Two Previous Transformations of Higher Learning l The Third Revolution l Access Proposals That Can Improve Quality, Too l Quality Proposals That Can Improve Access, Too l Summary: Visions Worth Working Toward

Access and/or Quality? Redefining Choices in the Third Revolution

Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D.

Many college presidents today worry that "we’ve passed the point of no return when it comes to spending money on technology, but we don’t know where we’re going."  -Steven W. Gilbert

In my eighteen years as a program officer with the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and with the Annenberg/CPB Projects, I often saw the following two types of grant proposal.

In other words, most technology proposals were designed either to enlarge the number of learners, or to improve what some learners could learn, but not both.  Applicants and reviewers seemed to believe that extending access would probably damage quality, and vice versa.  Why?  Key resources in education exist only in limited quantities: space at the seminar table, access to the one-of-a-kind books in the research library, use of expensive laboratory equipment, access to faculty attention, dollars.  Concentrate those resources? Or spread them thin? Improve quality or improve access? Or perhaps raise the price of education so much that we can afford more of those resources for each of a larger number of learners? Those seemed to be the only three options.

Improving both quality and access, simultaneously and affordably, may seem impossible.  And it is impossible to do so painlessly.  But this dual improvement has happened before, at least twice.  Each time access was gained by many while being lost by some.  Each time quality was improved in many ways while declining in others.  And each time the total costs of higher learning certainly increased but probably without a proportional increase in the costs per learner.

Two Previous Transformations of Higher Learning

Those two previous changes both enlarged and reorganized higher learning:

1.       From the oral dialogue of Socrates’ day toward educational forms that included reading and writing;

2.       From independent scholars teaching independent learners in ‘ad hoc’ settings in the early middle ages to a new mode of learning: organized scholars and students working within university campuses.

The reading-writing revolution: Imagine small groups of learners and their tutor who learned only by explanation and conversation.  Now imagine such learners and teachers beginning to rely on reading and writing, too.

Access gains: No longer would the words of a teacher be limited to the small group of learners fortunate enough to be present at a particular place and time.  Hundreds of learners, eventually hundreds of millions, could learn from a teacher like Plato, millennia after his death.  Reading and writing, aided later by the printing press, laid the foundation for enormous increases in the scale of education, even at the cost of increasing the distance between the learner and the teacher.  In fact, it's been said that the birth of distance learning was the first time a scholar said to a learner, "take this manuscript, go away, and read it."

Obviously distance is not entirely bad.  Quality also benefited from those same processes of reading and writing.  Each reader-learner could now learn about more subjects.  Within each subject area, reader-learners could benefit from more opinions and more versions of the facts.  Students and scholars were leaving limits of the grove of Academe for a larger intellectual universe.  The single scholar no longer was responsible for everything the student learned.  Paradoxically, increased "distance" between the student and scholar could improve their conversation.  Reading and writing while away from one another altered the character of their dialogue.   When talking with Socrates, many of us would either have blurted the first thing that came into our heads, or else remained prudently silent.   In contrast, readers could take the time to interpret a scholar’s question and then, as writers, compose a reply at a thoughtful pace, too.  And this reading and writing could enrich their oral interchange as well.

These and other gains came at a price, however.  While huge numbers of learners gained access to a scholar's thinking, reading is not the same thing as conversing (as Socrates warned): no one could be sure that the reader had understood the writer if they didn't also talk with one another. And some scholars and students, unable to read or write, would now be barred from education even if they previously had had full access.  There were many other losses, too: books and their errors were sometimes mindlessly copied and spread, oral traditions were lost, and so on.  But the revolution went on.  The gains in access and quality were too important to be abandoned.

Almost two thousand years later, the campus revolution also bridged space and redefined time. 

Access: Campuses attracted both scholars and students from great distances to a community where they could interact spontaneously. Because Medieval Latin served as an international language for books and lectures, students could more readily come to university towns from other countries.  That's one reason why some cities funded the creation of medieval universities: to attract scholars and students.  Large lecture halls and the library were just two mechanisms that increased education's capacity to handle students (and scholars). 

