I spent virtually my whole career working in educational media of various kinds. Here are some recollections:
Growing Up With Media
I
was born in 1948—part of the first blush of the Baby Boom. And, although no one knew at the time,
we were also part of the first blush of the Information Revolution. Like many other aspects of the
late 20th century, its roots were in the second of the World Wars
that put a punctuation mark on the old traditions of Western Civilization and,
at the same time, drove dramatic technological innovation. ENIAC, the first computer, went online
in 1938. The first commercial
television station went on-air in 1941.
Little did we know that the next generation would bring not only a
revolution in the global political structure but a social and economic
transformation as technology created a new global information society.
My
mother, my brother and I lived with my grandparents in a one-bedroom house that
my grandfather had built on the edge of his lot as a temporary home while he
built the big house.
Unfortunately, the big house never got built, and we all crowded into
the little house, just as their five children had done in the 1920s and
1930s.
When
I was very young, “media” meant “music.”
We had an old player piano, a Victorola with a great collection of 1940s
78 rpm records—the Ink Spots were my favorite—and, of course, a radio. In fact, we had two radios; an old
floor model and a new battery-powered portable. I remember listening to the Lone Ranger on the radio and my
grandmother listening to her soaps.
The record player got the best workout, though. There were no headphones or ear
buds. When one of us listened to
music, we all did. In
addition to the Ink Spots, we listened to Vaughan Monroe, the Mariners, and
others from the swing period, when my mother was on her own and bought a lot of
music.
I
loved the radio, too. My favorite
station was WHOT in Youngstown, Ohio, and disc jockey Boots Bell, the Booter
Scooter. But late at night, my
brother and I would try to tune in to Cincinnati and Barney Pip (who later
moved to Chicago). It sounded like
music from Mars.
By
then, of course, we had television.
We got our first television set around 1956. It was a Philco black and white console. When it was delivered, the delivery man
set it on Channel 27—WKBN, the CBS affiliate in Youngstown, Ohio. My grandfather had been the first
on our street to buy a radio back in the 30s, but was not comfortable with the
new technology. He would never
allow us to change the channel for fear that we would break the set. So we watched CBS for the next few
years. Ed Sullivan, Gunsmoke, I’ve Got a Secret, The Garry Moore
Show, The Twilight Zone, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. And, of course, Walter Cronkite. It wasn’t a bad fate. I had to go to my friend’s house down
the street to watch Bonanza, though.
In
1960, my grandfather died. Soon
after, we changed the channel and, you guessed it, we soon broke the channel
changer. We had to reach inside
the back of the set to change channels, using a little mirror to fine-tune the
station. Eventually, we got
a new set and one of my uncles set up an antenna on a pole so that we could get
both UHF and VHF stations. Now, we
could tune in stations in Youngstown, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. Life was good.
One
night in 1963, my friend Ken called from down the street. He knew that our TV was broken, and he
wanted to share the news: “There’s
going to be a war,” he said. “Come
down and watch.” It was, of
course, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I went down to Ken’s house and watched President Kennedy’s speech with
Ken, his sisters, parents, and grandmother. It was social media for those days. The Beatles arrival in the
U.S. and their first appearance on The Ed
Sullivan Show is another example.
Everyone watched it, it seemed.
I was in high school and working evenings at Little Italy, a
family-owned Italian restaurant.
The owner, Mrs. Bishop, brought a TV in so that the family and their
guests would miss neither the Beatles nor her mother’s great wedding soup!
Radio
provided portable media. It was in
our cars, so we could take music with us everywhere, but there was nothing so
good as sitting on the front porch with Ken on a hot summer day, listening to
the Pirates or the Indians.
Baseball was an ideal radio game.
You didn’t really need to see it to enjoy it, and the pace was very
comfortable on a sunny summer afternoon.
