by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
What will higher education in the digital age look like? We ought to have some idea by now. It’s been 25 years since Donald Schon urged universities to start considering life "beyond the stable state." At about the same time, the futurist Alvin Toffler confidently predicted that the Information Age would force academia to accommodate an "accelerating pace of change," prepare for "life-long learning," and even consider "learning contracts" instead of the conventional degree.
A flood of reports and a deluge of technological innovations have followed. Yet beyond the replacement of the library catalog by computer terminals, the use of PCs as sophisticated typewriters, and the explosion of campus e-mail, things don’t look very different. Perhaps, as an acquaintance suggested to George Landow, hypertext champion and author of Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, it’s just a matter of lag: "It took only 25 years for the overhead projector to make it from the bowling alley to the classroom. I’m optimistic about academic computing; I’ve begun to see computers in bowling alleys." Most campuses, of course, are rife with computers. Landow’s own Institute for Research into Information and Technology is based at Brown University. Schon teaches at MIT, the spiritual parent of such early high-tech successes as Wang and DEC. Colleagues there include such irreproachable frontiersmen of the digital age as Nicholas Negroponte, Marvin Minsky, and Bill Mitchell. Each is more likely to give you a home page URL than a business card. Their universities aren’t waiting for the Internet: they form its major intersections.
So computational backwardness cannot explain the apparent inertia in campus life over the past 25 years. Indeed, it’s more likely that campuses are schizophrenic: combinations of high-powered computational infrastructures and highly conventional institutional practices. Moreover, strength in technology can sometimes be a good indicator of institutional conservatism. Those institutions that were able to accumulate the resources (financial, intellectual, social) to develop a computer-intensive infrastructure were most likely to be large, wealthy, and above all—despite Schon’s pleas—profoundly stable.
This institutional conservatism doesn’t arise in the easy-to-criticize administrative bureaucracies alone. Tenured faculty, for both good and bad reasons, tend to cling to the institutional and disciplinary sources of their own hard-won security. (It took an English academic to say to one of us, "We’ve done things this way for 500 years; why should we change now?" but similar currents of conservatism run through American faculty senates.) Alumni and parents, too, as the March 15, 1995, New York Times noted, often militate against change. People who have paid a lot for a chunk of tradition usually will resist attempts to dismember it. (In a whirl of medieval costumes and dead languages, commencement invests both parents and alumni with the value of tradition.)
Nonetheless, for all the institutional inertia, campuses are changing. Their student bodies are forcing them to. The archetypal 18-to-22-year-old undergraduate going through school in 4 consecutive years and financed by parents is becoming increasingly rare and unconventional. People are taking up their degrees later and over longer periods, assembling them out of one course here and a few credit hours there, snatched between jobs and bank loans, as time, money, interest, and opportunity arise. It’s probably less helpful, then, to say simply that higher education will change because of changing technologies than to say the emerging computational infrastructure will be crucially important in shaping an already changing system.
In contemplating what the future might look like, some suggest that it won’t so much "look" as "be" —that the campus of the future will be "virtual," with no need of the physical plant that has been the visible center of academia for so long. This notion of a virtual campus, we suspect, both underestimates how universities as institutions work and overestimates what communications technologies do. Learning, at all levels, relies ultimately on personal interactions and, in particular, on a range of implicit and peripheral forms of communication, some of which technology is still very far from being able to handle proficiently.
Communications technology nonetheless can undoubtedly support many of the interactions between teachers and learners. Moreover, the lower marginal cost of online teaching makes it tempting to ignore what technology does not support. The practical and financial viability of the "online academy" may, however, become as much a cause for concern as celebration, threatening to polarize further an already divided system. The more expensive, conventional campus, with all its rich and respected resources, is less likely to disappear than to become the increasingly restricted preserve of those who can afford it. Net access will be for those who cannot. An online degree will almost certainly not command the same respect as its distant campus cousin. In consequence, despite conventional concerns about ‘have-nots" lacking access to technology, technology may in fact become the only access they have to experiences whose full value actually develops off-line.
An alternative approach, and one more in tune with the way people learn, is not to divide the student body between those who get to go to school and those who only get to go online. It will, we argue here, be wiser to arrange things so each student can divide his or her career between time better spent on campus or in communities and time better spent online. All learners need to experience both. So, in contrast to those who suggest that the university of the 21st century will not so much "look" as "be," we suggest that it may "look" in many ways much as it does now but "be" very different, because the most profound changes may occur in the institutional arrangements rather than the physical infrastructure that makes up what people currently think of as a university.
Our own view of how the college or university of the next millennium may look and be is based on our sense of what it is they do, what roles they play in society, and why people think they are worth the often huge sums of money invested in higher education.
