Information technology makes teaching and learning possible around the clock and around the world. But some wonder if an Ivy League education can be delivered over the Internet.
By Susan Lonkevich
FROM 3,000 MILES away came a message that prompted a faint trembling of test tubes and sent a slight shiver down the spines of brittle tomes.
“The research university is dead,” pronounced Dr. Peter Drucker, the renowned management guru and Clarke Professor of Social Science at Claremont Graduate School. Linked to Penn’s campus through satellite video, the influential octogenarian broke the news to some 80 leaders in education, technology, and business gathered at Penn in June to discuss “Higher Education in the Information Age.” The two-day event concluded a celebration of the 50th anniversary of ENIAC, the first general-purpose, electronic computer, created by a research team at Penn. The conference was organized by the School of Engineering and Applied Science, along with Michael Eleey, ASC’69, WG’77, associate vice provost for computing and information systems.
Drucker’s outlook may be extreme, as some educators argue, but it stems from a more credible concept expressed repeatedly at the conference — that market forces and information technology will transform higher
education as we know it today. Previous speakers had already predicted the alteration of the traditional academic calendar, envisioned a university where professors commonly e-mail students around the clock, and warned of competition from colleges granting degrees over the Internet. Earlier, while conference-goers watched and listened in fascination, acclaimed violinist Pinchas Zuckerman had reached across the miles from Tel Aviv, through digital video technology, to give a lesson to a student in Philadelphia.
“Technology is not the side show,” said Dr. Gregory Farrington, SEAS dean. “It is utterly essential to the future of the institution.”
What does that future look like at Penn and similar universities?
Dr. James O’Donnell, who holds the rather well-rounded titles of vice provost for information systems and computing and professor of classical studies, believes Penn will be around for a long time, both as a residential campus and a research university. But, he says, “I think we are in for some fairly drastic changes in the way that we do our business, in the business we do, and the markets we serve.”
And that actually could be a very good thing. Through the phenomenon known as interactive distance learning, for instance, Penn has the opportunity to educate an even more varied group of students than it does today.
Going the Distance For Education
Talk to O’Donnell about distance learning, and he’ll argue that it began with the medieval university that brought a multitude of students from diverse family backgrounds and countries to Paris some 700 years ago. “A social monstrosity,” he calls it. “A conservative, reasonable point of view in that age [would be that] you couldn’t possibly create valuable community out of all these people who don’t speak the same language, [with] no social structure around them, so they’re going to have to invent it all from scratch.” And they did.
But the distance learning plan for Western Governors University, as described at the conference by Utah Governor Michael Leavitt, introduces a new set of challenges.
The soft-spoken governor explained how WGU will use the Internet, videotapes, and other tools to offer degree and certification programs to students across the country. Faculty from potentially dozens of existing schools will teach the courses without leaving their own campuses. With support from 15 western states and a number of private corporations, the university plans to open its virtual doors next year.
THE MARKET TRULY driving this initiative, which “is about challenging and rethinking the very fundamental way in which we measure what people need to know,” Leavitt said. “The president of a major high-tech company told me, ‘If I can’t find people who have the skills that I need today, I can’t survive. Our colleges and universities are not adapting fast enough.'” The virtual university, as he pictures it, won’t replace on-campus education, but Leavitt argues that “any campus that does not have the capacity to deliver this kind of education will ultimately be shorting their students … and they will be at a serious disadvantage in terms of their ability to compete in the marketplace.”
Copied on a large scale, however, this plan could dramatically increase the ratio of students to professors, warned Dr. Steven Knapp, provost of Johns Hopkins University. He questioned whether such initiatives would “wipe out” large portions of faculty, and whether many institutions “would, in fact, perish in the competition.”
The market-conscious approach of WGU and the influential role of private corporations in the enterprise also drew some cautionary comments. “Most of what I teach and write about doesn’t have much market value,” said Dr. Mark Taylor, a humanities professor at Williams College. “I think it’s crucial for people in the arts and humanities to find new ways to participate in these new [media] and to make them places for critical thinking.”