Public Television: Serving Communities
In
1968, I transferred from Penn State’s Shenango Campus to the main campus,
University Park, to complete my undergraduate degree. I had been a Journalism major, but switched to English, which
had an honors program that included small seminars rather than large
classes. I was interested in
media, but unsure how to navigate this large campus. I volunteered at the student radio station—WDFM—but that was
limited to coming in between classes and writing some public service
announcements. I never connected
with anyone. I also trained as a
camera operator for the University Division of Instructional Services, which
operated an on-campus television studio that recorded class lectures and distributed
courses through a network that linked 24 classes with one-way video and two-way
audio (more on that later).
I
was still waiting to hear about a job with UDIS when a neighbor in my dorm
suggested that I go across the street to Wagner Building, which housed the ROTC
and where, three years earlier, the university had opened a public television
station, WPSX-TV. “You’re a
writer,” he said. “Maybe they will
hire you to write press releases or something.” So I went and was hired as a part-time production
assistant. For the next two years,
I learned television production from the ground up—set design, lighting, audio,
camera—and got wonderful experience in helping to create a wide range of
television programs, from talk shows to studio concerts and, of course,
sports.
When
I graduated, the operations manager (later station manager), David Phillips,
hired me full-time, and suddenly, I had a career. I stayed in Production for the next year, then moved into
Programming, where I was responsible for the daily program log and on-air
promotion. From there, I moved
into Public Information—and wrote a lot
of press releases. After a few
years, that position expanded to Viewer Services, in which role I was
responsible for various ways to engage viewers. The station’s founding manager, Marlowe Froke, counseled me
that a press release was the first step toward creating an educated viewer—one
who would be better able to grasp the program’s message. Our monthly program guide allowed
us to do longer background features on new programs. Beyond that, we engaged the viewer by providing
supplementary materials (viewer guides and so forth) for special programs, by
connecting with community organizations, sending faculty out to libraries to
discuss program content, and, ultimately, by offering courses around
broadcasts—telecourses, as they came to be called.
In
those days, “public” television was very much “educational” television.
Before the station went on the air
in March 1965, Marlowe Froke had met with superintendents of school districts
throughout the station’s 29-county viewing area to discuss how television
programs could be used to support their curricula. The result was the Allegheny Educational Broadcast Council
(AEBC), a nonprofit corporations through which participating school districts
selected educational programs at all levels of the K-12 curriculum. The station then acquired them and
devoted its daytime schedule—from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. to broadcasting programs
that teachers could use to enhance their local classes. School districts paid a small
per-student fee to fund coordination, printed teacher guides, professional
education programs for teachers, etc.
The Department of Education helped to fund program acquisition and some
production. Programs were
acquired from other stations and state educational television networks around
the country and from Province-wide educational television centers in Canada
(places like TV Ontario). It was a
model used by many public TV stations around the country. In many ways, it was a precursor to
today’s Open Educational Resources movement.
The
AEBC was a good early example of how educational media can bring institutions
and people together around a common mission. It was essential in a one-way broadcast environment,
especially in pre-cable days.
The
station also had a University of the Air program, broadcasting courses for
adults. These included Your Future Is Now, a GED preparation
course, as well as college credit courses. Originally, the broadcasts were accompanied by periodic
face-to-face sessions, limiting the effective range of the program. Later, the video lessons were
integrated with the University’s Independent Study by Correspondence program,
making them available to anyone who could receive the signal.
Instructional Media: Engaging Students
Public
broadcasting was a new twist on a long tradition of educational media at Penn
State. As early as the
1940s, Dr. C.R. Carpenter had experimented with the use of film for training. In the 1950s, he received a Ford
Foundation grant to experiment with instructional uses of video on campus. As the campus burgeoned with returning GIs, the University
created a Division of Instructional Services that included television and film
studios, along with graphic and photographic services and an audio-visual
library.
