The first major trend creating the current confluence is technology and its impact on education. Technology-enabled education (TEE) is education that is enhanced and improved as a result of technology. The technology does not drive the education;
students’ learning needs do that. However, TEE allows educational environments and opportunities that were not possible before the technology was in place.
One type of TEE is a simulated, computer-based virtual reality environment in which the learner must accomplish a goal, often within a given time frame. This approach has been made popular and respected by Roger Shank of Northwestern University’s Institute for the Learning Sciences,5who calls it experiential, nonlinear, goal-oriented learning.
This approach has become especially popular in industry—for example, new recruits to General Electric’s financial services operations must take and pass one of these virtual reality simulated tests; in this case they must design and implement a new line of GE business that turns a profit in 24 months. If there is no simulated profit, there is no actual job at GE! Designing and creating one of these simulated learning environments is not inexpensive, with price tags usually more than $1 million. At MIT we have used this pedagogy to develop CD-ROM applications to help students learn foreign languages:
You’re trapped in a foreign city. A contract is out on your life. Only your native-speaking friends know how you can escape. But they have been poisoned, and their memories are deteriorating at 10% per hour. Devise a strategy for visiting and interviewing your friends (in their native language) that allows you to survive!
Another example of TEE is the studio-based learning implemented at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) under the direction of Professor Jack Wilson (Wilson, 1999).
In the early 1990’s, Wilson and his colleagues at RPI decided to look at large lecture- based introductory courses in science and engineering. They found that attendance at these lectures averaged about 70% nationally, and even the students who did attend were not always 100% attentive. Moreover, these courses were expensive, with six contact hours per week, in lectures, recitations and laboratories. So, with an eye toward cost control and pedagogical reform, they designed studio courses having four hours of contact—but more effective contact—per week. According to Wilson (1999, p. 47), “The studio courses are…designed to bring interactivity often found in small enrollment interactive courses to meet the needs of large enrollment courses. Lecture, recitation, and laboratory are combined into one facility, the studio, where the faculty conducts hands-On interactive learning sessions.” As a result of RPI’s largescale implementation of the learning studio in freshman and sophomore courses, student attendance is up to
5http://www.ils.nwu.edu/index.html
over 95%, outside evaluations have been positive, and RPI has been showered with prestigious awards for its substantial positive reform in education.6 (See chap. 10)
New Words, Familiar Ideas
TEE carries with it a new vocabulary related to teaching and learning. Some traditional words and concepts are being pushed aside or at least being supplemented by others:
Old New
Student Learner
Teacher Mentor or Coach or Co-learner Teaching Learning
Passive learner Active learning Teaching material Accomplishing a goal
Linear Nonlinear Synchronous Asynchronous Classroom teaching Distance learning
The first three words on this list place the emphasis on the person learning, not the person doing the teaching. The focus is customer-oriented rather than producer-oriented. The mode is learner pull rather than teacher push. The next two paired entries can be considered in terms of a student passively sitting in a large lecture versus a learner designing and building something to demonstrate knowledge of theory or principals. The trend, based on education research, is toward active, goal-oriented learning. Linear learning can be thought of in terms of a student opening a book on page 1 and reading straight through, page by page, over the course of a semester. Nonlinear learning occurs when the learner seeks supporting materials—text, images, videos, etc.—in a sequence that she determines, based on her learning style, prerequisite knowledge and current educational needs. In a nonlinear learning environment no two learners traverse the learning space in the same way or cover exactly the same content.
The last two pairs of words have techie sounds and often create controversy when discussed among faculty colleagues. Synchronous learning takes place when the teacher and student are in the same place at the same time, such as in a classroom. If teacher and student are not in the same place but communicating with each other at the same time (perhaps via telephone or interactive television), then we still have synchronous learning.
