THE INTERNET REVOLUTION CONFERENCE
London
9 May 2000
The Internet and Higher Education: Preparing for Change
by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University
What kind of revolution?
Thank you for the opportunity to give the opening address to this conference. Our title is the Internet Education Revolution and I shall say something about each of those words in reverse order: revolution, education and internet. Then I shall suggest how universities should prepare for change.
Let’s start with revolution. The dictionary defines a revolution two ways. First, revolving, motion in a circular course around an axis. Second, a complete change, a turning upside down, a reversal of conditions. I presume that our title puts the Internet revolution in the second category, suggesting that the Internet heralds a complete change in higher education, the turning upside down of universities and a reversal of the conditions under which university people work.
Maybe, but before we get completely carried away, let’s take a valium and remember two things about revolutions. The first is that they usually leave blood on the floor. In the English and French revolutions people had their heads chopped off, and in the American revolution lots of folk were killed in battle. More recently China’s Cultural Revolution stunted the lives of millions of Chinese.
But the second feature of the turning-upside-down type of revolution is that it often mutates into the motion-in-a-circular-course type of revolution. The English revolution was followed by the restoration of the monarchy, the French revolution was followed by Napoleon and the Empire, and the American revolution left so many people in slavery that they had to fight a much bloodier civil war in the following century to embed the ideal that people were created equal. The net effect of China’s Cultural Revolution was to take the country back toward capitalism – although it wasn’t called that – under Deng Xiaoping
So that is my first caveat. To predict a permanent, turning-upside-down revolution in something so profoundly rooted in the human experience as education is a brave act. I’ll come back to the forecasts that we are about to see the end of universities and the end of campuses in a moment.
My second caveat is that we’ve been here many times before. The idea of educational technology as an intellectual forklift truck that can carry us to greater heights has a long pedigree. Here are a series of real quotes, starting over one hundred and fifty years ago with a Mr Josiah Bumstead who, in 1841 said:
The inventor or introducer of the blackboard deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not among the greatest benefactors of mankind.
One hundred years later in 1940, Hoban proclaimed that:
The motion picture is the most revolutionary instrument introduced into education since the printing press.
Then in 1957, according to Stoddard:
It now seems clear, however, that television offers the greatest opportunity for the advancement of education since the introduction of printing by moveable type.
But by 1962 Woefle could assert that:
Programmed learning is the first major technological breakthrough in education since the invention of printing.
And five years later Caffrey and Mossman could claim that:
The impact of computers on society, and hence on the curriculum, has been compared to that of moveable type and the printing press since Gutenberg.
You will have noted two things about those quotes, first that each new technology was going to create a revolution in education. Second, that most of them were compared to the printing press. So while the statement in our conference brochure that:
Internet and communication technologies are revolutionising the format and delivery of education,
may not actually make the comparison with printing it is clearly part of a long tradition of hype about the implications of new technologies for education.
If all the technologies that I have mentioned had delivered even a small proportion of the educational revolution that was anticipated by the enthusiasts when they were introduced, then surely the UK government of the year 2000 would not need to have ‘education, education, education’ as its key priority. And that goes for governments across the whole of the developed world, most of which seem to think that their education systems have regressed rather than progressed in the last few decades.
Am I saying then, that the Internet education revolution is just a phoney and that you’ve all been conned into paying for this conference. No, I am not. Coming from the University that leads the world of higher education in the use of the Internet at scale that would be an odd position for me to take. There are over 130,000 people using the Internet to study with the Open University this year so we obviously believe in its value. It is because we are so heavily engaged in addressing the challenges of using the Internet and communications technologies at industrial strength that we long ago passed the starry-eyed stage in our discourse about them.
Another reason for my sceptical and pragmatic approach is that the Open University is in a different position from most other universities that are seizing hold of the Internet as if it were the map to a buried treasure of which they have just become aware. The buried treasure is, of course, distance and distributed learning. The OU has both the advantage and the handicap of having carried out distance teaching at scale and with good success for thirty years.
During those three decades the OU has used all of the revolutionary technologies I mentioned a moment ago:
What is also interesting is that despite the rich array of media that OU students meet in their studies, nearly all courses rely today on a solid base of the medium that was used as the comparator in my earlier quotes, namely print on paper. The OU is in a rather similar position to the world of business. It was back in 1975 that the magazine Business Week forecast the imminent arrival of the paperless office. At that time office workers consumed 40 kilos of paper per year. Twenty five years and lots of computers later the consumption of paper per office worker has doubled to 80 kilos per year.
I can assert confidently that the weight of paper that OU students receive with their courses has not doubled over that same period. In many courses it is reducing. Nevertheless we – and more importantly our students – still regard print on paper as a powerful learning medium even though it is one learning medium among several. If the OU has learned one thing in thirty years it is that there is no magic all-purpose medium - for university study at least. And we suspect that the magic, all-purpose medium will, like tomorrow, never come. We bring that conclusion – call it complacency if you like – to our massive engagement with the Internet.