One
of the key services of UDIS was an on-campus one-way video, two-way audio cable
system that connected 24 classrooms to a television studio. Each classroom could accommodate
around 30 students, so the system allowed one faculty member (with assistants
in each classroom) to teach over 600 students at a time. This allowed the University to
accommodate the increasing demand for popular courses. One of the most popular courses offered
through this system was Accounting 101—Introduction to Accounting. It was taught by Dr. Kenneth Nelson,
who used the system for over twenty years. He was a master at engaging students at a distance. He would identify a student who had a birthday and ask
members of that student’s classroom to sing “Happy Birthday.” In Spring semester, he would give a
mid-term right before Spring Break.
The crew would create a beach setting in the studio. Ken would appear, sitting on a beach
chair with a straw hat on his head, and tell the students, “I’m already on
break. You can join me as soon as
you finish your mid-term!” In this
way, he taught more than half of the students who had ever taken Introduction
to Accounting at Penn State.
In
Engineering, one faculty member would rush over to the studio after class and
record solutions to the problems he had just assigned. These would then be taken to the
reserved reading room of the library, so that students could check their work
or get help if they were stuck on a problem.
Audio-Visual
Services served both internal and external audiences. It acquired film and video programs that faculty members
wanted to use in their classes. It
also libraried film and video produced by faculty and made these available for
sale and rental to schools, colleges and other customers worldwide. For example, AV Services distributed
films that Penn State Anthropology Professor Napoleon Chagnon’s made during his
research visits with the Yanamamo Indians of Brazil. It is a model that could easily be adapted in today’s online
world as an Open Educational Resource library.
In
1980, the University combined UDIS and public broadcasting into a new unit
called the Division of Media and Learning Resources, headed by Marlowe Froke,
who had founded WPSX-TV. This new
unit was housed under the Vice President for Continuing Education. It brought together two Continuing
Education units--WPSX-TV and the Department of Independent Learning by
Correspondence—and all of the UDIS units. It also included a new unit—the Department
of Instructional Media, which I was asked to lead. This unit combined the instructional production and delivery
services of WPSX-TV with production support for on-campus courses. Media-based distance education
courses were now offered through Independent Learning, so that we could easily
serve the entire viewing area and, soon, reach far beyond campus.
Cable and Satellite: Networking
The
Information Revolution hit educational television with a double punch in the
late 1970s, as both cable and satellite television took their places in the
educational media infrastructure.
Pennsylvania—with its many small towns and rural areas—had given birth
to cable television. In 1976, a
group of cable operators approached WPSX about creating a statewide educational
cable television channel, called PENNARAMA. The system was fully operational by 1983, creating a
great demand for video-based telecourses.
Around
the country, local cable operators were making channels available to local
colleges and universities to offer courses. The growing ability to network the delivery of educational
media was already stimulating the growth of consortia and distribution
partnerships. One was the To
Educate the People Consortium—a partnership among labor unions, Wayne State
University and other Detroit-area institutions, and Detroit-based auto
manufacturers. Another was the
University of Mid-America, which brought together the resources of several
higher education and educational broadcast organizations in the Midwest. A third was the Telecourse People, an
association of community college public television licensees that combined
resources to share telecourses among themselves and to license them to others.
Glenn
Jones, a native Pennsylvanian and a visionary cable operator who owned Jones
Intercable, created the Mind Extension University with the goal of offering
access to higher education on a national scale via cable. That initiative eventually evolved into
Jones International University.
Around
the same time, we joined a regional experiment in the use of satellites to
distribute media- based education.
Called the Appalachian Educational Satellite Program (AESP), the program
was headquartered at the University of Kentucky and led by Nofflet Williams,
one of the great innovators of this early period. Growing up in rural Alabama, Nofflet had a lifelong
commitment to providing access to education to those who had lacked access due
to location, time, or money. The
AESP used an experimental ATS-6 satellite to bring graduate-level courses in
nursing and education and professional development programs for firefighters
and others to remote communities up and down the Appalachian range, partnering
with local colleges and public education agencies to provide the needed local
coordination. It was the first
satellite-delivered graduate education program. I was the point person for Penn State’s participation
and worked with area Intermediate Units and Penn State campuses to promote the
use of courses that could be downlinked from AESP’s satellite. AESP evolved with the technology; as
cable television adopted satellite to interconnect individual cable systems, it
became, first, the Appalachian Community Service Network and, eventually, the
Learning Channel. Nofflet went on to
become the Dean of Distance Education at the University of Kentucky and was
widely honored as an influential pioneer and leader in the field.
