. But creating change in a course of study is a far greater intellectual, political and financial challenge than spreading resources thin so that every department gets a little.

2. In what ways do our ideas about "core curriculum" need to change? The world outside increasingly offers workers and citizens a plethora of disorganized information, truly novel problems, and protean information technology to use (or be used by). It puts college graduates from very different cultural backgrounds cheek by jowl, at least potentially, and then waits to see if they'll collaborate, fight or ignore each other.

Traditional undergraduate education, taught in the traditional ivory tower, has had a hard time equipping graduates to live and work on such a planet. Such undergraduates were forced to rely on the reserved book room and the anthology, for example. In many colleges they sat in classes filled with students very much like themselves. They had little or no personal access to power information technology tools. Those technological constraints helped shape a curriculum and textbooks to match. All that can change now. But what should it become? What kind of curricula can equip undergraduates to deal with the unexpected, with large amounts of information, with creative challenges? How should professional and preprofessional education change? How should general education change? The content of the curriculum is likely to become a major topic for Roundtables in the next few years.

Third floor: Campuses, Distance Education, and Scale

Until recently there were two basic ways to think about education for adults: campus (i.e., site)-bound programs and distance teaching programs. Now both of those concepts are undergoing profound change, while the system that includes them both is becoming larger and more complex. We are seeing the emergence of 1) campus-based education (not jut campus-bound), 2) distributed learning (not just distance teaching) and, with them, 3) the creation of larger scale structures in higher education.

Figure 3: The four dimensions of learning support (first floor) are built on a foundation of technologies that should evolve continuously and cumulatively. In turn, this supports change in educational practices (second floor). Those changes enable improvement in large scale structures (third floor).

Campus-bound and campus-based

The campus-bound paradigm assumes that the only resources of value are those within the walls of the educational institution in question and education only happens when the learner is on-site. The quality of a campus-bound program is, by definition, totally dependent upon the books, laboratories, faculty members, students and so on that were on site.

In contrast, the new campus-based paradigm assumes that some of the resources and some of the learning are off-site: the campus is an important part of, but only a part of, the learning environment. In this sense, the metaphor of the ivory tower is quite misleading; in contrast to the university of yesterday, today's physical ivory tower contains at any one time only a fraction of the people and resources that are part of the institution. Networks enable staff and students to use a world-wide web of academic resources. Those same staff and students may themselves only be on campus part of the time.

Policy questions for campus-based programs

The campus has a future, but not one the same as its past. Just what the role of the future campus is, and how institutions with campuses should support academic work off-campus, is one of the most important sets of questions facing Roundtables.

A related question is how to improve the coherence of academic programs at a time when their resources, teachers and students are all becoming more geographically scattered and when the people are on different working schedules.

Distance Teaching and Distributed Learning

Old distance teaching programs relied mainly on directed instruction often provided by mass media, e.g., textbooks, broadcasts" of explanations by print, video and other media. The other three forms of learner support -- learning by doing, real-time conversation and time-delayed exchange -- could only be supported to a modest extent.

In contrast, the new distributed learning paradigm assumes that each learner and educator is within physical or electronic reach of substantial bodies of resources (including other educators and learners). Directed instruction is not dominant in this paradigm, however, and the idea of a central broadcasting hub disappears.

Policy questions for distributed learning environments

Is your institution's distance learning program to be designed and funded as "better than nothing" whose cash balance is more important than its quality, or a model of excellence as good for learners in its own way as the campus-based program is, in its way?

Second, is the institution contributing its fair share to the networked "commons" of intellectual resources. This question is just as important for campus-based (no longer campus-bound) programs. It's almost ironic that the energy we put into crafting excellent distributed learning programs may have a major benefit for the health of our campus-based programs. The shift from campus-bound to campus-based is being powered by the impossibility of maintaining all needed resources on any one campus, no matter how well-endowed. Distributed learning programs and campus-based programs have a common cause in developing and maintaining rich academic resources online at a reasonable price.

Scale and Complexity

A third set of top floor challenges for TLT Roundtables and institutional leadership relates to the scale of the enterprise. This is no surprise. When reading and writing entered the scene thousands of years ago, the scale of education increased enormously: instead of a few students and a teacher being limited to one another's strengths and needs, students could get access to the thoughts of distant experts while teachers could simultaneously reach learners removed from them in space and time. Nor was the change limited to an expansion of old structures. New actors joined the system, e.g., scribes and, later, publishers, paper manufacturers, and library staff. Five hundred years ago, the system of higher education expanded and became more complex again when it moved from homes to campuses. Among many other changes: educational administration, bigger libraries, departments, accreditors.

One of the most obvious issues of scale in distributed learning arises from a simple question: "how are distant learners and distant providers supposed to find each other and work together successfully?" Many regions are beginning to create new organizations whose role is to mediate between distant learners and large number of distant providers of education. These organizations can be termed infrastructure for integrated access. (Ehrmann, 1996) Examples in the United States include the National Technological University, Education Network of Maine, Oregon EdNet, JEC College Connection (formerly known as "Mind Extension University"), and the proposed Western Governors University.

Sometimes this new infrastructure is started by government (Maine, Oregon, Western Governors University), sometimes by the educational institutions (National Technological University), and occasionally by telecommunications companies (JEC College Connection).

What defines this growing infrastructure is that it carries out one or more of the following functions: recruitment and consumer protection, study center creation and operation, academic records, shared services. Sometimes these functions are handled singly, and in other cases they are embodied in a single new "brokering" institution.

