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Aren’t we judging virtual universities by outdated standards?
Aren’t We Judging Virtual Universities by Outdated Standards? by Leslie P. Hitch
The questions swirling about the acceptability of a virtual university as a sanctioned institution of higher learning may be more about imposing outdated regulations upon an entity that uses 21st century technology to serve 21st century educational needs than about educational efficacy.
Leslie P. Hitch is Senior Consultant, Edvisors, 458 Albemarle Road, Newtonville, Massachusetts 02460 ⬍[email protected]⬎.
For nearly a millennium, the organizing concept of the university could best be described by the word convocation. Beset in its earliest manifestation by an often barbaric and intrusive world, and fearful that, in a moment’s time, the knowledge and wisdom passed down from generation to generation recorded painstakingly in precious, hand-lettered parchment manuscripts, could be suddenly and irrationally erased from the human record, the university has always organized for defense.1
I
n the waning months of the 20th century, the venerable Chronicle of Higher Education rarely let a week go by when it did not carry an article or two disparaging the growing number of virtual universities. Of particular concern to the most censorious was whether these institutions deserved the right to be licensed and accredited. There are several aspects to this debate. One is the overt questioning of educational effectiveness. Another, more subtle, may be the inherent conflict around the education of the adult learner. At a gathering in 1999 of continuing education professionals at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, vociferous debate among participants arose over whether the much maligned but highly successful University of Phoenix was offering education or training. Yet, one hundred years ago, several correspondence schools used well-known, erudite faculty and conferred prestigious degrees. This article raises the specter, but will not dwell on, the prejudices and tensions inherent in educating the adult. What it does address, in an age when people need continuous education, where legions of children daily use computers, and where items as expensive as automobiles can be purchased with an electronic click, is whether the issue is really the educational efficacy or the criteria on which we judge virtual education. This
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article questions whether higher education can fairly evaluate a 21st century institution when using standards from earlier centuries that may be outdated by technology and do not mesh with the population that virtual universities serve.
BACKGROUND Slow to change, higher education has revolved around a model born in the Middle Ages and solidified by the German research university concept at the turn of the last century. In the United States, higher education evolved from the almost sole bastion of the rich and the clergy to a conglomeration of institutions and tiers within those segments. By 1880, higher education institutions gave an aura of inclusiveness with the advent of research universities, women’s colleges, historically Black colleges, land-grant institutions, and trade colleges. Despite these gains, formal education served a very small percentage of the population. These changes in higher education reflected the changes in the society as a whole. Within a generation after the Civil War, the United States had become a world economic entity and an industrialized nation. The population and the railroads were growing ever westward. More and more people worked longer and longer hours in factories and on the farms. There were throngs of immigrants. This was the time of the electric light, of Darwinism, and of relentless change. The convergence of technological change and the need for a newly skilled workforce resulted in demand from individuals for additional learning. It was also a time when the disenfranchised often sought higher education. The disenfranchised, usually women or tradespeople, were consigned to home study groups, lectures, and evening high schools.2 For those without access to even this limited
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educational formality, correspondence courses became their lifeline.3 The advent of radio and later television as well as the tumultuous upheaval of two world wars lessened this need. Regulations The GI Bill after World War II opened not only doors for the masses to afford college, but also the doors of many new institutions to meet the demand. States soon passed laws restricting organizations and institutions from haphazardly granting college degrees. Legislatures created professional entities to review the requests. These regulations restrict the use of the college or university as part of a name as well as the authority for an institution to grant a degree. The primary and justifiable aim of these laws and regulations was to protect the student-consumer from enrolling in institutions that were interested only in financial gain and whose educational offerings were circumspect at best. Although the intent of these regulations is as necessary today as when they were passed, the regulations themselves are, to recast an often-used term, not Y2K compliant. The laws governing the licensing of a degree-granting institution were approved when the telephone was the primary distance communication device. These laws were also enacted when the traditional student population was 18 –24 years old and primarily male. Today, that telephone fits in the palm of one hand and can relay vast amounts of information into a far-away computer in the palm of another hand and the traditional student is over 25 years old and is overwhelmingly female. Furthermore, the structure of higher education has become more complex. The research university, not the liberal arts college, now sets the standard for the population of higher education.4 It has been in the past 50 years that this model has dominated. Richard Freeland, now president of Northeastern University, wrote that this model carries with it a social prestige of scholarship.5 The regulations set forth by states and other regulatory and/or accrediting organizations bolster this situation. Some of these regulations require conformation to a specified number of credit hours for graduation, a specified number and type of general education requirements, a delineated number of credit hours necessary to declare a major, a set number of classroom contact hours, and often a pro-
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scribed volume of library holdings. Although the global workplace is calling for collaboration, teamwork, and a multidisciplinary perspective, higher education holds on to discreet, self-contained units counted in numbers. It may be the adherence to these units of measurement that make the comprehension of the educational effectiveness of a virtual university so difficult. Parts of a virtual university are not easily converted to these standards. Effectively, by complying with the rules, regulations, and restrictions of a brick-and-mortar world, virtual education must work within the confines of a world already created, despite the obvious differences. There is an old axiom common to economists and historians that traces the demise of the railroads in the United States to their stubborn insistence that they were in the railroad business when, in effect, they were in the transportation business. Higher education may be in the unit measurement business sometimes at the expense of education.
UNDERSTANDING DIFFERENCES What are the obvious differences? The first is mission. There are over 3,300 institutions of higher education in the United States. A mission that states differentiation in terms of electronic delivery of educational materials does not ensure contrast from the myriad of organizations multiplying rapidly that offer electronic access to education.6,7 More than in conventional institutions where a mission statement might be irrelevant because student choice is based on proximity of location, physical plant, sports facilities and/or teams, legacy, or the need to go far from home, the mission of a virtual university becomes the equivalent of its physical plant or its proximity. The mission statement needs to address the basic tenets of higher education. More important, it needs to emphasize the role of the new media in delivering that education, for it is the technological delivery that sets it apart from place-based institutions. Still, the world population is transitioning to the ubiquitous use of technology in daily life, including in education. Therefore, the mission cannot be too avantgarde because it might scare away perspective students. It cannot be too bland for it would then sound like every other institution.
TEACHING, LIBRARY, AND STUDENT SERVICES But, mission is amorphous. The most significant differences, and often the most polemic, are at the core of higher education: teaching, library, and student services. A university’s given role, traditional or electronic, is transferring information and expanding knowledge. Yet, higher education, particularly over the past 15 years, has been accused of not only becoming more and more arcane, but also of straying further and further away from effective teaching.8 Legislators and the public feel faculty are eschewing teaching.9 Research is still the coin of the academic realm. Learner centered is neither widely accepted nor fully understood throughout academe.