Quality: Intellectual resources were collected, guarded, and organized by a growing patchwork of specialized departments.  Generation after generation these specialized communities grew and subdivided.  Students and scholars could spend decades inside the walls, learning and sharing.   As depth increased, so did the possibilities both for intellectual isolation and for intellectual cross-fertilization.

Once again, the bridging of space and time had a fundamental impact on our organization of knowledge for research and teaching. For the second time, higher learning had broken out of a smaller, more intimate space into larger worlds of learners and learning.  Of course, the transformation was again at a price.  Access was increased for many but some were shut out, e.g., those in towns whose scholars had left for the big university cities.  Quality was increased in many ways, but so were the risks of passivity and pedantry, especially as lecture halls grew larger.

The Third Revolution

Today a Third Revolution is underway, striking in its parallels to the first two. The signs of this third round of improvements in access and quality are appearing all around us

·         Access to presentations: live and prerecorded video and audio stream out across the Internet (a facility with some of the same strengths and weaknesses of earlier 'broadcast' technologies such as textbooks and lecture halls).

·         The library: once again the lode of intellectual resources is growing in size and accessibility. , The World Wide Web as well as online library catalogues provide access to gigantic collections of information.  Students and scholars can use this information from great distances and at times when traditional libraries are not open.  Of course, the new library does not contain all the information of the old, anymore than the first manuscripts contained all of Socrates' knowledge.

·         Seminars: the seminar was given new shape when learners started reading before talking, and again when they and scholars lived in the same colleges.  Now asynchronous seminars enable learners to participate more conveniently (access). Even more striking are the potential improvements in quality, stemming from more diverse student backgrounds and the ways in which students can open up when they don't need to worry about interrupting or being seen.

·         Growth of larger-scale educational structures.  Reading and writing brought with it the need for copyists, librarians, and, later, publishers.  Campuses mobilized, enriched, and focused the efforts of scholars by providing them with new support structures (laboratories, janitors, and administrators to raise funds).   Today even larger scale educational structures such as the Western Governors University, the University of Phoenix, and state networks are providing new contexts for higher education.

In 1987 I suggested the label of distributed learning environment to denote all the tools, resources, instructional materials and experiences currently within a student or scholar’s reach.  Each revolution has radically expanded and redefined the distributed learning environment of the day, thus enhancing both access and quality (while also harming them in certain ways).

These parallels may be startling because the three revolutions depend on such different technologies:

1.       For reading-writing, key technologies include paper, pen, and, later, printing presses;

2.       For the campus revolution, important technologies include lecture halls, chalkboards, dormitories, laboratories, and libraries as well as roads that could bring scholars and students to universities far from their birthplaces;

3.       For the Third Revolution, key technologies include silicon chips, a globe-spanning network optical fibers and satellites, telephone, fax machines, video cameras, and the agreements about communications and data storage that undergird the World Wide Web.

However, empowering technologies such as paper, buildings and computers don’t cause change by themselves.  Our choices of how to use them determine those consequences.  Because these three different families of technologies have been used in similar ways for similar purposes, the gains have been similar. The losses also resemble one another.

The striking parallels are fortunate for us.  They suggest that today's educational innovations can be designed to change both who learns and what they learn. We can reorganize learning around digital technologies in ways not unlike the methods by which we took advantage of reading and writing and of campuses. 

Unfortunately, most of today's proposals are still single mindedly pursuing either access or quality improvements.  So let's consider how to rethink access innovations so that they also improve quality, and vice versa.

Access Proposals That Can Improve Quality, Too

The typical proposal for a virtual college or program often describes in detail how access can be improved, while making rather vague claims about improving quality (if the latter is mentioned at all).  How might we transform the proposal so that a virtual university creates substantial improvements in quality, relative to what single institutions could have offered in the past?

The first step usually is to make sure that enrollment expands enough, justifying larger investments in program quality. A virtual program serving fifteen students has few options not open to a traditional campus program serving fifteen students. In the past, enrollment growth has justified the enlargement of libraries and laboratories, assembling a more diverse instructional staff, equipment for machine marking of exams, and other investments. Therefore, the program's content, marketing and capacity must be adequate for significant numbers of students.  

How can we use these capital investments to create distributed learning environments superior to what a small campus could once have offered?