"Higher education" covers a wide spectrum, of course. In 1993, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported there were 10,800 post-secondary institutions, of which 5,400 offered diplomas for less than 2 years’ work. Of the 3,600 regarded as accredited colleges of higher education, some 2,700 offered 4-year degrees, 800 MAs, and 660 doctorates. About 170 of these institutions are designated research universities. Given this range, much that has been written focuses only on a small part of the higher education enterprise, such as "the research university" or a particular school or discipline. But as Daniel Alpert has argued, part of the failure to change has arisen from the failure to address the ‘‘system as a whole." If only at a very general level, then, we attempt here to discuss the core of the system—degree-granting colleges and universities—and to raise some systemwide issues involving teaching, learning, and credentialing.
We begin by adopting a strategy from business consultants who have to evaluate huge and diversified corporations that address manifold interests. What, we want to ask, are higher education’s "core competencies"? What do its accredited institutions do that other institutions don’t? Why are individuals, families, states, and government agencies willing to invest so much in it? What is it they want—and the system offers— that is so valuable? The easiest answer—and one in line with the distinctions made in the NCES report—is that it offers degrees.
People in the system don’t, of course, like to think of their work in terms of credentials. Many have higher aims and higher goals, and for some, education is an end in itself. But for a large proportion of its clientele, education is an investment—down payment on a career, social status, or, more immediately, just a job. Most students take the degrees they do to get the jobs they want, knowing or hoping that these jobs will repay the investment. For the vast majority, college implicitly provides a route into the general job "draft," much as it more explicitly prepares athletes for the NBA or NFL draft. Academic aspirations and career aspirations are tightly entwined. Undoubtedly, providing credentials is far from all that colleges do. Nevertheless, crass though it may seem, any discussion that does not acknowledge the central importance to colleges and their students of credits and credentials, degrees and diplomas, simply cannot get very far.
Distaste for credentialing causes people to look on credentials themselves in very different ways. Some see a vulgar misrepresentation of what schools really do in detail. Others see them as a succinct and useful representation of the experience gained in a college career. Within the system, many rightly want to consider "how you play the game"; but outside the system, what matters most is whether you won or lost. These two views are not entirely separable. Public perception of degrees can exert strong influence on university practice at the highest levels. As Peter Eisenberger, professor of physics at Princeton, notes in a March 1995 Physics Today article, "Once students hear that investing years and thousands of dollars in a Ph.D. has little or no economic value or intellectual satisfaction, they will start changing their plans." So although it can seem a crude measure, a diploma remains a fairly sensitive indicator of the market status—the economic as well as the intellectual value—of a university, a degree, a discipline, and a graduate.
In the degree market, then, degrees usefully encapsulate or represent several years of work. Simultaneously, they also "usefully misrepresent" much of what goes on in those years, providing both schools and society with important slack in a system that should not be too taut. While its market value remains high, the very crude semiotics of a degree gives both universities and students a certain license to do what the degree doesn’t necessarily register. It allows students to "play the game" in a variety of creative ways, on the simple condition that in the end they meet the requirements for "winning" a degree. Behind a front of public respectability, students and faculty undertake activities that are socially valuable but not readily valued in the market. In the end, this slack provides the job market and society as a whole with more diverse and versatile candidates than they probably know to request. To shift our metaphor to legislative terms, the degree is an "omnibus package" intended to draw broad public support. While that support holds, an array of important but not always justifiable measures can be unobtrusively "tacked on" without question. It would help neither students, faculty, nor society to open the package to a "line item veto." In this way, credentialing serves everyone’s purposes.
The degree, then, is useful for what it mis/represents. As long as it represents certain things about a degree-holder with reasonable accuracy, it can creatively obscure other aspects to advantage. But that still leaves the question, What does a degree represent?
When people look too hard at degrees, we suspect they see a sort of intellectual bill of lading, a receipt for knowledge-on-board. Teaching, in this view, is a delivery service and school a loading site. No one actually says this, but a delivery view nonetheless underlies much of what people perceive about schools. An implicit delivery view also leads some to think of educational technology as a sort of intellectual forklift truck. If it’s true that the most effective technology in the classroom is still the overhead projector, this may well be because it and many of the alternatives have been designed with delivery in mind.
The knowledge-delivery view, however, profoundly misunderstands how people learn, where they learn, and when they learn. In the first place, it portrays students as vessels into which the university pours information. This is an extraordinarily passive view of how people leam, one that takes no account of the active participation necessary for learning and knowing. And second, the knowledge-delivery view overlooks all the things that people learn on campus outside as well as inside the classroom. These can be as important to a student’s career as teacher-delivered knowledge. People leave college knowing not just things, but knowing people, and knowing not just academic facts, but knowing social strategies for dealing with the world. Reliable friendships and complex social strategies can’t be delivered and aren’t picked up through lectures, but they give an education much of its value.
Furthermore, people don’t usually treat a degree like a bill of lading. Employers, for whom most degrees are ultimately earned, usually look at a degree with infinitely less care than they would a bill of lading. Few outside academia want to examine a transcript. And those who receive degrees rarely act as though it was information delivery that mattered most to them. Alumni tend to blur on classroom information. Details of what they were taught fade exponentially after finals. Few would easily forgive someone who asked them to retake their exams a couple of years—or possibly even a couple of weeks—later.