“Yet, higher education, particularly over the past 15 years, has been accused of not only becoming more and more arcane, but also of straying further and further away from effective teaching.” Faculty Role Therefore, the first question asked, and debated,10 is what is the role of faculty and who is qualified to teach in an online environment. Do faculty engaged in online delivery of courses actually teach? But the real truth is that faculty are not trained to teach. As experts in a specialized field of knowledge, faculty have traditionally transferred knowledge.11 Skilled in what has become euphemistically known as Sage on the Stage, many faculty teach as they have been taught, by didactic lecture. Content is designed, sequenced, and delivered by the faculty member with often minimal input (except through examinations) by the student. Without attempting a Talmudic interpretation of the intent and expectation of university teaching, the question of the role of online faculty is a logical one to ask. But we can also ask if a lecture to 300 students is an example of good teaching? Is the lecture setting, where the faculty member often cannot see or remember an individual face, better than an online course where the faculty member cannot
see an individual face? According to the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE), the Seven Principles For Good Practice In Undergraduate Education include methods that encourage contacts between students and faculty, develop reciprocity and cooperation among students, use active learning techniques, give prompt feedback, emphasize time on task, communicate high expectations, and respect diverse talents and ways of learning.12 These principles are no different in the virtual environment than in the walled classroom. The difference is in method of delivery. Teaching in an electronic environment, especially one where a constructivist model is extensively used, requires an slightly altered approach,13 where the faculty member and the student enter into a more collaborative framework for both teaching and learning. The debate over whether this role is more of a facilitator and not a true faculty role is already into several rounds. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is becoming more vociferous. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, James Perley and Denise Marie Tanguay, chair and member, respectively, of the AAUP Committee on the Accrediting of Colleges and Universities, asked if institutions lack “both a critical core of full-time faculty members and a system of governance by which the faculty is responsible for developing curricula and academic policy” can they truly be called “universities” or “colleges?”14 Others have given the role of the faculty member in an electronic environment a different definition. Their definition is in terms of student learning rather than faculty teaching. Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt espouse this view.15 The medium becomes the message: “the facilitation of learning environments that foster personal meaning-making as well as the social construction of knowledge . . . is preferred to instructor interventions that control the sequence and content of instruction.”16 Tyranny of the Credit Hour The second question heartily discussed and debated is what is a course online? How long is it? How do students connect with it? And, who actually prepares it? In the American university for almost all of its existence, a course was delivered over a given number of weeks; covered a given, or at least an attempted given,
amount of material; and required that students sit in that classroom for a given number of hours. Robert Heterick referred to the “tyranny of the classroom hour.”17 The classroom hour has been the measure, rightly or wrongly, effectively or not, of student learning. Programs delivered on other than the semester hour basis often must show they meet the standards of equivalent educational programs. These standards are common across higher education. Martin Trow refers to this as “our peculiar system.”18 Other countries do not have the equivalent system. The student takes an examination or writes a thesis: But our credits, units that can be accumulated, banked, transferred, and, within limits, automatically accepted as legal academic tender toward an earned degree throughout the country, make possible the extraordinary mobility of or students between fields of study and between institutions.19
The credit hour becomes a double-edge sword. Its use makes it somewhat seamless for students to transfer credit either in or out of a virtual or any institution, yet, for virtual education to meet standards, it must deliver courses based on the credit hour model20 integral to higher education. It has to determine a requisite amount of time that a student might spend in class and in preparation for class. However, the differentiation of virtual learning is that the student is not in class and is somewhat free to choose both the time and the place that he or she wishes to learn. One Click Away
“Without peer pressure and face-to-face contact with the instructor, students need to be involved, almost enraptured, with distance learning.” When developing a course for electronic distribution, the design must incorporate and compensate for as much of the teacher-student interaction as possible. The difficulty, as outlined in the now classic book Network Nation is “the designer is not responsible for all the problems that arise. However, it is true that users will exhibit certain undesirable behavior that the designer has to accept and allow for in the design of the system.”22 Although this statement could be applied to any classroom situation, the time for the instructor to recover from a design flaw in real time is immediate. In a virtual environment, a learning and instructional defect is far more complex to fix, far more difficult for the instructor to alter. Furthermore, in an online environment, students are free to skip ahead to different sections of the course, to linger in others. Interaction is guided by words, responses, and commentary. Therefore, an online course needs to anticipate as many different learning styles, approaches to material, subtleties, and nuances of understanding as possible. Unlike the conventional classroom, the creation of the courses and their subsequent syllabi could leave nothing to chance. But by leaving nothing to chance, everything would be left to chance. “Users will do the unexpected, the unanticipated, and the forbidden.”23 Virtual Syllabi
The connection to the student is one undergoing serious evaluation by both the detractors and devotees of virtual education. The challenge in the virtual environment (not too dissimilar than that in the traditional classroom) is how to keep students, not all of whom are expert at time management and self-discipline in their learning styles, connected, captivated, and committed to finishing. Without peer pressure and face-to-face contact with the instructor, students need to be involved, almost enraptured, with distance learning. The literature warns that the virtual student, particularly the adult, is only one click away from dropping out of any course.21
Probing deeper into what is a course online begs the question, what is a syllabus online? In a conventional courses, the individual instructor writes the individual syllabus, establishes the parameters for grading, and decides which books to use and what readings to require or suggest. In the instructor’s mind is a sequence where each class builds on the previous class, both in terms of the knowledge and the interaction between students and instructor. Development of an online course is not the same. First, the development cannot be done by one individual. The inclusion of the technology alone requires that there be others familiar with technology to work
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with the instructor to develop the course. Second, the sequence cannot be entirely linear. Students may wish to skip around. Third, altering the course part way though its delivery is more complex. Course authoring, once the sole domain of the instructor, becomes a team process subject to peer evaluation. Workload And, lastly, what is the best way to evaluate teaching load in a virtual university. How does one measure the amount of time that the faculty teaches? Is it the number of times the faculty member logs onto the site? Is it the amount of time the faculty member is in contact with the students? What about the time spent reading the textbook and discovering additional Web sites and materials? In a virtual world where there is increasing expectation that services are available 24 hours per day, seven days per week, what is a reasonable time for faculty to respond to students? Regulations often stipulate the normal workload for faculty. Limiting faculty workload in a virtual environment may have unintended and adverse consequences for the student and financial ramifications for the institution. Library Conundrum The library is undergoing considerable scrutiny in a virtual medium. It is here that the differences between the requirements and the realities of the information age are the most pronounced. What exactly is a library holding in a virtual university? Is it intellectual property; portals; proprietary Web pages of links instead of books, newspapers, archival material? The concern, in the words of Harvey Varnet, director of libraries at Simmons College in Boston and president of the Association of College and Research Libraries in the Northeast, has focused on what he calls “the last mile.” The last mile is the method in a totally virtual environment whereby a student in a virtual institution receives hardcopy books and documents. But, is this a realistic focus?