In
1978, the Public Broadcasting Service shifted to satellite to distribute its
programs nationally. This was a
watershed in American educational media.
It transformed how we used video to distribute education. The immediate impact was that every
public television station in the country had a satellite downlink and that many
also had uplinks. This allowed a stronger
national program schedule, but it also gave stations a huge advantage in
sharing programs within the network.
It also meant that stations—especially those licensed to educational
institutions—could share nonbroadcast resources among themselves. Within a couple of years, several new
services arose.
PBS
responded by creating the Adult Learning Service (ALS). ALS became a national distributor of
video-based telecourses. It would
acquire distribution rights to courses produced by member stations or other
agencies. Local public TV stations
would then preview the telecourses with higher education institutions in their
viewing areas. If an institution
wanted to offer a course, it would work through the local station to license it
from PBS (usually at a cost of $300 per offering, plus $15 per enrolled
student); the station would then broadcast it (or make it available on a local
cable channel). This, in
turn, created new channels of communication between stations and the higher
education institutions in their areas.
Other
kinds of networks using the PBS satellite system emerged among university
licensees. One was the National
University Teleconference Network (NUTN), organized by Oklahoma State
University to allow universities to offer live, noncredit, educational conferences
nationally. Essentially, any NUTN
institution could announce plans to offer a national satellite teleconference. Member
institutions wishing to offer the teleconference locally would license it and
arrange for a viewing room with audio feedback to the originating
institution. When the conference
was offered, all sites could show the event in their local meeting rooms and
have local participants ask questions via telephone or return audio. The first national teleconference that
Penn State produced for NUTN featured faculty from Penn State’s Department of
Nuclear Engineering. It offered
faculty and researchers at other institutions around the country the
opportunity to see video shot in the damaged nuclear reactors at Three Mile
Island and get an evaluation of the damage and possible solutions.
Another
example is Ag*Sat—the Agricultural Satellite Network—later renamed ADEC—the
American Distance Education Consortium. Headquartered at the University of Nebraska, Ag*Sat
connected Agricultural Extension centers at land grant colleges around the
nation. Originally, the focus was
on sharing specialized agricultural research and education programs, ensuring
that the best research on any topic was available to all interested states. Over time, Ag*Sat expanded to include
historically black institutions and Hispanic-serving institutions, as well as
institutions from Latin America.
In
the midst of this storm of technological innovation, Walter Annenberg, the
publisher of TV Guide, gave a $150
million grant to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to fund the
development of high-quality telecourses that would feed the growing demand for
educational media via broadcast, cable, and satellite distribution. The result was a series of prime time
PBS telecourses that raised the quality bar and further stimulated interest in
using these delivery systems.
UMUC: Innovating on a Global Scale
Another
entry into this increasingly complex environment was the International
University Consortium. IUC was the
brainchild of Allan Hershfield at the University of Maryland University
College. Dedicated to
serving adult students, UMUC had established a curriculum on the model of the
British Open University (BOU—now the Open University of the United Kingdom),
which had been established in 1970.
The BOU offered highly interdisciplinary courses that included
television documentaries produced by the BBC, along with study guides and
texts. Typically, one Open
University course was equal to three or more courses in the American
curriculum. IUC was a partnership
between UMUC and Maryland Public Broadcasting to adapt Open University courses
to the North American curriculum.