Policy Questions Related to Scale and Complexity

1. Should your institution form a relationship with one or more of these new organizations and, if so, how? For example, should you look for an organization that functions as a common carrier and does not try to evaluate your offerings (but also does relatively little to enhance your reputation for students in areas that you have not previously served). Or should you work with an organization that is selective about its providers, creating a corporate identity (e.g., National Technological University, JEC College Connection, Western Governors University) but possibly interfering more with your freedom of action?

2. How will the institution help manage academic resources that are not under its direct control, in order to offer a sufficiently comprehensive program: distant databases, distant faculty and other experts, courses from other institutions or corporations that complement local areas of strength?

Supporting the Rebuilding of the Ivory Tower

The most obvious need for supporting the rebuilding of an ivory tower while living and working in it is money. What else is needed?

We can note briefly that rebuilding this new ivory tower poses some special needs of its own, in addition some of the more conventional needs. Here are three of those needs: staff/program development, collaboration and coordination, and better information for decisionmaking.

Staff/Program Development

Better means of supporting, and rewarding, relatively fast-paced program and staff development are needed. Many elements of the job world are on a "digital treadmill." Thanks to Moore's Law (price-performance of computer chips doubles every eighteen months) these technology-dependent fields make rapid and somewhat unpredictable changes in the nature of their work and in the nature of their thinking. New fields pop into existence frequently and they too must be served. Thus the faculty members, departments and institutions serving these fast-changing job markets must change unusually rapidly, too. That takes money, and rewards for risk-taking staff members and departments. It seems apparent that institutions need to take some unusual steps internally, while also collaborating with one another. The INPUT awards program for the use of technology in service courses in mathematics is one example of inter-institutional sharing of ideas for rethinking courses.

Coordination and Collaboration

In some institutions some of the people who share collective responsibility for guiding the use of teaching and learning with technology do not even know one another, let alone do they share information on a regular basis or coordinate their activities. That is not as shocking as it might sound: information technology requires collaboration from some unusual "bedfellows," including faculty who are zealous about technology, faculty members with little use for technology, the distance learning program, the libraries, academic computing, the bookstore, the provost's office, the financial vice president...

As mentioned above, the American Association for Higher Education has been helping colleges and universities organize Teaching Learning and Technology Roundtables. At this writing approximately three hundred such roundtables have begun work. Roundtables bring together this disparate group of leaders to work on problems as diverse as the support service crisis, improvement of student writing using technology, redesign of distance learning programs, and the financing of new information technologies. (Gilbert, 1997)

A Flashlight in the Dark

Better information for guiding improvement efforts is required. In the not-so-distant past, educational institutions changed rather slowly and deliberately. Truly novel change was unusual, which made it relatively easy to anticipate the consequences of one's actions. For obvious reasons, educators today more often need to step off into the dark. Ordinarily it is almost impossible to tell whether the kinds of changes described in this essay are happening, even when they are happening on a large scale. Is an institution's investment in technology is enabling its curriculum to become more up to date? helping implement Gamson and Chickering's seven principles of good practice? How could one tell when answers are hidden behind hundreds of classroom walls and in the places where students do homework. Because the evidence of even dramatic success or failure are likely to be subtle and because so much is at stake, educators need to spend more of their time and resources using surveys and other forms of inquiry to detect what's going on inside and outside those classroom walls. The Flashlight Project at the American Association for Higher Education is developing survey item banks and other evaluative tools that can be used to gauge progress and problems. (Ehrmann, 1997) The AAHE Teaching Learning and Technology Roundtable Program itself is just one more example of how two- and four-year institutions are banding together to share crucial information about their progress and problems.

References

Chickering, Arthur and Zelda Gamson (1987) "Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education," AAHE Bulletin (March).

Chickering, Arthur and Stephen C. Ehrmann (1996), "Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever," AAHE Bulletin, October, pp. 3-6. Also available on the Web at <http://www.aahe.org/ehrmann.htm>

Ehrmann, Stephen C. (1990), "Reaching Students, Reaching Resources: Using Technology to Open the College," Academic Computing, IV:7 (April), pp. 10-14. 32-34.

Ehrmann, Stephen C. (1996a) "Responding to the Triple Challenge Facing Post-Secondary Education: Accessibility, Quality, Costs," in Information Technology and the Future of Post-Secondary Education, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development: Paris and Washington.

Ehrmann, Stephen C. (1996b) Adult Learning in a New Technological Era, OECD: Paris and Washington.

Ehrmann, Stephen C. (1997), "The Flashlight Program: Spotting an Elephant in the Dark," on the Web at <http://www.aahe.org/elephant.htm>

Gilbert, Steven W., (1997)Levers for Change. A TLTR Workbook, Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education.

Kulik, James A. (1994) , "Meta-Analytic Studies of findings on Computer-Based Instruction," in Eva Baker and Harold O'Neill, Jr., Technology Assessment in Education and Training, Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Levien, R. E., S. M. Barro, F. W. Blackwell, G. A. Comstock, M. L. Hawkins, K. Hoffmayer, W. B. Holland, and C. Mosmann (1972), The Emerging Technology: Instructional Uses of the Computer in Higher Education. A Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and Rand Corporation Study, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Morris, Paul, Stephen C. Ehrmann, Randi Goldsmith, Kevin Howat, and Vijay Kumar, Valuable, Viable Software in Education: Case Studies and Analysis, New York: Primis Division of McGraw-Hill, 1994.