“It is here that the differences between the requirements and the realities of the information age are the most pronounced.” Even though each day there are new documents, tools, and delivery systems
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for information appearing both for free and for cost on the Internet and the World Wide Web, there are those still skeptical of the new medium. These concerns are best expressed in What’s the Difference, a 1999 report prepared by the Institute for Higher Education Policy for the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association:24 The research does not adequately address the effectiveness of digital “libraries.” Students participating in distance learning, particularly those in remote locations are often introduced to a digital “library” that provides access to bibliographies, as well as full-text, of a variety of resources. The library is at the core of the higher education experience and, especially at the graduate level, is an integral part of the teaching/learning process. Indeed, digital libraries associated with the University of California, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan have made great advances in providing access to a wealth of collections. There is some concern, however, that these showcase libraries are not representative of other digital libraries. For instance, is there a tendency for the digital library, because of a limited collection, specifically with respect to copyrighted materials—to adversely affect curricular decisions?25
The issue for the information age, however, is not as much access to material or the concern that there is not enough material. The problem is the distillation and categorization of materials in an era when information is proliferating at almost exponential rates each day. Today, the learned person needs to know not only how to find information, but more important, how to sort through the volumes of information available for just about any request. “Teaching patrons how to effectively apply the increasingly sophisticated search methods available online will be an important function in the digital library.”26 In a White Paper, Lawrence Dowler, associate librarian for Public Services at Widener Library at Harvard University, agreed. He stated, “The challenge for librarians and other information professions will be to devise the most effective and efficient ways to assist in this process.27 The conundrum in the evaluation of the library in a virtual environment is the focus on both the opportunities and limitations that the technological delivery of information brings. The following is a segment of questions, some portending the excitement in the possibilities the con-
figuration of the library that go beyond the question of number of library holdings and access to the last mile: ●
How much library use will each class require? What kind? Is the use of the library primarily through the use of databases? Although increasing significantly through sites such as netLibrary,28 access to information through electronic means related to the humanities and, ironically, technology, lags behind sciences and business.
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What is the use of the library? Should library use be considered the ability to sort through large numbers of databases? Should the library develop sorting mechanisms related to each course to ease not only access to material, but to also identify legitimate sources?
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On a more mundane, but critical note, what are the hours of operation? Is there a professional librarian on call, to work in real time, in what is known in the jargon as 24 –7, a virtual world where anyone living anywhere can conduct business any time during the day. Even at a minimum, the real time to staff a virtual desk29 would have to exceed a standard eight to 10 hour day.
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How many commercial databases and information retrieval sources are enough to support a curriculum? Is a first class virtual library one where it has contracts with as many databases as possible, anticipating the most prodigious user, or could there be a ceiling of use?
The current requirements often revolve around holdings and access as the indication of educational competence. Perhaps they now need to revolve around knowledge management. In building a virtual library, is there the opportunity to develop a significant knowledge base not only of Web sites, but also of student requests, faculty suggestions, and ancillary materials? Could that knowledge be used to determine coming trends and issues that would lead to additional courses, modification of older courses, or reconfiguration of requirements keeping materials perpetually fresh? Student Services The third area of discussion is student services. Because the regulations are designed to protect the student consumer, the importance of servicing that student is paramount. However, again, the new
world has not yet been encompassed by the old, thus creating difficulties for the very people, the students, that the regulations are designed to protect. One of these areas is in student financial aid. The U.S. Congress, so far, has been cautious about extending Pell Grants and federal education loans to adult, part-time students at virtual universities. For l999 –2000 a cautious experiment involving up to 35 colleges and consortia has been authorized so that Congress and the U.S. Department of Education can monitor the loan and repayment experience with new electronic education programs.30 Student services includes examination of plant and equipment. Ordinarily a licensing or regulatory agency asks to see the building in which a college program is to be offered. Is it safe to occupy and warm enough in cold weather? A virtual university has no campus in the usual sense. Rather than a campus, a virtual university’s physical plant and equipment consists of courses, servers, and computers to receive and send messages. In a virtual university, the temperature of the student (and faculty) rests not on thermostats, but on access and orientation to the technology needed to comfortably take a course.
“In a virtual university, the temperature of the student (and faculty) rests not on thermostats, but on access and orientation to the technology needed to comfortably take a course.” The more serious consideration facing the viability of a virtual education is not its educational efficacy as much as individual access to technology. Access to technology, often referred to as the problem of the technology haves and the technology have-nots, is one of the salient issues of the information age. However, as the price of technology keeps coming down, it is likely that two thirds of American adults early in the 21st century will have ready access to the computers needed to take courses and to pursue degrees.31
PONDERING
THE
JUDGMENTS
At the dawn of the 21st century, what exactly are we requiring of not only vir-
tual universities, but also of the existing bricks-and-mortar ones? Technology is becoming pervasive in all of our lives regardless of socioeconomic status. Elementary and secondary schools worldwide are not only bringing the Internet and computer-based technology into their classrooms, they are also offering, themselves, modes of virtual delivery.32 There is an increasing need, as there was 100 years ago, to connect to the world of work, to educate individuals for productive lives. Higher education continues to be scrutinized by the public wary of high tuition, underprepared students, and a faculty they see as disconnected from societal needs.33 Therefore, several schools and colleges are developing ways to connect classroom work to the world of work. Portland State University in Oregon was cited by the Pew Foundation in the late 1990s as an Exemplar of an institution that was able to rein in its costs and, at the same time, reshape its curriculum to meet the needs of the community and the workplace.34 At the turn of the last century, the telephone, electricity, and the automobile transformed the way that society communicated, worked, and lived. We laid telephone cable, strung electric wires, and paved roads to incorporate these new devices into the fabric of our lives. We opened new universities and educational channels to teach those once restricted by class or economic means. Whether, or how, electronic delivery of education will destroy what scholars and society have known for millennia as higher education is unclear. What we do know is that in the past five years, the world has learned that goods and services are just one click away as they shop for books, stocks, or vehicles. The rapid accession of the Internet as a communication tool has allowed individuals to acquire new skills and new friends all on their own time and in their own space. Each day some new technology company makes billionaires out of regular, and often, very young people. Even the venerable Dow Jones Average, in the last 60 days of the 20th century, discarded the 100-year-old Sears and the even older Goodyear Tire and Rubber, two vestiges of the industrial economy, for Microsoft, vanguard of the new information age. What we do know is that a video camera costing less than $49 can be affixed to a computer, giving the user a new dimension from this ever-changing medium. Eventually, a full array of voice, aural,
and video capacities will enrich the potential of virtual universities that are reaching out to meet the needs of students wherever they are, whenever they wish to learn. Perhaps the primary judgment of a virtual university, including a traditional one, should not be a unit of measurement but whether individuals have the opportunity to continue to learn wherever and whenever they can.
