Why didn’t the walls come tumbling down?
An outsider’s view of distance education
The following article is based on a keynote speech delivered at NAWeb ’99 in Fredricton, New Brunswick, Oct. 1999. That same speech also served as the basis for a chapter in the book Perspectives of Web Course Management, published by Canadian Scholars Press. It is also included in the unpublished book Untrammeled Thoughts. There Is No Box. Please note that Internet businesses come and go quickly. Many sites mentioned here no longer exist. But the principles still apply.
Back in October 1993, when the first Web browsers became generally available, it looked like the Internet would change everything. And visions of paradise danced in our heads. In the arena of education, we expected:
- Internet-style sharing on a larger scale,
- Vast amounts of information are immediately available for free to anyone, anywhere,
- Students and teachers connect, teaching one another regardless of institutional walls and geography,
- Courses of all kinds are available online to anyone anywhere.
In brief, there would be:
- Libraries without walls
- Schools without walls
- Walls without walls
The teaching profession would be changed.
Lectures and class discussions — important spontaneous aspects of education — would be captured, saved, and searchable: that crucial question, that insight that comes unexpectedly as teachers and students interact. You would no longer have to count on students’ note-taking skills to capture and preserve the wisdom of a Socrates or a Richard Feynman. The volume of educational content would expand enormously.
Publication (and hence reputation and tenure) would no longer be in the hands of a few commercial publishers (who today get their content for free from professors seeking reputation and tenure. For-profit publishers sell subscriptions at enormous prices to college libraries and take forever to produce their print publications, slowing the pace of research).
Professors would become like consultants, available for assignments — at competitive prices — from several different institutions simultaneously.
Now, six years later, what actually happened?
Yes, there has been progress:
- Many courses and degree programs are available online.
- New institutions focus on distance learning flourish.
- Sometimes you can get credit at one institution for courses taken at others.
- Much richer offerings for continuing education.
But six years is an eternity on the Internet, and I, for one, was hoping for more.
While some resources are available for free to anyone, many institutions limit access to their faculty and paying students.
Yes, many courses are available online, but for the most part, institutions continue to offer courses that are meant to mimic old-style education — with credit hours and degrees. And they still typically serve up learning in large-size, semester or quarter-long chunks. And students in one class still typically have little interaction with students in others, much less with students from other institutions.
Lots of interaction takes place online instead of in physical classrooms and hence could be readily captured, preserved, and made searchable. But, for the most part, the content is not valued — it is treated as transient and disposable. Chat transcripts are not preserved. There is no audio or video archive.
Several official refereed journals have migrated to or were started on the Web. The Internet is used for pre-publication comments and spreading the word about research before print publication. But change has come slowly. And the traditional publications — whether distributed in print or electronically — still command a high level of respect and are still tied into the tenure process.
Work done for distance learning is considered “teaching,” not “publication.” Hence the more time you devote to developing and delivering online courses and perfecting the art of doing that well, the less time you have for activities that would help you get tenure.
While they don’t value this material for tenure purposes, many schools claim ownership (“work for hire”) of the class materials that their teachers create for online learning. Not only can you not make that material available to the general public, but when you leave the school, you can’t deliver that course anymore.
Contracts of many schools prevent your teaching online courses for any other institution.
What happened (or what didn’t happen)?
We see an enormous gap between what’s technologically possible and what happens, a gap develops between what you see in labs, the news, at trade shows, and what becomes widely adopted and changes how we learn and work and live. It’s the age-old gap between the possible and the real.
Only what people use will change how we learn and work and live.
Technology stimulates the imagination.
Marketing changes the world.
What are the barriers to change in distance education?
There are static barriers — the human barriers of habit, regulations, and industry practice (including “standard” contracts). There are also dynamic barriers — cost barriers: where technology drives down costs which opens business opportunities, and business drives volume, which drives costs far lower, which opens new possibilities.
The human barriers to change in distance education are typical, natural, essential elements of everyday reality. You may love to teach, but you don’t teach just for the love of it. You need pay and security and predictability. You need to be able to build a stable career and put food on the table for yourself and your family.