Short though they may be in some respects, alumni memories do, however, provide some insight into what a degree represents. Alumni do remember groups they joined, scholars they worked with, tasks they accomplished, and friendships they made. We don’t have to look much further than the group of Rhodes Scholars around our current president to see how college activities and networks can be far more important in later life than a degree’s formal content.
Such networking is not simply a campus sideshow. The groups people join at university, some social, some academic, are important. There’s much truth in the old saying "It’s not what you know, but who you know," although that doesn’t quite reflect the intricate connection between "what" and "who." It’s this connection that ultimately explains why parents pay high fees for "good" schools; why students and faculty compete so hard to get to a few campuses, while the vast majority of institutions often struggle to fill their places; why academics are so concerned about where someone received his or her degree and with whom; why diplomas are taken as significant indicators of job worthiness, though transcripts are not; and how university experience helps people find their way through life after university. For the core competency of universities is not transferring knowledge, but developing it, and that’s done within intricate and robust networks and communities.
The delivery view of education assumes that knowledge comprises discrete, preformed units, which learners ingest in smaller or greater amounts until graduation or indigestion takes over. To become a physicist, such a view suggests, you need to take in a lot of formulas and absorb a lot of experimental data. But, on the one hand, knowledge is not a static, preformed substance: it is constantly changing. Learning involves active engagement in the processes of that change. And, on the other hand, people don’t become physicists by learning formulas any more than they become football players by learning plays. In learning how to be a physicist or a football player—how to act as one, talk as one, be recognized as one—it’s not the explicit statements, but the implicit practices that count.
Indeed, knowing only the explicit—mouthing the formulas or the plays—is often exactly what gives an outsider away. Insiders know more. By coming to inhabit the relevant community, they get to know not just what the standard answers are, but the real questions and why they matter. You don’t pick up those things in textbooks any more than you learn to talk like a native by studying grammar books. Learning involves inhabiting the streets of a community’s culture. The community may include astrophysicists, architects, or acupuncturists, but learning involves experiencing its cultural peculiarities.
By describing universities in terms of community, we may seem to be putting academic disciplines somewhere on a cozy line running from neighborhood watch groups to football-team boosters—the sorts of communities that some communitarians have in mind. The communities we have in mind, however, are quite different. These hold together not through voluntarism but through the enduring interpersonal relations that form around shared practices. People come to share this sort of community by sharing the same tasks, obligations, and goals.
Stephen Toulmin, who has explored the community character of academic disciplines, argues that through a complex of shared practices and institutional arrangements (in which the university has come to play a major part), disciplines form "communities of concept users." What is often thought of as "concept-acquisition," he maintains, is really a rich process of "enculturation" as newcomers become members of the community. More recently, two learning researchers, Jean Lave and Etienne Wengel, broadened the scope of Toulmin’s analysis by arguing that all learning, whether specifically "academic" or not, involves enculturation in communities. At base, their work suggests, academic communities are quite similar to other communities of practitioners, or "communities of practice," as Lave and Wenger call them.
Communities of practice are, we think, essential and inevitable building blocks of society. Being an inevitable rather than optional form of social arrangement, they have the same credits and debits as society as a whole. They are as likely to be hierarchical as egalitarian; to be restrictive as open; to resist change as to welcome it; to be internally divided as united. It is the practice and the concepts they share that connect members of a community, not a warm glow of communitarian fellow feeling. So we are not claiming, as communitarians do, that it would be useful to form communities and that universities are a good place to form them. Rather, we claim that communities, with all their strengths and shortcomings, grow inevitably and inescapably out of ongoing, shared practice. Learning a community’s ways always requires access to that community and that practice.
The real test of a school, then, is the quality of access it provides to academic communities— Toulmin’s communities of concepts. A degree reflects not simply the quality of participation of a particular individual, but also the quality of access made available by the institution. That is why choosing a school is so important. Moreover, it’s exactly because some schools give credentials without ever giving suitable access to knowing communities that the relationship between learning and credentials is always problematic. People can and do end up with the label but without having had the necessary experience. Consequently, the central thrust of any attempt to retool the education system must involve expanding direct access to communities, not simply to credentials.
But our concern about technological retooling also comes at this issue from the opposite direction. Those who have the label but not the experience present one problem. Those who might have the experience but not the label face another. This is a central problem for proponents of "open learning." Experience without a formal representation has very limited exchange value— as those whose experience comes from the university of life well know. Consequently, we believe that any retooling must be two-pronged: it must seek to provide wider access to communities, and not just to information, and it must expand ways to represent new forms of access and practice.