Another conclusion we bring is that there will always be new technologies succeeding the present ones. To hear some people talk you would think that the current Internet and communications media were the end of technological history. In reality we’re dealing with the primitive first manifestations of a new generation of technology.
The PC, for example, is a pretty clunky way of interfacing with anything and the real era of mass use of IT must await something better. As my OU colleague John Naughton puts it: “There are only a finite number of masochists in the world and most of them already have a PC”. Any machine which requires you to press the START button in order to SHUT IT DOWN is not a mass consumer item.
Looking at it another way, might it not be that just as the media bandwagon is finally getting into gear about the e-world, that e-world is about to be superseded by the m-world, the world of mobile ICT? Those of you who understand what this slide means are already there.
For those who don’t it is an example of the new telegramese that is developing to cope with written communication on mobile phones.
So much for the revolution in the Internet education revolution. Now let me say a word about education, beginning with the forecasts about the end of the university.
The end of universities?
In this talk I shall recommend five books for those of you who are serious about innovating in universities through the Net and ICT. The first, and most recent is The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. John Seely Brown is the Chief Scientist at Xerox PARC, which invented more of today’s information and communication technologies than any other research centre, so these authors have solid credentials as information technologists.
Yet the fundamental theme of their book is that it is all too easy to reach the wrong conclusion by letting the logic of information push aside the more practical logic of humanity. They comment on a phenomenon that must strike us all, namely the tremendously impoverished notion of education that people who are transfixed by the logic of information bring to their discussion of learning.
The idea of learning as the steady supply of facts and information, although parodied by Charles Dickens 150 years ago, is alive and well in much of today’s discourse about the Internet. Each generation has its own fight against images of learners as wax to be moulded, jugs to be filled, and slates to be written on. The Internet simply adds the new image of the hydroponics system giving each plant its regular dose of nourishment without human intervention.
If we claim ours as the age of knowledge then we must remember, Brown and Duguid argue, that knowledge lies less in databases than people. They note that if NASA wanted to go to the moon again it would have to start from scratch because although it still has the data it has lost the human expertise that took it there last time.
Just as Mark Twain had to remonstrate that the report of his death was exaggerated, so these authors argue that the Internet is unlikely to be the end of the university. One reason is that university degrees include a certain amount of misrepresentation – a word that they use in a positive sense. They mean that behind the façade of the degree the university conducts many activities that are socially valuable but are not easily valued in the marketplace. As they put it:
The ability of the degree to shelter these activities from close scrutiny, immediate justification and micromanagement helps provide society with more diverse and versatile candidates than it knows to ask for.
I often argue that university campuses will always be in demand because they create a protected environment where young people can come to terms with life, love, liquor and learning - while sparing the rest of the community the sight of these often unsightly processes. It is particularly ironic that information technology is being used as a pretext to take the slack out of university degree programmes by micromanaging learning at the level of the individual course.
This is ironic because so many of the people who have made great contributions to technology and business in recent times did so by using their time at university to learn and experiment outside the formal curriculum. Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds are just two examples. Often this learning and this experimentation takes place through the student coming into contact with one or more of the many communities of practice for which universities are a congenial home.
This in turn suggests that we should be wary of using information technology to strip out the notion of student cohorts by individualising all learning. The general public is not just being old-fashioned when it accords the highest reputation to those universities that place most emphasis on students learning in small groups. You could get a student perspective on that by standing next to me at OU degree ceremonies as new OU graduates speak to me about their studies. The importance they attach to tutorial groups and residential schools as part of their OU experience is very clear.
Uses of the Internet
So much for education, especially higher education. My conclusion is that university education is a subtle and complex process. Uses of technology that start with a simplistic model of higher learning as information transfer are not likely to add much value.
So what about the internet and its uses in higher education? Here I must, of course, refer you to my own book Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education. Although the main part of the book was written a few years ago it continues to provide a helpful map of the field. I make the following five comments from my experience of observing applications of the Internet to higher education.
First, particularly in the United States, the Internet has changed the concept of distance education in the last few years. Until as late as 1997 distance learning, for most American academics, meant using broadband networks to teach simultaneously and synchronously to a number of groups at distant locations. The focus was on reproducing the classroom teaching that is at the heart of university pedagogy in the USA. That has now changed. Today distance learning means asynchronous teaching on the web.
Second, this takes academics away from the teaching model they are most familiar with, so in using the web they tend to revert to the older pedagogical model of correspondence education. At its simplest, and it often is very simple, this consists of loading up the course notes in html and using the web to turn the pages and administer a quiz at the end of each section. This reversion to the model of correspondence education also brings with it the temptation of adopting some of the sharp commercial practices that gave correspondence education a bad name. If you want to rip people off the net holds much more promise than the post office box.