Education is a business, not a charity. It depends on tuition fees and salaries and contracts. And the value that people are willing to pay for depends on accreditation, course credits, degree programs. And career advancement and security depend on systems of rewards and recognition, with promotions and tenure.
There’s a lot of inertia there, a lot of resistance to change, and that’s not a bad thing. Just don’t expect miracles, don’t expect radical change from schools that in many ways still closely resemble the Renaissance institutions they are descended from.
But while the human barriers are static, the cost barriers are dynamic. And thanks to the combination of technology and business, change is coming to education — just not as fast as folks like me might have dreamed of.
As an example, let’s look at audio/video storage cost.
Six years ago storage cost was prohibitively high for large-scale archiving of audio and video. My dream of saving lectures and even class discussions didn’t make economic sense. And, of course, back then, you couldn’t easily search audio and video files, as you can today.
But, thanks to advances in technology, the cost has been declining rapidly. Now it’s starting to get very interesting. That new PC you are tempted by may have more than 100 gigabytes of storage. And business factors are likely to accelerate the rate of change. For instance, digital storage is getting so cheap that over the next few years it’s likely to replace videotape for saving and retrieving television programs in the home. We already see ads for units like that which sell for about $500. If such an application takes off, the increased volumes could drive down the price of consumer-quality disk drives in general (like the use of transistors in portable radios drove down the price of transistors back in the 1950s.) Very soon, what sounded utopian, will begin to be practical.
So what’s the next-generation audio/video opportunity?
We’ll see increasing bandwidth on campus with gigabit Ethernet.
Bandwidth for remote students will also increase, with DSL and cable replacing dial-up.
Searchable digital audio and video, based on voice recognition, (as Virage does today) will become common place.
It will be common place for chat applications to automatically save transcripts, and organize them in threads of discussion, and embed them in forums for further discussion (as SiteScape does today).
Hence, we’ll see opportunities to integrate audio/video content with text — make it all searchable, make it easy for us to comment on it.
Meanwhile, not-so-formal education is flourishing on the Web — continuing education — where the goal is to learn something useful, rather than earning a degree.
Recently, several companies launched “expert” sites on the Web. Part of their rationale is that people can’t find answers with search engines. This is due in large part to the fact that people new to the Internet don’t know how to use search engines, and don’t know about the other free resources available on the Internet and how to get the most out of them. And they come to the Internet with the expectation that you have to pay to get quality information.
These companies are setting up databases that match people who have questions with people who have the knowledge and experience to answer them.
This is an interesting alternative model for learning and for earning.
If your contract prohibits you from teaching distance education courses for other educational institutions, does it prohibit you from private tutoring? Probably not. Does it prohibit you from consulting? Probably not. Does it even foresee the possibility of your getting paid for providing answers, information, and instruction online in small chunks, to random customers? Probably not.
Check out some of these startups:
- Tutor.com provides Web-based referral services for “supplemental education.” Basically, they run a matching service for physical-world, face-to-face tutoring
- Exp.com (formerly known as “Advoco”) lets visitors post questions and advisors respond describing their service and proposing a schedule and cost. For now, their business seems designed for business-related questions that require significant effort to answer.
- At Inforocket.com, visitors post questions and people with answers bid for the opportunity to answer it. The questioner picks the winner and pays when an acceptable answer is delivered on time.
- Allexperts.com and Abuzz.com handle questions of all kinds, many for free, matching people with questions with experts who should have answers.
These businesses all go to the heart of the Internet experience — connecting people to people, rather than documents to documents. This is another way of learning, another way of teaching, in a very informal context — it’s one step beyond newsgroups, and email distribution lists, and bulletin-board-style forums.
Today, well-established Web-based services strive to help you find the place where you can find the people with answers, who are willing to share in the old pre-Web Internet style. Deja.com (now owned by Google) does this for newsgroups, Liszt.com for distribution lists, and Forumone for forums.
But these new “expert” startups don’t just point you to somewhere else for answers. They deliver the answers directly to you. These startups are geared to Internet newcomers, for users who:
- Don’t know how to use search engines,
- Don’t know about or understand free Internet services, and
- Distrust the value and quality of anything that is free.