Learning becomes asynchronous when the teacher and learner are not communicating
6These are among the awards that RPI has received: 1995 Theodore Hesburgh Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Education from TIAA/CREF; Boeing Outstanding Educator of the Year Award (1995); Pew Charitable Trust Prize (1996); 1997 Excellence in Education Award from Bell Atlantic. See Jack Wilson’s home page for more details: http://cde.rpi.edu/wilson.html.
with each other at the same time. Asynchronous learning is not new. Early examples date to 30,000-year-old cave drawings, etchings and pictures that still teach us, many millennia after the teacher has passed on.7 A more academic example is the Egyptian library of Alexandria, dating to 330 BC, to which scholars and students traveled to learn asynchronously from the masters. The Alexandrian Library had a copy of every existing scroll known to the library’s administrators, with a collection estimated at up to 700,000 papyrus scrolls.8
Distance learning, either synchronous or asynchronous, occurs when teacher and student are not located at the same place. Distance learning is not new, and it may be older than you think. Although correspondence schools have existed since at least the early 20th century, distance learning really took hold in 1450 A.D., when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Once the printed book became ubiquitous, first hundreds then thousands, and soon millions of readers benefitted from the thoughts and writings of great authors. And yes, there were critics. Monks, who spent hours meticulously transcribing texts, complained that the printing-press editions were of poorer quality and did not last as long as their originals. Apparently they were right, but that still did not save their jobs.9 And there were those steeped in centuries-old oral tradition who feared that the printed book with its accompanying and newly popular silent reading would cause the demise of face-to-face live story telling. What actually transpired was much more complex, as each mode of communication eventually supported and enhanced the other (Chartier, 1989).
Distance Learning ≠ Technology-Enabled Education
Although technology-enabled education is often equated to distance learning, we believe that distance learning is a subset of technology-enabled education (TEE). Distance learning has an unfavorable image in many circles. It brings up memories of decades-old, low-quality correspondence schools (Match Book U, as it were) and sunrise classrooms that were once shown early in the morning on network TV stations. In contrast, most distance learning today is a carryover of the in-class teaching that we are familiar with in our brick-and-mortar universities. Distance learning courses delivered over the Internet often use text-based slides and lecture notes to support the assigned reading of printed textbooks and online course packs. Such asynchronous delivery is particularly used by institutions that offer a large number of courses and are seeking to replace their correspondence courses with Internet access. More advanced uses of technology, such as synchronous delivery using video conferencing, have made it possible to nearly duplicate the live classroom, minimizing faculty preparation. That is, most distance learning delivered synchronously using video today is in the classic lecture style which students view the talking heads in a passive-listening mode. But much more is possible.
7http://www.culture.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/gvpda-d.htm The Chauvet—Pont—d’Arc Cave
8New York Times, Nov. 6, 1999. p. A4.
9Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes (1494), quoted in O’Donnell, ‘The Pragmatics of the New: Trithemius, McLuhan, Cassiodorus,” archived @
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/sanmarino.html.
FIG. 2.1. Cave drawing that is 30,000 years old (the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave).
Figure 2.2 contains an etching of a steam-driven railroad train of 1837, the De Witt Clinton.10 The steam engine had just been engineered for powering railroad trains. But look at the cars on the train: they are stagecoaches with the horses removed and new rail- compatible wheels placed on them! Talking head lectures in a distance learning, technology-enabled environment are analogous to these stagecoaches—one takes that which is familiar or comfortable and transposes it virtually unchanged into a totally new, technology-enabled environment. The real potential of the new environment is rarely tapped. As analogies, consider: early movies, with emphasis on filming traditional stage dramas or plays; or first transoceanic flights, flown on amphibious Pan American Airways Clipper ships, with captain, cocaptain and galley; or even the computer you currently use, with its QWERTY keyboard, designed in an era of manual typewriters, and laid out (in 1874) to minimize the frequency of jammed keys.11 We are in the early stages of both distance learning and technology-enabled education. We must be careful not to evaluate the results of technology-enabled distance learning until we learn how to replace the stagecoaches.