NOTES
AND
REFERENCES
1. James W. Hall, “The Revolution in Electronic Technology and the Modern University: The Convergence of Means,” Studies in Public Higher Education 6 (November 1994): 21– 40. 2. Hartley C. Gratten, editor, American Ideas about Adult Education 1710 –1951 (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1959). 3. The most prominent example of this convergence of needs can be found in the annals of The Chautauquan, the vehicle of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC), This magazine-formatted educational medium may well represent the first distance education program in the United States with mass appeal. CLSC was the offspring of the Chautauqua Assembly, named for its location in New York State. Chautauqua began as a coalition between a minister and an industrialist to deliver formal pedagogical method training to Sunday school teachers. By 1878, the concept was so successful that the founders realized that their educational philosophy could extend beyond the summer program they offered. They developed CLSC so that summer assemblygoers could continue their studies by correspondence during the remainder of the year. The curriculum was primarily liberal. The course of study was four years. Some four to five books a year constituted the mostly classical curriculum. In the first year of the CLSC correspondence program, 8,000 people, mostly women and many from the less populous Midwest, had enrolled. Five years later, there were 50,000 degree candidates. CLSC and its Chautauquan made learning easy and convenient. If the student was a little behind schedule, the educators were ready to compensate: “those who joined before, and are behind, may catch up, and . . . those who begin may hold on their way.” CLSC allowed access to education by those who otherwise could not receive it. And, its standards were high. Among its first offerings was a course by William Rainey Harper, the wunderkind professor of Hebrew at Yale, later the president of the University of Chicago. See Joseph Gould, The Chautauqua Movement (State of New York Press, 1961); The Chautauquan 1 (1) (October 1880).
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4. S. Brint, & J. Karabel, “Institutional Origins and Transformations: The Case of American Community Colleges,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, edited by W. Powell & P. DiMaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 337–360; See also D. Finnegan & Z. Gamson, “Disciplinary Adaptations to Research Culture in Comprehensive Institutions,” Review of Higher Education 19 (Winter 1996): 141–177. 5. R. Freeland, Academia’s Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 6. Glenn Farrell, “The Development of Virtual Education: A Global Perspective,” Commonwealth of Learning (1999)[Online]. Available: http://www.col.org/ virtualed/index.htm (September 10, 1999); UNESCO “World Communication and Information Report 1999” [Online]. Available: http://www.unesco.org/education/ educ.prog/lwf/dl/edit.pdf. (September 10, 1999). 7. Much of the interest in distance learning is in the adult population, although increasing number of school districts (K–12) use this form of education. Many universities are offering distance learning courses or even degrees. Some of the most wellknown, including Duke University and Cornell University, are offering degrees in specialized programs. Proprietary organizations are also entering what was estimated, in 1998, by the International Data Group to be over a $3 billion market within five years. 8. C. Clofelter, Buying the Best (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); see also J. Fairweather, Faculty Work and the Public Trust (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1996). 9. Clofelter, Buying the Best; see also Fair-
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10.
11.
12.
13. 14.
15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
21.
weather, Faculty Work and the Public Trust. American Association of University Professors Statement on Distance Education [Online]. Available: http://www.aaup. org/spcdistn.htm (September 18, 1999). D. Damrosch, We Scholars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); see also D.C. Hague, Beyond Universities: A New Republic of the Intellect (London, England: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1991). Arthur Chickering & Stephen C. Ehrmann, “Implementing the Seven Principles,” AAHE Bulletin 49 (2) (October 1996): 2– 4. Rena Palloff & Keith Pratt, Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1999). James Perley & Denise Marie Tanguay, “Accrediting On-Line Institutions Diminishes Higher Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education (October 29, 1999), pp. B4-B5. Palloff & Pratt, “The Revolution in Electronic Technology . . . .” Ibid, p. 16. Hall, “The Revolution in Electronic Technology . . . ,” p. 31. Martin Trow, “American Higher Education—Past, Present, and Future,” Studies in Higher Education 14 (1989): 5–22. Ibid, p. 15. In the 1970s and early 1980s, when several colleges and universities changed their grading structure to more qualitative measurements, students, especially those who wished to attend medical or law school, were often thwarted in that effort because of their non-traditional transcript. The tyrannical credit hour won out. Margaret Driscoll, Computer Based Instruction (San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass, 1999).
22. Hiltz & Turoff, Network Nation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 322. 23. Ibid., p. 322. 24. Institute for Higher Education Policy for the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, What’s the Difference [Online]. Available: http://www.ihep.com (November 2, 1999). 25. Ibid, p. 27 26. R. Derlin & Edward Erazo, “Distance Learning and the Digital Library,” New Directions of Teaching and Learning (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 71 Fall 1997), p. 105. 27. Lawrence Dowler, White Paper [Online] Available: http://www.cni.org/docs/tsh/ Dowler.html (August 21, 1999). 28. See netLibrary at http://www.netlibrary. com. 29. Author’s comment: In any age and any time, language often lags behind technological change. The two most recent examples of this is that the car was first called the horseless carriage and the train the iron horse. With a paucity of new words available, we often had to rely on old ones even if they were arcane. The use of help desk to refer to a connection with a trained research librarian is a term reflective of the dilemma of language. 30. Chronicle of Higher Education (July 9, 1999), p. A34. 31. International Data Group (1998). 32. Farrell, “The Development of Virtual Education.” 33. Fairweather, Faculty Work and the Public Trust. 34. M. Reardon & Jason Lohr, “The Urban Research University in American Higher Education: Portland State University as a Model,” Journal of Higher Education (Special, 1997): 6 –12.