Graduate education and research illustrate the attempt to bring newcomers into the disciplinary community. Collaboration between aspiring students and established scholars introduces the former to a discipline’s practice. With the help of mentors, graduate students work their way ever deeper into a community and its institutions, moving away from a toe-hold on the periphery toward increasingly full participation, like apprentices being led into a craft by masters of the practice. In such a process, medical students learn to treat patients, law students to compose briefs, historians to undertake historical research, physics students to engage in the practice of physics rather than merely learn about it, and so on. It isn’t abstract theory but concrete, community practice that’s at the top of the pyramid.
Things are obviously different for undergraduates. They, after all, are prime targets of mechanisms of delivery. Nevertheless, as colleges are currently configured, undergraduates usually do gain some forms of community access. If only for didactic purposes, schools usually put before them practitioners from within particular fields or graduate students working on the periphery. These community members, some intentionally and some unintentionally, give undergraduates a glimpse of the reality of what life in those communities is like. Indeed, behind several of the reform movements one sees on campus today —undergraduate research, problem-based learning, field-based senior capstones, and so on—might lie a new sense of the value of introducing undergraduates to real-life aspects of disciplinary practice.
One of the most important things undergraduates gain from such exposures is an implicit sense of how society comprises innumerable distinct communities of practice. From a distance, academic disciplines appear engaged in the collective and seamless pursuit of knowledge. As students begin to engage with the discipline, as they move from exposure to experience, they develop a sense that the different communities on a campus are quite distinct, that apparently common terms have different meanings, apparently shared tools have different uses, and apparently related objects have different interpretations. Coming to understand this, however unconsciously, is a key outcome of a college career. Furthermore, as well as spotting the differences, undergraduates also tend to understand the common social demands all professional communities make. This is an important part of the socializing effect of schools that makes their graduates congenial to corporations.
In the past it was quite easy to regard universities as society’s unique and separate centers to which students went for a specified period to learn what they needed for life. The opposition of "town" to "gown" and the notion of the "ivory tower" represented a classic division between the university and its locale. Today, that division has little meaning. Schools must respond to a growing demand for further education in the town, and they must draw on the knowledge created there, as well.
Demand is growing as people need to go on learning long after the conventional years of school are past. The insights acquired during a 4-year degree never really sufficed for life, but previously, almost everything else needed for a particular job could be picked up in situ. As people change jobs and jobs themselves change with great rapidity, such ad hoc learning is no longer sufficient. People need to re-immerse themselves in specialized communities to follow developments in specialized knowledge. Universities increasingly have to consider how they can support "life-long" learning to meet these needs. Perhaps, as Toffler suggested long ago, they might start to offer "learning contracts" to incoming students, committing colleges to their students for more than a standard 4 years.
As universities contemplate such changes, they need to find ways to reach people beyond the campus. Here, schools can draw on an inherent asset base generated in the daily round of seminars, colloquiums, lectures, and so forth. New means for capturing the transient activities of the classroom (live-boards, which capture the writings on a board for future reference, multimedia recordings, etc.) and for interactive dissemination (principally through Internet-like infrastructures) offer universities ways to provide a dynamic, responsive archive out of what formerly have been transient or broadcast practices.
Inevitably, capitalizing on these resources will require more than unedited dumps of classroom exchanges. To be useful, these exchanges will require the addition of different types of indexing and annotation, new and versatile search tools, and moderated channels for response. Here schools might develop links between students on campus (with time rather than money on their hands) and students off campus (with complementary resources). Students attending classes on campus might be able to index recordings in real time (these might be thought of as the multimedia equivalent of those exemplary class notes that classmates find so valuable today) and to respond to the issues raised by off-campus students through the interactive links.
In reaching out beyond the campus like this, universities are not simply expanding their fee base or extending their patronage. Communities of concepts don’t emerge in the ivory tower alone. Valuable knowledge is created elsewhere in society, too. Consequently, in building better interactive links between town and gown, between a field’s on and off campus members, schools are serving their own needs, too. In the first place, they are also building links to expertise they lack themselves. And, perhaps most important of all, they are contributing to what AnnaLee Saxenian has called "regional advantage": the conventional science park of businesses fed from the university are, in fact, evolving into learning parks where universities and businesses feed one another. This process more firmly situates schools and their strengths within their regions rather than isolating them within their campuses.
With such changes, conventional boundaries such as those between "town" and "gown" or students and alumni will start to blur as schools extend their reach across space and time. New technologies will be increasingly important for doing this. So far, "distance learning," which primarily involves delivering instruction to people off campus, has been the center of attention. As schools consider their options, we think it’s important that they look beyond traditional paradigms of distance and delivery. A college’s core competency, as we have attempted to say, involves a great deal more than simply delivering knowledge.
Our view is distinct from distance learning in several ways. First, distance teaching was developed with broadcast technology in mind. In the hands of institutions like the Open University (OU) in England, broadcast media have successfully allowed teachers to reach people who had little or no access to conventional schools. Questioning the privilege of the classroom more than the practice, however, such developments have only minimally altered the underlying delivery structure of pedagogy.