Third, this simple and rather impoverished model seems to produce a backlash among students. Today the trend is to embed teaching on the web within a wider range of activities and to use the term web-enhanced courses rather than web-based courses.
Fourth, our own Open University experience of the use of the net and the web at scale indicates that its most powerful and popular use is for communication between people about the course rather than for dumping the content the course on each student’s computer.
Fifth, getting best value out of this communication on the internet and having our 8,000 associate lecturers use this teaching and learning medium cost-effectively is not straightforward. I refer you to a new book by my colleague Gilly Salmon, E-Moderating: the key to teaching and learning online, for some of the lessons we have learned.
What we find most surprising is that despite the huge commercial effort devoted to producing software shells for online teaching and learning, much of what is available is pretty primitive. At the OU we have a rule that we always use off-the-shelf software if it is available. Recently we wanted an application for a graduate course being taken by nearly a thousand students that would allow them to interact over the net in small groups of four with full duplex audio and a common working screen to which each student could contribute. And, of course, we wanted this to work with the wide variety of equipment that students have at home. Sadly, we could not find a product with these specifications so we had to develop our own, which we call Lyceum.
Preparing for Change
After those comments about revolutions, education and the internet let me conclude, as promised, by addressing the issue of preparing for change. My advice is that to prepare for the Internet revolution in higher education universities need, first of all, to revisit their missions, values, and purposes, which is always a healthy thing to do.
Strategy: issues of purpose
I have made the point that too often the internet tends to lead people towards a primitive model of pedagogy that is hardly suited to university education. A first requirement, therefore, is to reflect deeply on what we mean by that overused and underdefined word interaction and develop greater clarity about what teaching and learning at university level should involve.
Second, at a deeper level, we have to beware of letting the logic of information supplant the more practical logic of humanity. Universities must maintain a balance between facts and values, between the positivist approach that links knowledge strictly to facts and the practical rationality that a university graduate needs to function in society as a true professional. William Sullivan’s book Work and Integrity is a helpful reflection on this topical challenge. It is topical because the commercial pressures mixed up with the Internet will push universities down a purely positivist route unless they remember their wider purpose.
This wider purpose was well summed up by the Dearing Enquiry a few years ago when it said that the role of universities is to enable society to maintain an independent understanding of itself and its world. Universities can and should be independent in a way that politicians, the media, commercial interests, and lobby groups cannot be.
Tactics: making it happen
After those comments about fundamental purposes let me end on a practical note. To use the internet and communications technology effectively in higher education requires good tactics as well as a sensible strategy. I have found two concepts particularly helpful at the level of tactics.
The first is the technology adoption life cycle. Here the work of Geoffrey Moore is exciting and I provide a summary of his stimulating books Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado in my own Mega-universities text. The key idea is that the behaviour of the early adopters of a new technology may not tell you much about how the mass market will respond to your innovative use of technology. There is a wealth of practical advice about how to cross the chasm from the early adopters into the tornado of the mass market.
The second concept is the Innovator’s Dilemma, the title of a closely argued book by Clayton Christensen. The basic idea is that new technologies come in two types. First there are sustaining technologies which, as the term implies, sustain and advance our current work in an evolutionary manner. But then there are disruptive technologies which cannot be integrated into our current operations in a straightforward way. They require a different organisational structure in which to flourish. However, if they do flourish they can transform the whole enterprise.
The challenge, it seems to me, is that for universities the internet is sustaining in some areas and disruptive in others. At the Open University, for example, the net is sustaining in that it extends the opportunities for students to communicate with each other. But it is disruptive in that it does allow a distance learning system to be reconceived from scratch.
I conclude that preparing for the change that the internet could bring to higher education will require some really hard thought. That in itself will do universities a lot of good. Napoleon once called England a nation of shopkeepers and meetings of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals often do resemble a convention of academic shopkeepers. If the threat of the e-commerce of ideas leads us to raise our sights from our check-out tills and review our fundamental purposes it will do us a power of good.
Conclusion
I expect that I have disappointed you by taking a calm and matter-of-fact approach to the Internet revolution in higher education. I make no apology. The challenge of serving tens of thousands of students online on a daily basis roots me in reality and discourages the gee-whiz approach to new technology.
It is just because the internet is such a remarkable technological advance that we must devote our best intellects to ensuring that it promotes, rather than undermines, the millennial ideal of the university. If we do our job well the internet could indeed become the most revolutionary innovation in education since the invention of printing with moveable type.
References
Brown, J S & P. Duguid (2000) The Social Life of Information, Harvard Business School Press.
Christensen, C M (1997) The Innovator’s Dilemma: When technologies cause great firms to fail, Harvard Business School Press.
Daniel, J S (1996) Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education, Kogan Page.
Salmon, G.K. (2000) E-Moderating: the key to teaching and learning online, Kogan Page.
Sullivan, W.M. (1995) Work and Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in America, Harper Business.