It then licensed the adapted materials to its member institutions, which
offered them locally. Early
members were leaders in media-based distance education in the U.S. and
Canada. Over time, institutions in
Australia, Hong Kong, Brazil, and other nations joined, and IUC began to
develop its own courses through the academic resources of the Consortium’s
member institutions.
I
joined UMUC as Executive Director of IUC in 1987, when the founding Executive Director,
Allan Hershfield, was named UMUC Vice President, reporting to President
Benjamin Massey. An institution
fully committed to serving the adult, part-time student, UMUC was incredibly
innovative. While its foundation
was in providing higher education access to U.S. military on overseas bases in
Europe and Asia, in the 1980s it was also expanding its programs for adults in
the D.C. suburbs. A major
innovation was a set of open learning degree programs based on the model of the
British Open University—an innovation that had given rise to the International
University Consortium. At the same
time, UMUC operated a video production center, a dedicated cable channel in
Prince George’s County, and the ability to deliver live video lectures, with
audio feedback, to remote classrooms in Southern Maryland and in the northern
suburbs.
UMUC
also operated the Center for Instructional Development and Evaluation, a large
unit staffed with media specialists and instructional designers. CIDE developed media-based courses for
UMUC’s undergraduate and graduate programs, but it also attracted federal contracts
that allowed it to innovate on the cutting edge of technology. One example: a videodisc-based training program for
the National Agricultural Library.
Their contract-based experiments with innovative, technology-based
training and education packages gave UMUC a head start in the digital era.
In
the early 1990s, a group of electrical power companies approached the
University of Maryland about creating a degree program in nuclear science that
could be delivered electronically to sites in Wisconsin, South Carolina, Texas,
and elsewhere. They hired many
technical staff from the U.S. Navy Submarine Corps and were concerned that the
government would require these professionals to have degrees. The College of Engineering at the
College Park campus worked with UMUC to create the degree, which was one of the
first university degrees to be offered at a distance online. Today, UMUC is a major provider
of online degree programs.
While
UMUC was experimenting with online education, national attention was on the
rise of interactive videoconferencing.
The University of Maryland System created an Institute for Distance
Education designed to help the 14 System institutions make the most of this
networked approach to education.
By that time, my role had evolved into that of Associate Vice President
for Program Development. As such,
I chaired the Institute, working with many UMS institutions to explore how
interactive video could be used to extend programs from one campus to another.
Back to Penn State: The World Campus
In
1993, Penn State stepped back and took a fresh look at its long tradition of
distance education. The University
had been one of the pioneers in distance education, dating back to 1892, when
it was one of the first three higher education institutions to develop
correspondence courses, using the then new Rural Free Delivery to offer a “Home
Reading Program” in agriculture.
As cable, satellite, interactive video, and interactive computer-based
technologies arose, the University decided that distance education should be
more mainstreamed and created the position of Assistant Vice President for
Distance Education. I was invited
by Jim Ryan, the Vice President for Continuing and Distance Education, to take
on this new role and returned to the University in January 1994.
Initially,
the emphasis at Penn State was, like the University of Maryland System,
interactive video networking. In
1995, we received funds from the AT&T Foundation to support a multi-year
Innovations in Distance Education project, in collaboration with two other
Pennsylvania institutions—Cheney University and Lincoln University. The goal was to explore both
operational and policy issues in technology-based distance education. We held a series of three invitational
policy seminars that explored policy issues from the perspective of
administration, faculty, and learner support, out of which a set of 25 guiding
principles emerged in five main areas:
Learning Goals and Content Presentation, Interaction, Assessment and
Measurement, Learner Support and Services, and Instructional Media and Tools.
At
that time, most of the computer-based innovation at Penn State was being done
by the central Information Technology unit, with a focus on resident
instruction. However, that
changed in the summer of 1996, when Penn State President Graham Spanier called
a few people into his office. He
had been to a meeting of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education
(WICHE) where he had learned of plans to create a Western Governors University
that would use online technology to ensure access to needed degree programs
throughout the multi-state WICHE area.