Ø      Build a well-structured Web library.  This effort will usually include collecting and creating new materials (e.g. primary sources, tools for inquiry or design available over the Web). Equally important is the creation of mediating pages to help students find and use extant sites around the world.  These mediating web sites might include specialized search engines, reviews, organization of sources, and self-instructional materials.  The students themselves could help create and update these structures on a regular basis, under faculty supervision.  Institutions could specialize.  Each could gain a reputation for tending a different part of the intellectual garden.   Courses of study ought to be organized to help students gradually learn the complex skills they need to discover, evaluate, and organize information.  The peril, as ever, is the risk of investing heavily in specialized materials that are rendered obsolete too quickly by changes in computer operating systems and the Web. The Instructional Management Systems initiative is seeking to make this progress of incremental, long term growth more feasible; its standards would make it easier for bits of instructional material to be developed in one place and used (and sometimes paid for) at other places.

Ø      Enrich and diversify the instructional support.  For example, lecturers might work closely with specialists in the development of instructional materials and Web sites.  Experts from the outside world could lend their expertise and prestige to the assessment of student projects. The faculty member’s role ought to be redefined so he or she can be rewarded for being an effective part of such a team. This kind of division of labor is nothing new: think of the specialists and organizations that create and publish mass-produced textbooks, an earlier innovation made possible by the growth in scale of education and the technology of mass copying of text and images.

Ø      Seek a more diverse student body.  Organize and teach the course so that students ' differing backgrounds, values and settings create more energetic debates and inquiries. Make the varied settings where students work and learn into assets for the course. If the course is about the art of the Southwest, include students from different locations and have them research the art that is near them, and share what they learn with other students.

Ø      Exploit the slower pace of e-mail.  A teacher of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology once remarked only half-jokingly that he'd never talk philosophy with an undergraduate again. "Ah but e-mail," he continued.  "With e-mail, students have time to think about what they've heard, time to think about what they say next."  Students who are inarticulate face-to-face sometimes converse clearly and thoughtfully in the slower pace of the electronic seminar.  Such courses might thus be made more challenging as well as more accessible.

Ø      Improve assessment and feedback: It's unfortunate that many faculty members don't know enough about assessment.  One result: they hope that students will learn one thing (e.g., higher order thinking, academic values) but unwittingly test them for something else (e.g., memorization).  As we work on a larger scale, the advantages of appropriate assessment, and the dangers of inappropriate assessment grow.  It's also important to make assessment faster and thus more effective.  Some institutions are making greater use of online practice quizzes.   MIT instituted a program of online teaching assistants for freshman classes several years ago, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Ø      Learning how to learn: This doesn’t happen by accident. Courses of study need to be organized to help students gradually become conscious of their theories of learning and then to improve them. Some students enter college believing that their job is to listen and repeat, working alone. Changing that paradigm is as difficult as challenging their ideas about philosophy or physics.  A graduate who knows how to learn in today's world likely has far different attitudes, values, skills and knowledge than that person did when entering college. Capstone courses ought to test and improve students' ability to learn within their fields and as liberally educated adults.

Quality Proposals That Can Improve Access, Too

Suppose on the other hand that the original proposal was to improve the quality of education for a very small number of students.  As an example, let's imagine a program in management that is investing in technology for role-playing simulations and specialized business software.  How can that idea be revised to also improve access? 

Ø      Letting more students know the course or resource exists: working through a “virtual university” is one way to inform a new group of students about the existence of the innovation.  Another is to enlarge the innovation by working with one or more other institutions, and then drawing on the student bodies of all the partners.

Ø      Attracting more students: "Location, location, location" used to be the hallmark of many college programs. What was special about them was that they were within the reach of nearby learners.  To expand enrollment it will often be necessary to create programs that are more distinctive and valuable, perhaps by combining one's strengths with those of other institutions, certainly by taking a fresh look at needs.  Our business program, for example, might take a fresh look at how its students master the interpersonal skills needed to mobilize colleagues and employees over the Internet.  That's an important skill in this era of international business, when one initially does not know the culture or background of the people with whom one is working.  What business program (yet) is able to stake a claim there? If they could, how many students might they attract?