Penn junior Myra Lotto described a very different kind of distance education already being tested here. Unlike the “broadcast” model of one lecturer to many students, the so-called “24-hour classroom” is interactive to the extreme. English 103, The Short Story, was “one of the most exhausting experiences I’ve ever had,” she said, but one that “taught a whole new way of thinking.” Her English professor, Dr. Alan Filreis, assigned topics in class, and students divided into position groups. When they returned to their dorms and clicked on their computers, the intellectual battles began. Over one semester the students — and their professor — exchanged 4 million bytes, or 2,200 pages, of impassioned text. “There’s nothing like opening up your e-mail account every day to see 74 new messages from your adoring classmates,” Lotto said. “Frantic e-mailings at 3 a.m. gave way to screaming matches in the hallways.” In essence, “class never ended.”
Dr. Michael Zuckerman, C’61, a Penn history professor who even abstains from e-mail (“It’s a little cluttered,” he explains. “More than enough people reach me.”), isn’t impressed with any model of distance learning. There simply is no replacement for teaching face to face, he says. “For universities to be walking away from those remarkably wonderful connections is a betrayal of the smidgen of humanity that we cling to,” he laments. “I think a lot of discoveries come not out of impersonal exchanges, but come with inflections of voice, and with heat, and anger, and edge, and fashion, and irony, and viciousness … But all of that is tougher to convey over e-mail communication that’s so clipped and abbreviated anyway. It doesn’t even bring out the kind of exquisiteness one can get in speech.”
The effectiveness of distance learning would depend on the subject being taught, believes Dr. Bruce Kuklick, C’63, Gr’68, the Jeanette P. and Roy F. Nichols Professor of History and undergraduate chair of the history department. “If you’re taking an accounting course, who cares? If you’re taking a course on the English novel, it makes a big difference.”
Although he finds information technology useful for rapid communication, Kuklick doubts it can transform teaching for the better. “All the basic problems in the world of education are human problems, and they can’t be resolved by technology.”
He also views e-mail exchanges of the kind described by Lotto as “tangential” to the substance of a course, “which is the more disciplined reading and writing.” Says Kuklick, “I think the computer revolution kind of goes along with the general idea that everyone has something to say, and this is a way for everybody to spew out what they want … but I don’t believe everybody has something to say. I think learning and knowledge require some study, and reflection and thought to construct coherent arguments.”
Like many private universities, Penn is studying more selective uses for distance learning and doesn’t view WGU as direct competition. “In principle, someone could teach a freshman calculus on-line-for-anybody course and sell it for a decent price,” O’Donnell says. But educational quality might be sacrificed in the process. “We now turn away something like four out of every five people who want to come here and get a bachelor’s degree. In so doing, we produce a community of people on campus who are all very smart, very competitive, creative, and therefore, interesting to know. A significant part of what we offer to people who want to come and beat down our doors is a first-rate faculty, but also classrooms in which first-rate work will be done. So the question is, if you open up the virtual doors to the world outside, how do you design programs that are comparably enriching?” With that in mind, Penn is more likely to experiment with the new technologies in a way that will offer continuing education to alumni, and even non-alumni professionals.
At the undergraduate level, O’Donnell says, students on campus could “reach out in individualized, targeted ways to get the special experience they need from someplace else.’ In turn, students who study or do research overseas, be it for a few weeks or a semester, could also stay in touch electronically with Penn.
Also possible in future years is “a more intermittent form of face-to-face learning” for well-motivated students who, due to family commitments, finances or other obstacles can’t spend an entire semester on campus: “Show up for two weeks of orientation,” O’Donnell explains. “Go back to your real life. Show up for a weekend six weeks later. Come back for a week at the end of the semester. And in between that time have highly structured communication, curriculum, and so forth.”