He came to the conclusion that online learning was the way of the
future.
We
have three choices, he told the group.
One, we can say that this new technology is not for us and continue to
do what we have been doing with satellite and interactive video, plus
correspondence study. Two, we can
experiment with online learning without backing away from our commitment to
these other media. Or, three, we can make a full commitment to the online
environment and put all our resources there. In the end, though, he believed that the third option
was the only viable path forward.
If we don’t invest now in online learning, we will be left behind, he
said.
Jim
Ryan and I were asked to put together a brief backgrounder for the University’s
leadership. President Spanier then
named a Study Team to explore the idea further and to come up with a strategic
plan for the development of what he was calling the World Campus (after a
suggestion by Fred Gage at our Berks Campus). The Study Team
included the leaders of key units whose support would be vital to the World
Campus’ success: Enrollment Management, Budget Office, Library, Information
Technology, Graduate School, Undergraduate Education, several campuses, several
key academic colleges, and representatives of the Faculty Senate and Graduate
Council. Acknowledging that
it would be hard to get this group together regularly, everyone agreed to meet
over dinner every Thursday evening from November 1996 through March 1997. At the end, we had a 70+ page report
that included a vision and business model for the World Campus.
At
the same time, Jim Ryan and I began meeting with leaders of the individual
academic colleges to discuss the World Campus and identify possible degree and
certificate programs that the academic units thought might succeed online. At the end of the process, we had
identified around 90 possible programs. Penn State already had contact with the Sloan
Foundation’s Asynchronous Learning Systems program, headed by Dr. Frank
Mayadas. Frank had visited Penn
State in the early 1990s to explore the potential of online learning. When I returned from Maryland, Penn
State was completing grant to develop a multi-media test preparation program
for the Professional Engineering Examination. As the Study Team’s work wound down, we got a small
director’s grant to conduct secondary market research around these programs. The result was a list of 25 programs
with high potential for success.
We then submitted a much larger proposal to the Sloan Foundation to underwrite
the start-up costs. That grant was
funded in June of 1997, and the World Campus launched in January 1998 with four
courses and 48 enrollments.
The
World Campus has grown steadily since then. Today, it boasts more than 40 undergraduate degrees
and certificates and more than 60 professional masters degrees and
post-baccalaureate certificate programs, serving over 14,000 students in all
fifty states and over 40 countries around the world. I am happy to say that, in 2015, it was named the top
online undergraduate program by US News
and World Report.
Starting
with that first Study Team, the World Campus has been an institution-wide team
effort. Faculty have support
from instructional designers, media content developers, and editors. Over the years, some of the more
active colleges have created their own course design support units, so that
instructional designers can be more integrated into the academic culture of the
college. On the other end, student
support has proven to essential to helping adult learners survive the sometime
delicate act of balancing learning, working, family and simply living. These services surely will
continue to be important, even as online learning becomes more mainstreamed.
Perspectives
Just
as the Internet has transformed many other aspects of daily life, online
learning is proving to be part of a true revolution in how we conduct education
at institutions around the world. More
colleges and universities than ever before are reaching beyond their campuses
to serve working adults and other students who could not otherwise attend their
classes. In addition, online
learning is allowing faculty members to greatly increase student engagement in
learning, both on campus and at a distance. It has eliminated distance and time as limiting factors in
how higher education reaches and engages students. In the process, it has helped position higher education to
better serve our communities as they transform themselves to meet the new
challenges that are inherent in the emerging global information society.
That
said, there is still much to be done—and some lessons to be learned from
earlier technologies. I was
surprised, when the World Campus came along, about the new community that was
forming around online learning.
Previously, people tended to organize themselves around not the
technology per se, but its use.