The questions swirling about the acceptability of a virtual university as a sanctioned institution of higher learning may be more about imposing outdated regulations upon an entity that uses 21st century technology to serve 21st century educational needs than about educational efficacy.
Leslie P. Hitch is Senior Consultant, Edvisors, 458 Albemarle Road, Newtonville, Massachusetts 02460 ⬍[email protected]⬎.
For nearly a millennium, the organizing concept of the university could best be described by the word convocation. Beset in its earliest manifestation by an often barbaric and intrusive world, and fearful that, in a moment’s time, the knowledge and wisdom passed down from generation to generation recorded painstakingly in precious, hand-lettered parchment manuscripts, could be suddenly and irrationally erased from the human record, the university has always organized for defense.1
I
n the waning months of the 20th century, the venerable Chronicle of Higher Education rarely let a week go by when it did not carry an article or two disparaging the growing number of virtual universities. Of particular concern to the most censorious was whether these institutions deserved the right to be licensed and accredited. There are several aspects to this debate. One is the overt questioning of educational effectiveness. Another, more subtle, may be the inherent conflict around the education of the adult learner. At a gathering in 1999 of continuing education professionals at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, vociferous debate among participants arose over whether the much maligned but highly successful University of Phoenix was offering education or training. Yet, one hundred years ago, several correspondence schools used well-known, erudite faculty and conferred prestigious degrees. This article raises the specter, but will not dwell on, the prejudices and tensions inherent in educating the adult. What it does address, in an age when people need continuous education, where legions of children daily use computers, and where items as expensive as automobiles can be purchased with an electronic click, is whether the issue is really the educational efficacy or the criteria on which we judge virtual education. This
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article questions whether higher education can fairly evaluate a 21st century institution when using standards from earlier centuries that may be outdated by technology and do not mesh with the population that virtual universities serve.
BACKGROUND Slow to change, higher education has revolved around a model born in the Middle Ages and solidified by the German research university concept at the turn of the last century. In the United States, higher education evolved from the almost sole bastion of the rich and the clergy to a conglomeration of institutions and tiers within those segments. By 1880, higher education institutions gave an aura of inclusiveness with the advent of research universities, women’s colleges, historically Black colleges, land-grant institutions, and trade colleges. Despite these gains, formal education served a very small percentage of the population. These changes in higher education reflected the changes in the society as a whole. Within a generation after the Civil War, the United States had become a world economic entity and an industrialized nation. The population and the railroads were growing ever westward. More and more people worked longer and longer hours in factories and on the farms. There were throngs of immigrants. This was the time of the electric light, of Darwinism, and of relentless change. The convergence of technological change and the need for a newly skilled workforce resulted in demand from individuals for additional learning. It was also a time when the disenfranchised often sought higher education. The disenfranchised, usually women or tradespeople, were consigned to home study groups, lectures, and evening high schools.2 For those without access to even this limited
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educational formality, correspondence courses became their lifeline.3 The advent of radio and later television as well as the tumultuous upheaval of two world wars lessened this need. Regulations The GI Bill after World War II opened not only doors for the masses to afford college, but also the doors of many new institutions to meet the demand. States soon passed laws restricting organizations and institutions from haphazardly granting college degrees. Legislatures created professional entities to review the requests. These regulations restrict the use of the college or university as part of a name as well as the authority for an institution to grant a degree. The primary and justifiable aim of these laws and regulations was to protect the student-consumer from enrolling in institutions that were interested only in financial gain and whose educational offerings were circumspect at best. Although the intent of these regulations is as necessary today as when they were passed, the regulations themselves are, to recast an often-used term, not Y2K compliant. The laws governing the licensing of a degree-granting institution were approved when the telephone was the primary distance communication device. These laws were also enacted when the traditional student population was 18 –24 years old and primarily male. Today, that telephone fits in the palm of one hand and can relay vast amounts of information into a far-away computer in the palm of another hand and the traditional student is over 25 years old and is overwhelmingly female. Furthermore, the structure of higher education has become more complex. The research university, not the liberal arts college, now sets the standard for the population of higher education.4 It has been in the past 50 years that this model has dominated. Richard Freeland, now president of Northeastern University, wrote that this model carries with it a social prestige of scholarship.5 The regulations set forth by states and other regulatory and/or accrediting organizations bolster this situation. Some of these regulations require conformation to a specified number of credit hours for graduation, a specified number and type of general education requirements, a delineated number of credit hours necessary to declare a major, a set number of classroom contact hours, and often a pro-
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scribed volume of library holdings. Although the global workplace is calling for collaboration, teamwork, and a multidisciplinary perspective, higher education holds on to discreet, self-contained units counted in numbers. It may be the adherence to these units of measurement that make the comprehension of the educational effectiveness of a virtual university so difficult. Parts of a virtual university are not easily converted to these standards. Effectively, by complying with the rules, regulations, and restrictions of a brick-and-mortar world, virtual education must work within the confines of a world already created, despite the obvious differences. There is an old axiom common to economists and historians that traces the demise of the railroads in the United States to their stubborn insistence that they were in the railroad business when, in effect, they were in the transportation business. Higher education may be in the unit measurement business sometimes at the expense of education.
UNDERSTANDING DIFFERENCES What are the obvious differences? The first is mission. There are over 3,300 institutions of higher education in the United States. A mission that states differentiation in terms of electronic delivery of educational materials does not ensure contrast from the myriad of organizations multiplying rapidly that offer electronic access to education.6,7 More than in conventional institutions where a mission statement might be irrelevant because student choice is based on proximity of location, physical plant, sports facilities and/or teams, legacy, or the need to go far from home, the mission of a virtual university becomes the equivalent of its physical plant or its proximity. The mission statement needs to address the basic tenets of higher education. More important, it needs to emphasize the role of the new media in delivering that education, for it is the technological delivery that sets it apart from place-based institutions. Still, the world population is transitioning to the ubiquitous use of technology in daily life, including in education. Therefore, the mission cannot be too avantgarde because it might scare away perspective students. It cannot be too bland for it would then sound like every other institution.
TEACHING, LIBRARY, AND STUDENT SERVICES But, mission is amorphous. The most significant differences, and often the most polemic, are at the core of higher education: teaching, library, and student services. A university’s given role, traditional or electronic, is transferring information and expanding knowledge. Yet, higher education, particularly over the past 15 years, has been accused of not only becoming more and more arcane, but also of straying further and further away from effective teaching.8 Legislators and the public feel faculty are eschewing teaching.9 Research is still the coin of the academic realm. Learner centered is neither widely accepted nor fully understood throughout academe.
