This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com)
Wednesday, January 17, 2001
Education Must 'Transform' Itself or Become Irrelevant, Educause Official Says By FLORENCE OLSEN Creating a course syllabus will be a different experience with the new approach to teaching and learning that Carole A. Barone now advocates. Two years ago, Ms. Barone was named vice president of Educause, a consortium of colleges and information-technology companies. Ms. Barone had been the associate vice chancellor for information technology at the University of California at Davis. Among Ms. Barone's responsibilities at Educause is the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, which -- despite its name -- is an international program. Begun in 1994, its objective is to transform higher education through the extensive use of information technology. Its proponents envision using the technology to expand access to American higher education and enhance its quality, while reducing or containing teaching and learning costs. One possibility lies in using software components that are sometimes called "learning objects." These are software building blocks that can also include content. Professors will use them to create multimedia materials for courses that can be taught, in part or entirely, online. If traditional higher education does not transform itself, it risks losing market share and relevance in the rapidly emerging distributed-education "marketspace," Ms. Barone suggests.
Q. What is the "infrastructure" in the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative?
A. We use the term "infrastructure" in
the broadest sense, because from the beginning we have recognized that it
takes more than technology to enable academic transformation.
We include, in addition to hardware, software,
networking, and standards, such institutional foundations as
policies and planning and budgeting strategies. The
initiative is not about change at the margins. We are talking
about an entirely new higher-education environment.
Q. Can we really expect faculty members to become
software developers and universities to support
hundreds of course-software-development projects?
A. I don't think the majority of faculty members
want to becourseware developers. I think they want to
able to create their courses and put their personal
stamp on them, because teaching is a very personal
thing. Many campuses have installed
course-management systems to provide a standard
technical environment within which faculty members are
able to customize their courses. With these
systems, institutions can offer consistent support
within the constraints of limited resources. The days
of one-on-one support for faculty
courseware-development efforts are waning.
Q. Those systems basically automate much of the
programming, and the faculty members more or less just
put content in?
A. Yes, the faculty members put content in, and then they are doing what faculty members have always done.
Q. So that professors are using a new type of media to create their courses, but essentially still being professors?
A. That's right. This approach also gets at some
of the problems that faculty members have had in the past.
They find a textbook that is two-thirds wonderful, and
one-third of it they want to throw away. Well,
now you can have exactly what you want. You just have
to be able to go out there and find the
components -- and have easy-to-use tools to put them
together. And you need standards for
interoperability -- so that different components work
together.
Q. Do you think universities would be promoting
this sort of technology-based transformation were they
not fearful of new, for-profit competitors changing the
economics of higher education?
A. I don't think universities have a choice. One
of the things motivating faculty members to make these changes
is the students. Even if you're a traditional tier-one
institution, you're going to have students coming to
your campus with expectations that they will do more
than merely sit in the classroom and absorb. They
are expecting to use online resources, and they come
able to use them. The Internet is a social environment
for many of these students, and they construct
knowledge using fragments of knowledge that they find on
the Web. They construct their knowledge socially using
the Web. It's very different. So every institution
is faced with at least that much change. And that in
itself is transformational.
Q. How are colleges handling the extra financial
and personnel burdens of developing software-based teaching
materials?
A. I'd say they're still trying to do it with
excess funds and on the fringes. That works when you're just dealing
with the faculty members who were the pioneers, but it
doesn't scale -- for all the rest of the faculty who now
need to do it.
Q. That is to say, there are no line items in university budgets for faculty-software development?
A. To give every faculty member individual technical support is just not possible.
Q. There aren't enough students with technical training to provide that support?
A. That's why we're pushing the development of
course components that are reusable and course-management
systems that make it possible for technical-staff
members to support most of the faculty. Faculty members
have expectations of being able to operate
independently, so there is also that tension for faculty members
who need technical support.
Q. Once faculty members get up and running with
these components, aren't the courses that they create ones
they can maintain on their own?
A. That's the key to this.