Second, when distance learning shifts education on-line and off campus, it can damagingly restrict the essential access to the authentic communities we discussed above. Students in dislocated, virtual campuses are unable either to engage fully with a range of communities, as undergraduates should, or to participate in particular ones, as graduates must.
Third, the focus on distance and delivery overlooks not only the needs of students, but all too often the strengths of new technologies, which are distinctive because they are interactive. Previous communications technologies—books, film, radio, television, telephones, video—have all supported distance and delivery, but they have primarily permitted only one-to-many or one-to-one communications. Knowledge communities, however, are built on more complex interactions, such as continuous conversation. Even in the technologically rich 20th century, such interactions have, for the most part, been possible only in face-to-face situations. The explosion of interactive and midcast (as opposed to broadcast or narrowcast distribution) technologies for the Internet argues that in the 21st century mediated communications will expand the possibility for rich, distal interactions—urging consideration of more than distance in distal education.
Already, innovative teachers and students are taking full advantage of the Internet to move from a paradigm of delivery to one of interactivity. We offer here a few examples of technologies and teachers that strike us as going in the right direction.
Newsgroups, Usenets, Bulletin Boards, and Listserv Mail Lists. All these are based on the rudimentary software of electronic mail. E-mail has proved very useful in keeping teachers and students in touch with one another in one-to-one exchanges, but these groups or lists move beyond that by allowing all their members to address the group as a whole (in much the way someone asking a question in class addresses the whole class). Anyone who subscribes to a group or list can broadcast or mid-cast. Furthermore, many lists and groups capture the apparently ephemeral exchanges and comments of members in an archive that outlives the transient status of classroom questions. In sum, these systems essentially embrace both the features of many-to-many, real-time, conversation-like interaction and those of more enduring, written exchanges.
Such group interactions and their archives are particularly useful for auditors—"lurkers" as they are sometimes known on the Net. Like a good conversation or debate, group exchanges can be as illuminating for those who don’t contribute as for those who do. And many lists have more silent partners than active ones. Evidence of the many lurkers haunting the virtual space often comes only when participants suggest taking an interesting discussion off-list. Then lurkers suddenly materialize to protest attempts to make a fruitful public discussion private.
Annotation Systems. Anyone who has lurked on a list knows that for every good conversation that gets going, there are a dozen false starts. For every useful contribution, there can be a dozen uninformed and highly opinionated ones that derail everyone. Often, conversational wheels merely spin or promising trains of thought get sidetracked. This is particularly true when too many participants are not well versed in the topic. Dan Huttenlocher, a professor in Cornell’s computer science department, discovered all this when he created a list for informal undergraduate class discussions. He was disappointed to find how little it helped. "Particularly for undergraduates," he notes, "a list makes conversation easy, but focus difficult. Students don’t need the opportunity to talk. What they need is something to talk about." Conversely, when he put problem sets on a class ftp server, Huttenlocher found this gave students a great deal to talk about, but no means for many-to-many conversation.
In response, with Jim Davis of the Xerox Design Research Institute at Cornell, Huttenlocher designed "CoNote," a World Wide Web annotation tool that allows students looking at a Web document both to post and to read questions and comments attached to that document. As a result, students can raise and discuss tricky issues, learn from others, discover they aren’t the only ones stuck, and generally enter into lively debates about issues of importance to the class. Textual scholars have long known the importance of the interplay of text and commentary. This interplay can be traced back through the conventional footnotes and marginal notes to Talmudic commentaries. William Sherman has recently noted the importance of marginalia (or adversaria as they were called) to Renaissance science. Hypertext annotation systems like Huttenlocher’s help continue this robust interactivity between a text and its readers in new technological forms while extending the right to annotate publicly beyond a privileged few. (There are now several similar annotation systems in use on the World Wide Web. MIT Press, for example, uses a similar system with online texts of books, allowing readers to respond to authors.)
Shared Online Environments. Nowhere on the Net has conversation become as lively as in MUDs and MOOs, shared online environments that allow all participating to see whatever anyone writes, though the participants may be continents apart. MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) allow several players on computers connected by modems to play the game "Dungeons and Dragons" together. MOOs (object-oriented MUDs) remove the game goals, turning the dungeons into a computationally manipulable set of "rooms" where people can meet for online discussions and programming. MOOs have become the clubs and coffee houses, pubs and cafes of the Internet.
For courses that have difficulty finding enough live bodies on one campus, a MOO offers an interesting medium for interactive distal learning. James O’Donnell’s graduate course on Boethius, conducted in the fall of 1994 for credit from the graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, is an early example. Graduate medieval Latinists are few and usually far between, but Penn’s LatinMOO allowed students from the United States and Asia to form a reasonable quorum. (The course on Boethius spanned some nine time zones.)