“Yet, higher education, particularly over the past 15 years, has been accused of not only becoming more and more arcane, but also of straying further and further away from effective teaching.” Faculty Role Therefore, the first question asked, and debated,10 is what is the role of faculty and who is qualified to teach in an online environment. Do faculty engaged in online delivery of courses actually teach? But the real truth is that faculty are not trained to teach. As experts in a specialized field of knowledge, faculty have traditionally transferred knowledge.11 Skilled in what has become euphemistically known as Sage on the Stage, many faculty teach as they have been taught, by didactic lecture. Content is designed, sequenced, and delivered by the faculty member with often minimal input (except through examinations) by the student. Without attempting a Talmudic interpretation of the intent and expectation of university teaching, the question of the role of online faculty is a logical one to ask. But we can also ask if a lecture to 300 students is an example of good teaching? Is the lecture setting, where the faculty member often cannot see or remember an individual face, better than an online course where the faculty member cannot
see an individual face? According to the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE), the Seven Principles For Good Practice In Undergraduate Education include methods that encourage contacts between students and faculty, develop reciprocity and cooperation among students, use active learning techniques, give prompt feedback, emphasize time on task, communicate high expectations, and respect diverse talents and ways of learning.12 These principles are no different in the virtual environment than in the walled classroom. The difference is in method of delivery. Teaching in an electronic environment, especially one where a constructivist model is extensively used, requires an slightly altered approach,13 where the faculty member and the student enter into a more collaborative framework for both teaching and learning. The debate over whether this role is more of a facilitator and not a true faculty role is already into several rounds. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is becoming more vociferous. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, James Perley and Denise Marie Tanguay, chair and member, respectively, of the AAUP Committee on the Accrediting of Colleges and Universities, asked if institutions lack “both a critical core of full-time faculty members and a system of governance by which the faculty is responsible for developing curricula and academic policy” can they truly be called “universities” or “colleges?”14 Others have given the role of the faculty member in an electronic environment a different definition. Their definition is in terms of student learning rather than faculty teaching. Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt espouse this view.15 The medium becomes the message: “the facilitation of learning environments that foster personal meaning-making as well as the social construction of knowledge . . . is preferred to instructor interventions that control the sequence and content of instruction.”16 Tyranny of the Credit Hour The second question heartily discussed and debated is what is a course online? How long is it? How do students connect with it? And, who actually prepares it? In the American university for almost all of its existence, a course was delivered over a given number of weeks; covered a given, or at least an attempted given,
amount of material; and required that students sit in that classroom for a given number of hours. Robert Heterick referred to the “tyranny of the classroom hour.”17 The classroom hour has been the measure, rightly or wrongly, effectively or not, of student learning. Programs delivered on other than the semester hour basis often must show they meet the standards of equivalent educational programs. These standards are common across higher education. Martin Trow refers to this as “our peculiar system.”18 Other countries do not have the equivalent system. The student takes an examination or writes a thesis: But our credits, units that can be accumulated, banked, transferred, and, within limits, automatically accepted as legal academic tender toward an earned degree throughout the country, make possible the extraordinary mobility of or students between fields of study and between institutions.19
The credit hour becomes a double-edge sword. Its use makes it somewhat seamless for students to transfer credit either in or out of a virtual or any institution, yet, for virtual education to meet standards, it must deliver courses based on the credit hour model20 integral to higher education. It has to determine a requisite amount of time that a student might spend in class and in preparation for class. However, the differentiation of virtual learning is that the student is not in class and is somewhat free to choose both the time and the place that he or she wishes to learn. One Click Away
“Without peer pressure and face-to-face contact with the instructor, students need to be involved, almost enraptured, with distance learning.” When developing a course for electronic distribution, the design must incorporate and compensate for as much of the teacher-student interaction as possible. The difficulty, as outlined in the now classic book Network Nation is “the designer is not responsible for all the problems that arise. However, it is true that users will exhibit certain undesirable behavior that the designer has to accept and allow for in the design of the system.”22 Although this statement could be applied to any classroom situation, the time for the instructor to recover from a design flaw in real time is immediate. In a virtual environment, a learning and instructional defect is far more complex to fix, far more difficult for the instructor to alter. Furthermore, in an online environment, students are free to skip ahead to different sections of the course, to linger in others. Interaction is guided by words, responses, and commentary. Therefore, an online course needs to anticipate as many different learning styles, approaches to material, subtleties, and nuances of understanding as possible. Unlike the conventional classroom, the creation of the courses and their subsequent syllabi could leave nothing to chance. But by leaving nothing to chance, everything would be left to chance. “Users will do the unexpected, the unanticipated, and the forbidden.”23 Virtual Syllabi
The connection to the student is one undergoing serious evaluation by both the detractors and devotees of virtual education. The challenge in the virtual environment (not too dissimilar than that in the traditional classroom) is how to keep students, not all of whom are expert at time management and self-discipline in their learning styles, connected, captivated, and committed to finishing. Without peer pressure and face-to-face contact with the instructor, students need to be involved, almost enraptured, with distance learning. The literature warns that the virtual student, particularly the adult, is only one click away from dropping out of any course.21
Probing deeper into what is a course online begs the question, what is a syllabus online? In a conventional courses, the individual instructor writes the individual syllabus, establishes the parameters for grading, and decides which books to use and what readings to require or suggest. In the instructor’s mind is a sequence where each class builds on the previous class, both in terms of the knowledge and the interaction between students and instructor. Development of an online course is not the same. First, the development cannot be done by one individual. The inclusion of the technology alone requires that there be others familiar with technology to work
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with the instructor to develop the course. Second, the sequence cannot be entirely linear. Students may wish to skip around. Third, altering the course part way though its delivery is more complex. Course authoring, once the sole domain of the instructor, becomes a team process subject to peer evaluation. Workload And, lastly, what is the best way to evaluate teaching load in a virtual university. How does one measure the amount of time that the faculty teaches? Is it the number of times the faculty member logs onto the site? Is it the amount of time the faculty member is in contact with the students? What about the time spent reading the textbook and discovering additional Web sites and materials? In a virtual world where there is increasing expectation that services are available 24 hours per day, seven days per week, what is a reasonable time for faculty to respond to students? Regulations often stipulate the normal workload for faculty. Limiting faculty workload in a virtual environment may have unintended and adverse consequences for the student and financial ramifications for the institution. Library Conundrum The library is undergoing considerable scrutiny in a virtual medium. It is here that the differences between the requirements and the realities of the information age are the most pronounced. What exactly is a library holding in a virtual university? Is it intellectual property; portals; proprietary Web pages of links instead of books, newspapers, archival material? The concern, in the words of Harvey Varnet, director of libraries at Simmons College in Boston and president of the Association of College and Research Libraries in the Northeast, has focused on what he calls “the last mile.” The last mile is the method in a totally virtual environment whereby a student in a virtual institution receives hardcopy books and documents. But, is this a realistic focus?