New Ways of Learning
INFORMATION TECHNOLGY has already altered teaching and learning on college campuses in subtler ways. In some classes, term papers are giving way to Web projects. “A whole new rhetoric is born when you have the freedom to create hypertext links between pieces of supportive evidence,” Lotto said. “Web projects escape linear thought while maintaining a level of analysis which you will also find in the best term papers.” Technology also has created new methods for studying old disciplines. Medical students, for example, can partake of a virtual anatomy lesson when cadavers are scarce, and a representative from Silicon Graphics demonstrated one such program at the conference.
But will the average teacher have the time and skill to create lesson plans with such high-tech bells and whistles? “I think as a community we are still ridiculously optimistic about the amount of work it’s going to take to put a really good curriculum or even a course together using these new tools,” said Dr. Andries Van Dam, GEE’63, GrE’66, technology and education professor at Brown University.
Dr. Walter Licht, a Penn history professor and associate dean of graduate studies, has taught the same U.S. history survey course more than 15 times, but creating a comprehensive Web site as a teaching tool last semester enlivened what he admits was becoming a monotonous task. “I had an exciting, wonderful time with it.
“I know my [teaching assistants’] class discussions have been much better, and I have found students asking more questions in class,” he says. Now that Licht doesn’t need to rush through hundreds of audiovisuals during class lectures, he can linger on topics he feels need extra attention. His students can take their time later viewing related photos, maps, and lithographs on the Web site. But Licht says he had help through a grant to construct the site, a time-consuming project that would have been nearly impossible to juggle with his other duties.
Penn senior Steven Morgan Friedman gestured with obvious enthusiasm as he praised the many educational uses of the Internet. Not only did it keep him in contact with a professor several times daily during an independent study, but it allowed him to converse in beginner German with students from Germany. Friedman also sees in technology the potential to recreate the close intellectual community that thrived on college campuses when they were smaller. (See his Web site on Penn in the 1830s). Researching life at New England universities in the 1830s, he learned that Harvard students used to print up pamphlets about themselves and their opinions — “kind of like Web pages in a way” — and distribute them around campus; in response, the faculty would circulate their own pamphlets. “Using these new technologies,” he said, “we too can do the same thing with our own twist for the 21st century.”
Rather than viewing each other as “these strange creatures” that disappear at sundown, O’Donnell agrees, students and professors can use technology to get to know each other better despite busy schedules. He recalls one e-mail desperately sent by a student before sunrise — a smart idea, because otherwise, the student would not have caught up with O’Donnell on that particular day.
It’s clear that some faculty don’t view the concept of “the 24-hour classroom” with the same benign vision, however. “A number of our faculty find that notion awful and terrifying,” said Dr. Judith Rodin, CW’66, president of the University. “We really do need to think about how we make it available, in what ways, and for whom.”
Education Freed From Time and Place
Each May, O’Donnell chuckles at the stern notices slapped on the walls of Hill College House, where he serves as faculty master: “‘You must be out of the dormitory by such and such a time on Saturday. Anyone found in the building after hours will be escorted from the premises by a University Police officer.'” It’s not exactly “the warmest and fuzziest kind of farewell,” he notes.
Undergraduates might prefer the option of buying year-round housing at Penn, he says. With the University as “their home base of operations 12 months a year,” they could move on and off campus in patterns more compatible with their fields of study.
When Dr. Stanley Chodorow, Penn’s provost, assembled O’Donnell and other administrators last spring for a seminar and retreat on the future of the University in the information age, they envisioned just such an institution, freed from the restrictions of the ancient agrarian cal- endar and the daily class schedule. They also predicted that professors might begin mentoring students from other schools who have contacted them over the Internet, and that Penn would use information technology to work out some teaching partnerships with similar universities. Chodorow’s group has begun defining a set of experiments to test the feasibility and quality of various uses of information technology.
The Fraternity of Art Historians?
AS TECHNOLOGY makes it possible to spread information with a keystroke, the work of many research universities will become irrelevant, argues Dr. Peter Drucker.