Penn’s LatinMOO was much more than a simple chat line. It comprised a "complex" with a quadrangle, several classrooms, a Latin-only common room, and a virtual Coke machine around which people would gather to chat. O’Donnell opened the Boethius classroom to students enrolled in the class, while he made other parts of the MOO available for Latin students from his regular courses (including a "live" undergraduate class on Boethius) to get together more informally. To widen the conversation, O’Donnell combined other Net facilities with the MOO. In addition to putting the central text on a Web site with links to a commentary and other resources, he started a Boethius e-mail list that included all students in the MOO seminar and the live class, but essentially created space for virtual "auditors." This opened discussion to students and academics from around the world, while distinguishing levels of participation and access.
New online courses and new course technology emerge all the time. Our aim here has not been to attempt either a catalog or a survey. We offer these as examples of distal education that seem to us implicitly to go beyond issues of distance and to honor the interactive, communal character of learning and the emerging capabilities of the Net. In particular, they allow students to engage in what Dewey called "productive inquiry."
To some extent, addressing the needs of students in this way reflects the aspirations of what is called "open learning." Proponents of open learning seek to empower learners by breaking down barriers to education raised by conventional institutions. They wish to provide unhindered access to learning resources, so that technologically supported freedom of information may be turned into freedom of education for people pursuing their own learning needs. While such a shift responds better to the way people learn by facilitating interactivity and active engagement and inquiry rather than passive reception, even open learning underestimates some important roles institutions play.
First, as we have noted, a good deal of what an undergraduate diploma signifies comes from the way education socializes students, making them unreflectively familiar with the distinct mores of diverse communities. While open learning pursues access to information, it ignores the more important issues of access to communities.
Second, while open learning challenges the university’s conventional role as gatekeeper to academic information, it simultaneously underestimates the importance of institutions representing educational achievement. As we argued earlier, it is the representation of experience that has exchange value in the job market. Employers who have proved generally reluctant to accept credentials from the university of life are unlikely to behave very differently with open learning on the Net.
Consequently, while the shift from distance to open learning is conceptually important, it fails to address both the communal and the institutional needs of learners. Institutional roles in providing access, oversight, and credentialing will remain important in the digital age. The institutional arrangements required by those roles, however, seem likely to change.
If we ignore, as some prefer, the way credentials provide both constraints on and resources for the higher education system—a valuable form of mis/representation as we described them—then it’s possible to see the march toward first distance learning and now open learning as a fairly direct march of progress. With the development of various technologies, it can be claimed, students have slowly been able to take advantage of each new form of distance learning: the correspondence course, the broadcast-media course, and now Net courses. The future, as proponents of the electronic university assume, is simply to continue this progressive trend and move toward an "Electronic Worldwide University."
If, however, learning requires genuine participation, distance learning often provide its illusion only, while actually keeping students at a disempowering distance. This is a particular risk with use of the Net. As anyone who has sent e-mail to the White House, Congress, or even a newspaper knows, the Net can provide a powerful impression of interactivity and exchange while in practice denying both. Similar problems are likely to arise for online students. A distal learner, for example, may achieve access to public forums used by a campus class, but the campus community’s private, off-line interactions will remain both inaccessible and invisible. Where Stanley Fish was once challenged by the question "Is there a text in this class?" the Net raises the challenge of discovering if there is "a class with this text?"
We suspect that, though Net interactions offer profoundly useful means to support and develop existing communities, they are not so good at helping a community to form or a newcomer to join. Dan Huttenlocher argues that from his experience there is an important synergy between his live classes and their online interactions that the online exchanges alone couldn’t provide. "The Net isn’t a good place to form communities," he claims, ‘‘though it’s a very good place to keep them going." Clearly, someone with only online access to Huttenlocher’s course material would not benefit from this synergy.
The experience of LatinMOO at first seems to challenge Huttenlocher’s claim. A cadre of Boethius scholars did appear to form wholly online. Yet even here online participation was significantly dependent on a deep base of off-line experiences. All the participants were graduate students, which by our earlier analysis makes them quite distinct from Huttenlocher’s class. Graduate students have already been heavily socialized into the patterns of university and graduate work and behavior, whereas undergraduate classes have only started this difficult socializing process. Unlike Huttenlocher, O’Donnell didn’t have to instill too many social conventions beyond those of MOOing itself, since participants had already picked up the niceties and the idiosyncrasies of scholarly behavior off-line. In short, O’Donnell’s online class was inescapably enabled and enriched from the participants’ background in off-line classes.
So for us, the idea of a progressive march toward open learning culminating in a future of virtual universities where all interaction is online is problematic. Furthermore, the accompanying whiggish story of a progressive march, a steady loosening of an age-old university grip on knowledge and access—though appealing —simply isn’t true. Our reading of history is different and less relentlessly progressive. Indeed, we suspect that some earlier ways of organizing postsecondary education, though they might appear to have been superseded, could be useful in addressing problems raised but not answered by futuristic notions of a virtual, placeless university for isolated individuals.
