Volume 9, May 22, 2000

Two previous revolutions in higher learning are the reading-writing revolution and the campus revolution. "Imagine a tutor teaching small groups of students who learned only by explanation and conversation. Now imagine such learners and teachers beginning to rely on reading and writing too. Access certainly would have increased." (p. 24) "In fact, it has been said that distance learning was born the first time a scholar said to a learner, ‘Take this manuscript, go away, and read it.’" (p. 25) "Almost two thousand years later, the campus revolution brought scattered scholars, learners, and academic resources together." (p. 25) "Access was increased for many, but some were shut out—for example, those living in towns whose scholars had left for the big university cities." (p. 25)

"Today a third revolution is under way, striking in its parallels to the first two. The signs of this third round of improvements in access and quality are appearing all around us:" (p. 25)

• Presentations – "Live and prerecorded video and audio presentations stream out across the Internet." (p. 25)
• Libraries – "The World Wide Web and online library catalogues provide access to gigantic collections of information." (p. 25) "Of course, the new library does not contain all the information of the old, just as the first manuscripts could not contain all of Socrates’ knowledge." (p. 25)
• Seminars – "The first revolution reshaped the seminar when participants alternated periods of talking and listening with periods of reading and writing. The second revolution enriched the seminar in part because scholars and students worked and lived together for long periods of time. Today, asynchronous seminars enable learners to participate move conveniently, improving access." (p. 25)
• Educational structures – "Reading and writing brought the need for copyists, librarians, and later, publishers. Campuses mobilized, enriched, and focused the efforts of scholars by proving them with new support structures (e.g., laboratories, janitors, and administrators). Today even larger-scale educational structures—such as Western Governors University, the University of Phoenix, and state networks—are providing new contexts for higher education." (p. 26)

"All three revolutions used their technologies to help more scholars teach and more students learn, enable new kinds of scholarship and specialization, alter the relationship of scholars with the larger society, increase the uniformity and diversity of teaching resources, and change the character of academic conversation." (p. 26) "Empowering technologies such as paper, buildings, and computers don’t cause change by themselves. Our choices of how to use the technologies determine those consequences." (p. 26)

We can use our "capital investments to create distributed learning environments superior to what a small campus could once have offered" by: (p. 26)

• Building a well-structured Web library – "This effort will usually include collecting and creating new materials (e.g., primary sources, tools for inquiry or design available over the Web). Equally important is the creation of mediating pages to help students find and use extant sites around the world." (p. 26) "Each institution could gain a reputation for tending a specific part of the intellectual garden." (p. 26)
• Enriching and diversifying the instructional support – "Lecturers might work closely with specialists in the development of instructional materials and Web sites. Experts from the outside world could lend their expertise and prestige to the assessment of student projects. The faculty member’s role ought to be redefined so that he or she can be rewarded for being an effective part of such a team." (p. 27)
• Seeking a more diverse student body – "Organize and teach the course so that students’ differing backgrounds, values, and settings create more energetic debates and inquiries." (p. 27)
• Exploiting the slower pace of e-mail – "Students who are inarticulate face-to-face sometimes converse clearly and thoughtfully in the slower pace of the electronic seminar." (p. 27)
• Improving assessment and feedback – Faculty members may "hope students will learn one thing (e.g., higher-order thinking, academic values) but they unwittingly test students for something else (e.g., memorization). As we work on a larger scale, the advantages of appropriate assessment, and the dangers of inappropriate assessment, grow." (p. 27)
• Teaching students how to learn – "We must teach students how to learn on their own, and we must be able to assess whether they are able to do so, before they graduate." (p. 27)
• Letting more students know that the course or resource exists – "Enlarge the innovation by working with one or more other institutions and then drawing on the student bodies of all the partners." (p. 27)
• Attracting more students – "To expand enrollment today, institutions often will need to create accessible programs that are more distinctive and valuable, perhaps by combining one’s strengths with those of other institutions, certainly by taking a fresh look at needs." (p. 27)
• Handling more students – "One method to reduce costs "may be as simple as renegotiating site licenses for specialized software so that costs per student can be lowered in exchange for serving more students. Sometimes this goal may require changing the organization of academic work." (p. 50)
• Providing instruction in more accessible formats – "Traditionally campuses have incurred enormous costs to bring students face-to-face but have not used that opportunity very efficiently. Students had to stand in line, commute often to campus, and sit silently in classrooms, generally shoulder-to-shoulder rather than face-to-face." (p. 50) "We’ve seen that education can sometimes improve when distance is increased (e.g., by creating the option of rewinding a tape of a lecture and listening to it a second time." (p. 50)
• Controlling the long-term costs of materials – "Courseware in the past has often been educationally quite effective but expensive in the long term because it was used by only small numbers of students for a small time." (p. 50)

"In the Third Revolution, we’ll need to think even harder about how to help instructors (some of whom may no longer be resident on campus) to work together to deal with these problems, which are simply going to get worse. This is just one of the new ‘grand challenges’ posed by the Third Revolution—research and experimentation challenges that are too big for only one institution to handle." (p. 51) "Paradoxically, while this revolution makes education more accessible, it also creates new barriers to entry. Unfortunately this risk is heightened when proponents and government representatives hype virtual education mainly as a way of saving money." (p. 51) "Technology is no longer a niche activity. But many universities and colleges are still organized as though technology were the preserve of a few experts and can be handled apart from the main academic concerns of the institution." (p. 51)

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