“We will have to accept the fact that only a few institutions can maintain research in any given area,” said the Vienna-born management expert in a deep, guttural voice much like that of Henry Kissinger. An art historian he knows, for example, counted just seven institutions worldwide where art history is truly being advanced. “The rest are to art history what a fast-food outlet is to a Michelin four-star restaurant,” Drucker sniffed. “One eats there if one has to, but not eagerly.
“A few, a very few, will specialize in this area and that area, and the top people will form a worldwide fraternity … held together by the Internet.”
But more important, said Drucker, the new information carriers “will change the meaning of knowledge. We have defined knowledge as the acquisition of information … There is a much older definition: that knowledge is what people can learn.”
Chodorow, responding later by e-mail, said he doubts the new research entities Drucker described could replace the functions of a university. “As I heard Drucker, he was saying that the university would dissolve into an intellectual system much like a discipline … But the university is necessarily an interdisciplinary community, and it is impossible to imagine a universal ‘community’ that was merely the collection of all the placeless and timeless operations of the disciplines. Such an ‘institution’ would make no choices and apply no interdisciplinary judgments on the work of individual disciplines represented in their faculties.”
O’Donnell believes Drucker’s theories are grounded in at least one reality, though — that universities “cannot continue to be everything they have been and cover as high a percentage of the waterfront of scientific scholarly subject matter as they used to. That’s partly because the waterfront is expanding.”
Although Penn will be around for “probably a good long while,” he predicts, “there are other kinds of places that struggle to be research institutions that may very well see their mission change and become more pedagogical, less research oriented; more dependent, less independent.”
Let’s “Do It On Our Own Terms”
For two days, Dr. Harry Payne, president of Williams College, had sat back and watched his colleagues debate the numerous ways that technology and the marketplace may change the university. When his turn came to address the group, he first gave this advice: Lighten up.
“It’s been just a little grim,” said Payne, whose fast-paced speaking style contrasted with his mellow attitude. “I think the students are having fun … but mostly we’re adopting the language of the marketplace — production and delivery and all those kinds of things.
“If we’re going to have fun, if we’re going to embrace these technologies well, we have to do it on our terms,” said Payne. “The college I superintend on a good day is a well-ordered anarchy — and I would say that’s true of any institution.” He observes the same dynamic on the Internet. Rather than co-opt universities, “the Internet may well ratify and strengthen who we are and what we are.”
Rodin spoke with a little more urgency. “I think technology is upon us with a vengeance” — and that’s exciting, she said. By inviting Leavitt, someone outside traditional academe, to speak, “We felt we should all recognize that whether we like it or not there is going to be an onslaught of [educational] initiatives that will sometimes emerge outside the universities but impact our universities.”
Because of the new technologies, there probably will be fewer places of higher learning, Rodin said. “I can’t even imagine what 25 years from now will be like, but I agree with my colleagues that being planful now and being nimble and flexible is something that is probably more demanded of us at this moment than ever before.”
Back in his office, with classics on his shelves and a Windows NT computer on his desk, O’Donnell responds to doubts that you can create an authentic community online. Again, he refers to the medieval university: “Human history from that day to this has been one of learning to make do with less and less face-to-face interaction and creating more and more virtual communities.”
Reflecting on his childhood in southern New Mexico and west Texas, O’Donnell says, “We regret the fact that we don’t know all of our neighbors the way Mom and Dad used to do.” But we’ve made that choice. For one thing, he says, our neighbors may not be the world’s most interesting people. “And number two, we have a network of relationships outside the neighborhood that absorb our time and energy, that are, to us, higher in quality and value in various ways than time spent setting on the front ‘pohch’ talking to Clem down the block.”
Some of those associations are formed many miles apart over the Internet. Just the other day, O’Donnell recalls with a smile, a ninth-grader from Canada, who had seen one of his Web sites and wanted to include it in a project, contacted him by e-mail.
“We forget,” he says, “that when we spent all of our time sitting on the front porch, sometimes it used to drive us nuts that we were stuck there in the middle of nowhere, talking to Clem, night after night, when there were bright lights and big cities and interesting people someplace else.”