“It is here that the differences between the requirements and the realities of the information age are the most pronounced.” Even though each day there are new documents, tools, and delivery systems
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for information appearing both for free and for cost on the Internet and the World Wide Web, there are those still skeptical of the new medium. These concerns are best expressed in What’s the Difference, a 1999 report prepared by the Institute for Higher Education Policy for the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association:24 The research does not adequately address the effectiveness of digital “libraries.” Students participating in distance learning, particularly those in remote locations are often introduced to a digital “library” that provides access to bibliographies, as well as full-text, of a variety of resources. The library is at the core of the higher education experience and, especially at the graduate level, is an integral part of the teaching/learning process. Indeed, digital libraries associated with the University of California, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan have made great advances in providing access to a wealth of collections. There is some concern, however, that these showcase libraries are not representative of other digital libraries. For instance, is there a tendency for the digital library, because of a limited collection, specifically with respect to copyrighted materials—to adversely affect curricular decisions?25
The issue for the information age, however, is not as much access to material or the concern that there is not enough material. The problem is the distillation and categorization of materials in an era when information is proliferating at almost exponential rates each day. Today, the learned person needs to know not only how to find information, but more important, how to sort through the volumes of information available for just about any request. “Teaching patrons how to effectively apply the increasingly sophisticated search methods available online will be an important function in the digital library.”26 In a White Paper, Lawrence Dowler, associate librarian for Public Services at Widener Library at Harvard University, agreed. He stated, “The challenge for librarians and other information professions will be to devise the most effective and efficient ways to assist in this process.27 The conundrum in the evaluation of the library in a virtual environment is the focus on both the opportunities and limitations that the technological delivery of information brings. The following is a segment of questions, some portending the excitement in the possibilities the con-
figuration of the library that go beyond the question of number of library holdings and access to the last mile: ●
How much library use will each class require? What kind? Is the use of the library primarily through the use of databases? Although increasing significantly through sites such as netLibrary,28 access to information through electronic means related to the humanities and, ironically, technology, lags behind sciences and business.
●
What is the use of the library? Should library use be considered the ability to sort through large numbers of databases? Should the library develop sorting mechanisms related to each course to ease not only access to material, but to also identify legitimate sources?
●
On a more mundane, but critical note, what are the hours of operation? Is there a professional librarian on call, to work in real time, in what is known in the jargon as 24 –7, a virtual world where anyone living anywhere can conduct business any time during the day. Even at a minimum, the real time to staff a virtual desk29 would have to exceed a standard eight to 10 hour day.
●
How many commercial databases and information retrieval sources are enough to support a curriculum? Is a first class virtual library one where it has contracts with as many databases as possible, anticipating the most prodigious user, or could there be a ceiling of use?
The current requirements often revolve around holdings and access as the indication of educational competence. Perhaps they now need to revolve around knowledge management. In building a virtual library, is there the opportunity to develop a significant knowledge base not only of Web sites, but also of student requests, faculty suggestions, and ancillary materials? Could that knowledge be used to determine coming trends and issues that would lead to additional courses, modification of older courses, or reconfiguration of requirements keeping materials perpetually fresh? Student Services The third area of discussion is student services. Because the regulations are designed to protect the student consumer, the importance of servicing that student is paramount. However, again, the new
world has not yet been encompassed by the old, thus creating difficulties for the very people, the students, that the regulations are designed to protect. One of these areas is in student financial aid. The U.S. Congress, so far, has been cautious about extending Pell Grants and federal education loans to adult, part-time students at virtual universities. For l999 –2000 a cautious experiment involving up to 35 colleges and consortia has been authorized so that Congress and the U.S. Department of Education can monitor the loan and repayment experience with new electronic education programs.30 Student services includes examination of plant and equipment. Ordinarily a licensing or regulatory agency asks to see the building in which a college program is to be offered. Is it safe to occupy and warm enough in cold weather? A virtual university has no campus in the usual sense. Rather than a campus, a virtual university’s physical plant and equipment consists of courses, servers, and computers to receive and send messages. In a virtual university, the temperature of the student (and faculty) rests not on thermostats, but on access and orientation to the technology needed to comfortably take a course.
“In a virtual university, the temperature of the student (and faculty) rests not on thermostats, but on access and orientation to the technology needed to comfortably take a course.” The more serious consideration facing the viability of a virtual education is not its educational efficacy as much as individual access to technology. Access to technology, often referred to as the problem of the technology haves and the technology have-nots, is one of the salient issues of the information age. However, as the price of technology keeps coming down, it is likely that two thirds of American adults early in the 21st century will have ready access to the computers needed to take courses and to pursue degrees.31
PONDERING
THE
JUDGMENTS
At the dawn of the 21st century, what exactly are we requiring of not only vir-
tual universities, but also of the existing bricks-and-mortar ones? Technology is becoming pervasive in all of our lives regardless of socioeconomic status. Elementary and secondary schools worldwide are not only bringing the Internet and computer-based technology into their classrooms, they are also offering, themselves, modes of virtual delivery.32 There is an increasing need, as there was 100 years ago, to connect to the world of work, to educate individuals for productive lives. Higher education continues to be scrutinized by the public wary of high tuition, underprepared students, and a faculty they see as disconnected from societal needs.33 Therefore, several schools and colleges are developing ways to connect classroom work to the world of work. Portland State University in Oregon was cited by the Pew Foundation in the late 1990s as an Exemplar of an institution that was able to rein in its costs and, at the same time, reshape its curriculum to meet the needs of the community and the workplace.34 At the turn of the last century, the telephone, electricity, and the automobile transformed the way that society communicated, worked, and lived. We laid telephone cable, strung electric wires, and paved roads to incorporate these new devices into the fabric of our lives. We opened new universities and educational channels to teach those once restricted by class or economic means. Whether, or how, electronic delivery of education will destroy what scholars and society have known for millennia as higher education is unclear. What we do know is that in the past five years, the world has learned that goods and services are just one click away as they shop for books, stocks, or vehicles. The rapid accession of the Internet as a communication tool has allowed individuals to acquire new skills and new friends all on their own time and in their own space. Each day some new technology company makes billionaires out of regular, and often, very young people. Even the venerable Dow Jones Average, in the last 60 days of the 20th century, discarded the 100-year-old Sears and the even older Goodyear Tire and Rubber, two vestiges of the industrial economy, for Microsoft, vanguard of the new information age. What we do know is that a video camera costing less than $49 can be affixed to a computer, giving the user a new dimension from this ever-changing medium. Eventually, a full array of voice, aural,
and video capacities will enrich the potential of virtual universities that are reaching out to meet the needs of students wherever they are, whenever they wish to learn. Perhaps the primary judgment of a virtual university, including a traditional one, should not be a unit of measurement but whether individuals have the opportunity to continue to learn wherever and whenever they can.