Ø      Handling more students: Many boutique innovations in management education are marked by high costs per learner. But often there are ways to handle more students while reducing costs per student.  It may be as simple as renegotiating site licenses for specialized software so that costs per student can be lowered in exchange for serving more students.  Sometimes it may require changing the organization of academic work.  Virginia Tech, for example, created a Math Emporium.  A former retail store was converted into a massive facility for supporting a variety of math courses, sharing a common corps of tutors for operation seven days a week at almost all hours of the day and night. 

Ø      Providing instruction in more accessible formats: For generations higher education has treated student time as though it was of no value.  Students had to stand in line, commute often to campus, and sit silently in classrooms, more shoulder to shoulder than face to face.  Yet when instructors lectured, there was usually no recording made (other than student notes) if the student wanted to review.  Our management program's use of technology could be strengthened if it were more thoughtful about when students and faculty really must be face-to-face.  As we've seen, sometimes education is better when distance is increased, saving time and creating new educational options in the process (e.g., the option of rewinding a lecture and listening to it a second time).

Ø      Controlling the long-term costs of materials: Courseware in the past has often been educationally quite effective, but expensive in the long term because it was used by only small numbers of students for a small time.  Ironically computers themselves have been the worst enemy of homegrown courseware.  Rapid changes in operating systems and hardware render educationally effective courseware obsolete long before it ever gains wide acceptance.  One response: use worldware such as spreadsheets and more sophisticated business software as the foundation. Because instructors can usually rely on such software (in new versions) to be around for a decade or two, they can gradually reshape courses of study to take advantage of it.  The Instructional Management Systems initiative, mentioned above, also hopes to create standards that will improve the viability of courseware.

Summary: Visions Worth Working Toward

Steve Gilbert coined the phrase "visions worth working toward" to describe images of the future that can mobilize action.  There are at least four levels of vision for using technology to improve access and quality.  Think of these as stages in the development of our imagination.

The first vision -- almost always a mirage -- imagines that technology is magic.  A few academics and people in government still believe that if they merely provide enough hardware or network connections, education will automatically become better, faster, more accessible, and cheaper.  But that makes as much sense as giving children paper, pencils, and a library card and expecting that millions of them will learn to read and then learn calculus.

The second level of vision is the one with which this essay began:

Ø      Use technology in activities that only increase access (with the hope that quality will be damaged little, if at all). 

Ø      Use technology to improve the quality of learning (while unfortunately benefiting only a small number of students for the time being). 

Attend any conference on technology and learning and most presentations will boast of only one type of gain: either in access or quality but rarely in both.  We ought to leave this kind of vision behind as quickly as possible.   Transforming learning almost always results in some losses in both access and quality.  Proposals that focus too single mindedly on access could create net losses in quality, when they could have made net improvements.  Proposals that focus too single mindedly on quality could create wider gaps between "haves" and "have-nots" when, if the proposal had been reconceived, the gap could have been narrowed.

The third level of vision suggests using technology in activities that simultaneously increase both access and quality by linking larger numbers of learners, scholars and resources together in a richer, more effective distributed learning environment.  This is a truly transformative vision. A number of institutions have begun taking steps along this path. It's a good path.

The fourth level of vision, however, is the one I recommend. It is much like the third, but with an added touch: its proposals recognize from the beginning that each step forward involves tradeoffs and damage.  When the innovator can predict these kinds of potential damage in advance, the proposal can include steps to limit the harm.   Such predictions are made easier by exploring parallels with the two earlier revolutions. 

For example, we know that each revolution has immersed learners in a larger set of possibilities for learning while increasing their distance from a single teacher to which they are accountable.  Thus each revolution increases the chances for student passivity, floundering, and cheating.  The first step in responding is to explore current best practices: what have been our best responses to passivity, floundering, and cheating in the past?  For example, we've challenged students with realistic projects, used faculty with deep insight into student learning and life, mixed large classes and small ones to give those experts a chance to see what students are really doing, paid attention to advising, and used authentic assessment.  In the Third Revolution we'll need to think even harder about how to help instructors (some of whom may no longer be resident on campus) to work together to deal with these problems because they are going to get worse.  This is just one of the new Grand Challenges posed by the Third Revolution: challenges to research and experimentation that are too big for one institution to deal with alone.