The broad gate-keeping role universities now play is, in fact, a relatively recent development. For instance, the professions, which now rely so heavily on universities, previously relied much more on professional apprenticeship. In these areas as elsewhere, university dominion is a recent phenomenon, suggesting that institutional control is being centralized rather than diffused.
In 19th- and early 20th-century Britain, for example, universities themselves oversaw much looser, more highly devolved arrangements. Students from Scotland to Singapore, for example, took courses and earned external degrees from the University of London, most without ever leaving home. Nor were these simply correspondence courses or early forms of distance teaching. The external degree importantly allowed students and teachers to form or join relatively autonomous local groups of like-minded participants thousands of miles from the degree-granting university. High schools opened their facilities to nearby students, particularly women, beyond school leaving age, to allow local scholars to provide university-level courses in places without a university.
In this devolved system of higher education, pedagogy and control were widely distributed, involving both local and remote scholars and communities. This arrangement meant that students were neither dislocated from local networks nor trapped by the limitations of local resources. Local communities gave students opportunities for authentic access and membership while, from a distance, the university provided oversight, materials, standards, and credentials. Consequently, students could draw on the strengths of both the metropolis and the periphery. This type of arrangement significantly opened educational opportunilies for rural women, the poor, and Third World residents who lacked access to universities, and it provided them with recognized and respected credentials.
For various reasons, the use of external degrees has diminished (though the University of London still administers some). Moreover, much of the "open" potential of the external system has given way to distance learning. Paradoxically, because it replaces local resources with metropolitan ones delivered from a distance, distance learning is more part of a trend toward centralization than devolution. Certainly learners have wrested some control from the academy, but in other areas the academy has increased its control. The single (and increasingly large) campus as the sole source—of faculty, disciplines, and colleagues— for matriculating students is the outcome of a 20th-century trend of concentration that has probably been as significant as the opposing triumphs of dispersal.
Any rethinking of resources for distal learning, it seems to us, needs to steer a path between the academy’s centralizing tendencies and the optimistic faith that technologically mediated open learning offers a viable alternative. As we suggested above, to meet learners’ needs for access to communities and credentials, institutions of higher education are more likely to be reconfigured than bypassed or abandoned.
The forces involved in the reconfiguration are too varied to make the outcome in any way predictable. Yet it seems unreasonable simply to shrug our shoulders at the ineffable character of the future. So instead, in the following section we suggest one way in which the current configuration, often thought of as a single and inseparable institutional unit, might be rethought. Our purpose is not to produce a new blueprint for "the idea of a university," but to undertake a thought experiment concerning the different pieces to be considered in reconfiguring higher education. With new technologies, we suspect, the components of a university, which once moved together, might develop along different trajectories on different time lines. We offer this sketch of a devolving university system as an intuition pump or discussion piece rather than a wish list or prognostication. It should be as useful to consider why it couldn’t work as why it might.
Our discussion so far suggests that learners need three things from an institution of higher education:
If this is the case, then, along with the students themselves, there are three other crucial components of a college: faculty (drawn from communities of practice); facilities; and an institution able to provide formal, accepted representation of work done. At the moment these four components are tightly woven together in particular colleges and their campuses. Distance education seeks to keep all but the students together. The history of the external degree, with its central credentialing but distal teaching, suggests that other configurations are possible. Moreover, as we’ve suggested, new, interactive technologies are starting to pick away at some previously invisible seams. Here, we pick a little further.
If these components are separable, degree-granting bodies (DGBs) might take up the degree-granting function. These would no doubt have to fight over students and faculty, just as colleges do now. DGBs could take on as many or as few students and faculty as they thought practical, becoming smaller than a liberal arts college or larger than an entire state system. They could set degree requirements and core courses as they saw fit. But a DGB would be essentially administrative, with little need to own much beyond its administrative competency and a building to house its (administrative) staff. Its loyalties might be to a locale or a region, or be national or international. Without the need for the massive capital investment that owning a campus and hiring a faculty requires, DGBs would be highly flexible, able to evolve to meet the needs of students, faculty, and the labor draft. Conversely, of course, they might be less resistant to unhealthy winds of change.
If a DGB could take on an independent status, faculty might also become more independent. Like doctors who contract to HMOs, they would need to find a DGB to sanction their teaching. But also like doctors, they might find more than one DGB to do this. DGB sanction would allow students who study with a particular scholar to gain credit for work done toward a degree from the DGB. Scholars might contract individually or in teams. But, as distinct from the current system, they wouldn’t be tied to one place. There is no reason for all the faculty of a DGB, or even all the members of a team, to be in the same place. Some could be on the East Coast, some on the West Coast, and some overseas. They might teach students from several DGBs online or in person, through tutorials, lectures, or seminars, or any combination.