10A replica of the De Witt Clinton, manufactured by the West Point Foundry in New York City and operated by the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, can be found in the Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan.
11 http://inventors.about.com/education/sciphys/inventors/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=
http://popularmechanics.com/popmech/spec/9608SFACM.html
FIG. 2.2. Stage coaches attached to steam engine (Mohawk and Hudson’s De Witt Clinton, 1837).
Copyright © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The academy has not been known for using innovative technologies in the delivery of education. For instance, the blackboard remains education’s dominant delivery technology. One might ask tongue in cheek: What is the difference between cave drawings and a blackboard? Answer: Invention of the eraser! Many of us now also use the overhead projector, an invention originally driven more by bowlers who needed to see their scores projected, than by teachers. Other more recent technologies used in teaching were also invented for other purposes: television, computers, and videoconference systems (marketed first for corporate meetings). But that is changing—we are now seeing inventions, both in hardware and software that are driven solely by the education marketplace.
Distance Learning Today and Tomorrow
Today, distance learning can include any learning environment available to both on- campus and off-campus students. It can be Jack Wilson’s learning studios or one of Roger Shank’s experiential simulations. But too much of distance learning today attempts to glue the pedagogy of the past onto newly available technology platforms. If video or audio is involved, this usually means broadcast-style lecturing that students receive in passive-listening mode. If the web is involved without lecturing, students may receive the material as a Sunday color supplement, a type of rotogravure containing syllabus, linearly listed reading assignments and color images. In a sense these approaches are analogous to selling buggy whips to drivers of those new-fangled horseless carriages.
Newly arrived students from the Nintendo generation often drive an institution’s first investments into TEE. These students are accustomed to USing personal computers and the Web to obtain information. It is frequently the students who are asking for course websites, online lecture notes and other technology enhancements to on-campus courses.
A recent survey of colleges and universities indicates that the use of technology for on- campus courses is a higher priority than the development of courses for online delivery across the Internet (Green, 1999). As student demands and competitive pressures increase
the need for TEE on-campus, institutions need to provide some guidance and standards to assure the rapid and effective development of such materials. Luckily for institutions wanting to move towards distance learning, much of the investment in TEE can be transferred into the distance-learning world.
To address the need for standardized technology, the Instructional Management System (IMS) group has been meeting to develop agreement on the technical standards for delivering distance learning.12 Such standards have been slow to be developed and are needed across a wider spectrum of the distance learning process. The primary work of the IMS group revolves around the production of technical specifications for IMS—
compliant environments and materials. The first version of the IMS technical specifications and an integrative prototype, released in March 1998, is organized around the development of specifications in four areas:
Meta-data
Packaging and run-time services Profiles
Enterprise integration
The IMS technical specifications will provide general guidelines and requirements for developers to create interoperable content and management systems.
The growth of distance learning has been held back by the lack of quality educational content and the lack of standardized easy-to-use technology. This results from a lack of standards for describing and developing distance learning courses, the uneven quality of courses being offered, and the rapid growth and diversity of equipment and software in the classroom, the conference room and on the desktop. To meet the learning needs and time constraints of students, courses may need to become much shorter and meet more limited learning objectives than our traditional courses of 15 or more weeks with 45 or more hours of class lectures. Even the concept of course may have to be examined and replaced by new alternatives in the just-in-time, at-my-place world of distance learning.
Within a few years many of the current problems will be largely behind us. The English-speaking world does not need hundreds of individual distance learning offerings for each of the most popular introductory undergraduate courses. It may only need a few of each. If this is the case, the opportunities for winner-take-all course development and delivery will encourage both traditional educators and for-profit companies to develop courses of high quality.
Potential learners will have easy access to information about the educational opportunities at colleges and universities through the growing numbers of higher- education Web portals—websites that provide links to a broad array of educational resources and services. If either the quality of our teaching or our course offerings is not competitive with our peers, we will need to improve in order to compete. One message of e-commerce is that easing a person’s access to information and ease of purchase can quickly change the competitive environment. We believe this will also happen in higher education. Faculty and their deans can expect students to make them aware of other
12http://www.imsproject.ord/
institutions that are perceived as offering better programs and courses, at least as measured by the information on their websites.