Paradoxically another serious problem we can anticipate is loss of access.  Just as in the two previous access revolutions, some people are likely to lose.  Unfortunately this risk is heightened when proponents and government hype virtual education mainly as a way of saving money. The potential losers could include the same kinds of people who have been slighted in the past, minds and talents we cannot afford to lose. There is no one solution.  Maine demonstrated one strategy by creating a virtual college based on video and computing with points of access in high schools, helping to assure that the rural poor would not be shut out.  That's not the whole problem, of course.  Each enlargement of the distributed learning environment gives students more options and thus puts more stress on their ability to take responsibility for their own learning.  Many of today's adults and young adults were not well served by their upbringing or their school education.  They will need extra help.  If every college and every state legislature says, "Right, but that's not my department," we're in for trouble. How to help them: that's another Grand Challenge.

A third Challenge is one of organizational fragmentation.  As technology leaves its niche on the wall and becomes fundamental to the work of the academy, our old ways of organizing work become barriers.  Too many looming problems are no one office or department's business, or they're the business of too many offices.  That's one reason why hundreds of colleges and universities have begun Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtables: to share information and coordinate strategies as their institutions gathers themselves to make major improvements in teaching and learning. 

These and other such challenges are serious.  Our two favorite options in higher education -- either doing nothing for the moment or else adding something new to an otherwise unchanged program -- look risky. 

Nonetheless, we do not know whether the Third Revolution will be good for most learners and scholars, or disastrous.  It may be affordable or it may bankrupt us.  It may narrow the gap between "haves" and "have-nots," or widen it.  It may enrich education or eviscerate it. Evaluation becomes more critical in such a period of turbulent change.  We are less likely to make real progress if we don't take time to see what we've just done and where we're going.  The Flashlight Program is working to provide tools and training for institutions and instructors that want to take a hard look at just what is going on in their programs.

Clark Kerr once wrote, "The most enduring institutions of Western civilization are the Roman Catholic Church; legislative assemblies and other government entities in Great Britain, Iceland, the Isle of Man and Switzerland; the Bank of Siena; and 61 universities."  Those institutions, and thousands of others like them, are no longer quite so stable. They are in the early stages of a profound transformation.  There is no King of Education who will determine what that transformation will bring.  The direction and the results of the Third Revolution will be determined by thousands of thoughtful and thoughtless choices being made today by institutions, governments, and corporations around the world.

About the Author

Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D., directs the Flashlight Program at the non-profit TLT Group.  Flashlight helps educators study and improve educational uses of technology.  The Teaching, Learning, and Technology Group, Inc., is a non-profit corporation affiliated with the American Association for Higher Education.   

Notes

A revised version of this draft was published in the September 1999 issue of The Educom Review. If you liked this article and want to see a complementary piece that describes R&D challenges raised by this transformation, see this article that appeared in Academe, also in 1999.

References and Resources

Ehrmann, Stephen C. "Improving a Distributed Learning Environment with Computers and Telecommunications," in Mindweave: Communication, Computers and Distance Education, Robin Mason and Anthony Kaye (eds.), Oxford and NY: Pergamon, 1988, 255-259. 

The Instructional Management Systems Project is described on the Web at http://www.imsproject.org.

The Pew Grant Program in Course Redesign is a $6 million institutional grant program that focuses on large-enrollment introductory courses, which have the potential of impacting significant numbers of students and generating substantial cost savings.  See http://www.center.rpi.edu.

Teaching, Learning and Technology Roundtables are described on the Web at http://www.tltgroup.org/programs/round.html.

Virginia Tech's Math Emporium is described at http://www.emporium.vt.edu.

Some Rights Reserved:  "Share it Forward"  by the TLT Group, a Non-Profit Corp.

PO Box 5643,
Takoma Park, Maryland 20913
Phone: 301.270.8312/Fax: 301.270.8110  

To talk about our work
or our organization
contact:  Sally Gilbert

Contact us | Partners | TLTRs | FridayLive! | Consulting | 7 Principles | LTAs | TLT-SWG | Archives | Site Map |