In such an arrangement, fees would be likely to vary depending on the type of teaching offered—a lecture, a tutorial, a research seminar, a lab, or in-work training for graduate, undergraduate, or extension students. DGBs might pay a per capita fee to reward a teacher’s ability to attract high-quality students to the DGB. Or, like 18th-century academics, scholars might collect a fee directly from the students they attract. (Adam Smith’s Edinburgh lectures were paid for this way—he took a guinea per head and made 100 pounds per annum; so were Hegel’s lectures in Jena.) Or again, a DGB might pay for matriculating students while auditors could pay teachers directly. An option like this might help ensure that the structure and content of a course are not shaped by degree and exam requirements alone.
Research might be administered by a DGB or staffed and funded separately. For both teaching and research, faculty could find their own facilities. For some, these would be inevitably extensive, involving labs, equipment, and libraries. Others might need only a classroom. And yet others running small, local tutorial groups or online classes might need few facilities beyond an Internet link or a seminar room, which might be provided rather like branch libraries, dispersed across towns and cities.
Despite the loss of a tied academic administration and faculty, concrete facilities under such an arrangement would no doubt look very much like the campus of today. A particular campus would have to compete for faculty and students in the region, with the quality of its facilities a significant attractor. Both faculty and students using a particular facility might then come from several DGBs. The facility itself might thus become a regional magnet for staff, students, and DGBs. If this were the case, it would be in a city’s or a region’s interest to maintain a high standard of facilities. Faculty and students wouldn’t have to travel to their DGB, but they might want to travel to be close to superior facilities. On the other hand, they wouldn’t be locked into one set of facilities. In well-endowed areas, some faculty and many students might use more than one facility. DGBs, faculty, and students might not use campus facilities at all. We would imagine, however, that given the needs for socialization, most DGBs and many faculty might insist that degree candidates spend a set amount of time on campus in groups rather than online individually. DGBs without such a requirement might well find their degrees rapidly falling in value and competitive worth.
Student choices would change significantly in any reconfiguration of this sort. More choices, of course, are likely to mean more complex decisions. The central choice would involve finding a suitable DGB. Perhaps a student would choose one that insists on conventional campus life—and one that has faculty on a particular campus. Or perhaps one that makes no campus demands, or one that includes certain faculty. Or the choice might be one that has faculty in the various regions a student expects to work in over the next few years: northern Scotland, Singapore, or San Francisco. A student also might choose a DGB whose degree in an area of interest is known to have a particularly high exchange value; or one that is prepared to validate certain kinds of in-work experience. But a student wouldn’t be committed to working with the faculty of a single campus or a single region; furthermore, he or she might be able to work with local communities of excellence whose credentials are not accepted by universities under present arrangements.
In this way, a distributed system might allow much greater flexibility, employing local sites of professional excellence—research labs, hospitals, architects’ offices, law firms, engineering offices, and the like—to offer mentoring programs that give students practical experience and course credits simultaneously. Regions that lack conventional academic facilities might start to attract students through the quality of mentors in the workforce. Students in forestry, viticulture, mining, conservation, or ocean science would, for instance, be able to get credit for working with experts in the field, however far this might be from conventional academic centers.
Essentially, a student’s university career in such a system would no longer be through a particular place, time, or pre-selected body of academics, but through a network principally of students’ own making, yet shaped by a DGB and its faculty. Students could stay home or travel, mix online and off-line education, work in classes or with mentors, and take their own time. Their college careers wouldn’t begin at age 18 and end at age 22.
Direct funding through fees wouldn’t change much. DGBs would take tuition fees, while arrangements for faculty and facility per capita payments could be negotiated in a variety of ways, as we have suggested. (Of course, the extensive support provided by alumni to certain institutions might well ensure that these resisted all other pressures to reconfigure.) Subject to accreditation, private institutions could set up their own DGBs; states could set up their own. Some DGBs might try to be exclusive; others inclusive. Each would over time develop its particular reputation, attracting faculty and students through the exchange value of its degrees. Groups concerned about education in their fields—such as the AMA, MLA, or Computer Scientists for Social Responsibility—might try to establish themselves as DGBs. As we suggested earlier, degrees that reflect too much concentration, that represent too accurately the work involved, might well fall in value compared to those that mis/represent greater diversity. For in the end, the goal of a devolved system would be the education of students as capable of change on graduation as the world they encounter.
This sketch is not, of course, a road map for the future. Rather, it is something of a deliberate provocation intended to make the general point that the radical changes occurring in a university’s environment—from the reconstitution of its student body to the reengineering of its technological infrastructure—will require different institutional arrangements from those found today. Distance learning, where much of the current interest lies, is, we believe, too deeply enmeshed within current arrangements to produce sufficiently radical change. Open learning, on the other hand, tends to ignore the strengths worth preserving in current arrangements. Without more thought to students and their practical needs, we fear that not only will these technologies be underexploited, but they may well reinforce the current limitations on our higher educational system.
* Change, July/August 1996. Reprinted with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. Published by Heldref Publications, 1319 Eighteenth St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036-1802. Copyright © 1996.
| Anthology Index | Part Two Index | Part Three |