With almost every course potentially available to every distance learner, many may survive, but only the best will prosper. Institutions are likely to be faced with increasing demands for transfer credit for courses taken at a distance. Although institutions may choose to limit such credit to their own courses, the competition to recruit capable students may make it difficult to do so. The financial model for distance learning results in low marginal costs for additional students coupled with a need for large student enrollments to justify large course development costs. As a result, there will be large incremental revenues, net of expenses, for each additional student enrolled.
Individualized Learning Through Technology
Technology holds the promise of bringing learning to students in individual’ ized ways with the ability to frequently assess and respond to their learning needs. A major problem with earlier technologies, such as videotapes, was the inability to individualize the delivery to students or give them frequent opportunities to personally interact with their teachers or with other students. Learning is recognized as a social experience, best for most students if not delivered in isolation from teachers or other students. To alleviate this problem, some distance learning courses use a blended combination of off-campus delivery and on-campus tutoring and classes. In two of our MIT graduate degree programs, we use synchronous two-way videoconferencing to include remote learners in the classroom and tutoring portions of courses, supplemented by asynchronous text-based Internet support.13 In this way, we have created for our remote learners much of the experience that students would expect from an entirely on-campus program.
We have spoken to many educators on our campus and elsewhere about the ways that students use technology to enhance their learning. One important observation is that online access to full lecture materials provides an opportunity to review this material in its original form several times, leading to greater comprehension. Instructors have told us that it is often the average student or the student near the bottom of the class who, if motivated, can gain the most from access to such lecture materials. Slower learners, or those with minimal course prerequisites, now can access the lectures and lecture materials and not have to rely solely on their class notes and textbooks. Additionally, nonnative speakers can review material that may have been difficult to understand the first time simply because of their language comprehension.
Distance learning often substitutes for, rather than duplicates, the on-campus learning experience. It may not be the best way for all students to learn, but it can be a good method for many of them. A relative of one of the authors recently reported very positive learning experiences using correspondence courses from one of our state universities. She particularly mentioned the care with which the faculty commented on her written papers.
Because she lives in a remote area, her options are distance learning or no learning. For most of us, learning entirely from a textbook is quite difficult, so having a professor’s guidance in asynchronous text form is what much of distance learning is about these days. With continual interaction and feedback, the student is mentored through the learning process, not just given an exam at the end.
13Systems Design and Management, MIT Singapore Alliance.
The Internet is now bringing information to students from universities around the world. It will not replace traditional classroom instruction, but understanding the alternative learning environments that are available can change society’s expectations for the university experience. Students can now make comparisons on the Internet with similar on-campus or distance learning courses being provided by other educational institutions. This should encourage creativity in teaching, rather than reduce it, and should certainly encourage more course preparation by faculty.
Over the longer term, the increased learning taking place at a distance can increase, rather than reduce, the demand for on-campus learning. Through distance learning, we can increase the proportion of the population that have successfully completed the basic courses that are a prerequisite for more advanced courses. The opportunity to engage with fellow students and faculty through on-campus learning in the more advanced topics should have both personal and professional appeal.
People still want to go to live concerts, theater, and sporting events even though technology brings these programs to them at a distance in both synchronous and asynchronous forms. The availability of such programs through technology has increased our understanding and causes attendance at the live event to be a more meaningful experience. We believe distance learning will have the same impact on our campuses. We will increasingly hear about the imaginative use of visual materials for distance learning, such as charts, graphs, simulations, animations, and short video clips. It will be an environment of experimentation and change. New pedagogies will result in improved learning outcomes. With quick access to information on the Web, information about these improved learning outcomes will be quickly transmitted to both educators and their students.