NOTES
AND
REFERENCES
1. James W. Hall, “The Revolution in Electronic Technology and the Modern University: The Convergence of Means,” Studies in Public Higher Education 6 (November 1994): 21– 40. 2. Hartley C. Gratten, editor, American Ideas about Adult Education 1710 –1951 (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1959). 3. The most prominent example of this convergence of needs can be found in the annals of The Chautauquan, the vehicle of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC), This magazine-formatted educational medium may well represent the first distance education program in the United States with mass appeal. CLSC was the offspring of the Chautauqua Assembly, named for its location in New York State. Chautauqua began as a coalition between a minister and an industrialist to deliver formal pedagogical method training to Sunday school teachers. By 1878, the concept was so successful that the founders realized that their educational philosophy could extend beyond the summer program they offered. They developed CLSC so that summer assemblygoers could continue their studies by correspondence during the remainder of the year. The curriculum was primarily liberal. The course of study was four years. Some four to five books a year constituted the mostly classical curriculum. In the first year of the CLSC correspondence program, 8,000 people, mostly women and many from the less populous Midwest, had enrolled. Five years later, there were 50,000 degree candidates. CLSC and its Chautauquan made learning easy and convenient. If the student was a little behind schedule, the educators were ready to compensate: “those who joined before, and are behind, may catch up, and . . . those who begin may hold on their way.” CLSC allowed access to education by those who otherwise could not receive it. And, its standards were high. Among its first offerings was a course by William Rainey Harper, the wunderkind professor of Hebrew at Yale, later the president of the University of Chicago. See Joseph Gould, The Chautauqua Movement (State of New York Press, 1961); The Chautauquan 1 (1) (October 1880).
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4. S. Brint, & J. Karabel, “Institutional Origins and Transformations: The Case of American Community Colleges,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, edited by W. Powell & P. DiMaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 337–360; See also D. Finnegan & Z. Gamson, “Disciplinary Adaptations to Research Culture in Comprehensive Institutions,” Review of Higher Education 19 (Winter 1996): 141–177. 5. R. Freeland, Academia’s Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 6. Glenn Farrell, “The Development of Virtual Education: A Global Perspective,” Commonwealth of Learning (1999)[Online]. Available: http://www.col.org/ virtualed/index.htm (September 10, 1999); UNESCO “World Communication and Information Report 1999” [Online]. Available: http://www.unesco.org/education/ educ.prog/lwf/dl/edit.pdf. (September 10, 1999). 7. Much of the interest in distance learning is in the adult population, although increasing number of school districts (K–12) use this form of education. Many universities are offering distance learning courses or even degrees. Some of the most wellknown, including Duke University and Cornell University, are offering degrees in specialized programs. Proprietary organizations are also entering what was estimated, in 1998, by the International Data Group to be over a $3 billion market within five years. 8. C. Clofelter, Buying the Best (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); see also J. Fairweather, Faculty Work and the Public Trust (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1996). 9. Clofelter, Buying the Best; see also Fair-
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10.
11.
12.
13. 14.
15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
21.
weather, Faculty Work and the Public Trust. American Association of University Professors Statement on Distance Education [Online]. Available: http://www.aaup. org/spcdistn.htm (September 18, 1999). D. Damrosch, We Scholars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); see also D.C. Hague, Beyond Universities: A New Republic of the Intellect (London, England: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1991). Arthur Chickering & Stephen C. Ehrmann, “Implementing the Seven Principles,” AAHE Bulletin 49 (2) (October 1996): 2– 4. Rena Palloff & Keith Pratt, Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1999). James Perley & Denise Marie Tanguay, “Accrediting On-Line Institutions Diminishes Higher Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education (October 29, 1999), pp. B4-B5. Palloff & Pratt, “The Revolution in Electronic Technology . . . .” Ibid, p. 16. Hall, “The Revolution in Electronic Technology . . . ,” p. 31. Martin Trow, “American Higher Education—Past, Present, and Future,” Studies in Higher Education 14 (1989): 5–22. Ibid, p. 15. In the 1970s and early 1980s, when several colleges and universities changed their grading structure to more qualitative measurements, students, especially those who wished to attend medical or law school, were often thwarted in that effort because of their non-traditional transcript. The tyrannical credit hour won out. Margaret Driscoll, Computer Based Instruction (San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass, 1999).
22. Hiltz & Turoff, Network Nation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 322. 23. Ibid., p. 322. 24. Institute for Higher Education Policy for the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, What’s the Difference [Online]. Available: http://www.ihep.com (November 2, 1999). 25. Ibid, p. 27 26. R. Derlin & Edward Erazo, “Distance Learning and the Digital Library,” New Directions of Teaching and Learning (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 71 Fall 1997), p. 105. 27. Lawrence Dowler, White Paper [Online] Available: http://www.cni.org/docs/tsh/ Dowler.html (August 21, 1999). 28. See netLibrary at http://www.netlibrary. com. 29. Author’s comment: In any age and any time, language often lags behind technological change. The two most recent examples of this is that the car was first called the horseless carriage and the train the iron horse. With a paucity of new words available, we often had to rely on old ones even if they were arcane. The use of help desk to refer to a connection with a trained research librarian is a term reflective of the dilemma of language. 30. Chronicle of Higher Education (July 9, 1999), p. A34. 31. International Data Group (1998). 32. Farrell, “The Development of Virtual Education.” 33. Fairweather, Faculty Work and the Public Trust. 34. M. Reardon & Jason Lohr, “The Urban Research University in American Higher Education: Portland State University as a Model,” Journal of Higher Education (Special, 1997): 6 –12.