For instance, those of us using public broadcasting, cable, and
interactive video formed a new division within what was then called the
National University Extension Association (now UPCEA—University Professional
and Continuing Education Association). NUTN—the National University Teleconference
Network—was also an association of continuing education folks. Similarly, AG*Sat brought together
Cooperative Extension leaders and counterparts at Historically Black
Institutions and Hispanic Serving Institutions who were interested in
collaborating via satellite.
It was an association of continuing education/extension/outreach units
in public universities, and we all tended to report to the Vice President or
Dean of Continuing Education at our institutions. However, when online came along, there was no common reporting
line. Some online initiatives
reported to the Vice Provost for Information Technology; other initiatives were
housed in a particular academic program; others were in the Provost’s Office or
reported directly to the President; and, indeed, some reported to the Vice
President for Continuing Education.
Frank Mayadas at the Sloan Foundation did a wonderful service to the
field by bringing together all of his grantees for annual conferences about
progress in the field. These
evolved over time into the Sloan Consortium (now the Online Learning Consortium). It was inevitable, however, that we
would lose some of the knowledge and, more importantly, institutional
relationships that had grown up in these other venues.
One
of the things we missed early on was the spirit of collaboration and sharing
that had marked early distance education efforts. Online learning brought new institutions into the
distance education community; it also focused on complete degree programs,
making competition a real issue in some disciplines. This was a significant change from earlier technologies. The land grant universities offering
correspondence study programs had set the example by publishing an annual
catalog that listed correspondence courses available from all
institutions. They also tended to
share course materials and help each other out by proctoring exams for students
who lived in their states.
Resource sharing was absolutely vital to the use of telecourses via
public broadcasting. The entire
purpose of PBS-ALS was to aggregate available telecourses and license their use
out to other institutions served by local PBS stations. That was also true of the Telecourse
People and the International University Consortium. The idea of sharing has come more slowly to the online
learning environment. An early
major effort was the Open Educational Resources movement, which began as an
international effort to share online resources. In the United States, community colleges have been the major
group to pick up on this idea, since they tend not to compete with each other
for students. The Great Plains
Institutional Distance Education Alliance (IDEA) demonstrated another kind of
collaboration: institutions
sharing faculty resources and courses in order to be able to offer more robust
graduate degree offerings to students in the institutions’ home states. Given the number and variety of
institutions now offering online courses, sharing would seem to be increasingly
important so that institutions waste little time duplicating the same course
over and over. As with textbooks,
the true value of a course should be less in the materials than in the unique
interactions between faculty members and students and among student
communities.
In
the long run, the online environment would seem to support academic
partnerships that go beyond instruction to include collaborative research,
technology transfer, and consulting. There have been several limited university-industry
collaborations that are providing models for this more engaged approach to
using technology.
A
second area where we have lost initiative through technology change is the idea
of higher education partnering with the public schools to improve the school
curriculum. That was the original
focus of educational/public television in the 1960s. Today, policy
makers are beginning to see the need to regain the momentum here. Extending the Open Educational
Resources idea to the schools is one option. In the sixties, public
broadcasting was the broker that made the connection between school need and
delivery of resources. Fifty years
later, we need a new broker.
The second option is for universities to make some online courses
available as “dual enrollment” courses, through which students can earn credit
toward high school graduation while simultaneously earning college credit.
The
U.S. Department of Education has estimated that, in order for the U.S. to
continue to compete in the global information society, we need to increase the
percentage of high school graduates who go on to college from the current rate
of 39% to about 60%. The problem
is that, today, most kids who graduate from high school ready to go to college
already do so. Thus, in order to
meet the increased need fore more college graduates, we need to increase the
number of high school students who are ready for college when they
graduate. In the 1960s, the
American response to Sputnik drove investments in the production and broadcast
of instructional television for the schools. In 2015, STEM and both the
workforce and citizenship needs of the global information society should drive
investments in OERs and dual enrollment online courses.
Above
all, it is important that institutions not define online learning by the
technologies they use but by the services they provide, so that they can be
flexible and innovative as new technologies arise, as they most inevitably
will.