And you thought that commerce might corrupt the Internet style of sharing? You thought it was crass to ask for payment?
Believe it or not, in many cases, these people would rather pay. They’ll value the answers more if they have to pay for them.
So where does this take us?
I see a new utopia in the works — a more practical, doable vision of where distance education is headed.
First, I see an emphasis of matching people-to-people for learning and earning, in the style of these startups. Databases will help match people with people, as the basis for paid online tutor and mentor services, without institutional boundaries.
So try out those new sites and maybe make a few dollars today while you figure out how to adapt that model to be effective for education. And spread the word — make sure your department head signs up as an expert. That’s your best insurance against the creation of new restrictive policies and contract terms — get the decision-makers involved personally, get self-interest working on your side.
At the same time, I hope and expect to see more reciprocal agreements to expand academic sharing.
We have plenty of examples of grassroots sharing over the Internet:
- documents freely published on the Web
- email distributions lists (DEOS) and newsgroups
- Global Learn Day
- MOO-based classrooms
But course material, courses themselves, and class-style access to professors are typically limited to students of a particular institution.
Is that truly necessary? Or is it a matter of inertia?
Consider interlibrary loan programs as an example of how institutions can share their intellectual property with all. Why not negotiate similar reciprocal agreements for sharing distance learning resources and even people? This could include course materials, controlled access to particular teachers as online guest lecturers, plus audio/video of lectures and class discussions.
Let’s imagine that costs drop to the point where it becomes relatively inexpensive to save lectures and course discussions in audio and maybe video form and to make those digital files searchable. Then give millions of students around the world the right to do such searches and to access the files that match. Demand from a single institution would probably not be enough to justify the effort — who, aside from the students in the class, would be interested? But when those files might be accessed by students from other institutions, that changes the equation. Yes, it would help those who couldn’t attend that particular lecture. Yes, it would make it easier to review for exams, even when you don’t have notes of the lectures. But that’s still very few people per gigabyte or even terabyte of storage.
Save, index, and share spontaneous educational content: transient Web content — like chat; transient classroom content — like the lecture delivered spontaneously from rough notes and the unexpected classroom exchange.
We also can expect to see more alternatives to traditional publishing: not just putting text on the Web instead of or in addition to paper, but treating the Web as a different medium. Remember that copyright covers the particular expression of your ideas, not the ideas themselves. So in learning to adapt your ideas to a new medium, you are opening new opportunities for selling your writing. Your college may have locked up the copyright on your online teaching materials as “work for hire.” But you might be able to be paid for different expressions of those same thoughts. As an example of this direction, take a look at Attenza.com (formerly Learnlots). They are repackaging tutorial content for the Web in easily digestible chunks of instruction that take no more than a few minutes to read and absorb, interrelated in series.
Meanwhile, we need to institutionalize and reward Web-based academic functions. Much of the work necessary for the success of a distance education program is not valued at all by the administration today. It’s work that you are supposed to just fit in somehow. What you do to make your course easily accessible over the Web, the time you put in for online interaction with students, the research to track down and make accessible, helpful online resources, that’s just taken for granted. Print publication counts toward tenure. Online activities count for zilch.
The people who perform essential functions should be given important titles, be paid commensurate with the value of what they do, and have their workloads adjusted to provide these activities with the right kind of attention.
Consider the model of About.com (formerly The Mining Company). Their guides organize resources relating to a particular subject, answer questions, and in the process, build a personal reputation. Imagine formalizing such a role within a department. The online guide for molecular biophysics at your school might help your school develop an international reputation in that field by serving as a guide for your school and students and faculty elsewhere.
Consider also the example of iSyndicate.com, which distributes Web content (for a price) across various commercial Web sites. The writer gets paid. And the Web sites get content that their visitors are interested in.
Why not similarly syndicate course modules? Not entire courses — that would be more a distance education clearinghouse kind of operation, like Western Governance. Rather, syndicate one lecture or a few interrelated or even discrete elements of a single lecture or class experience.
As a teacher or administrator, imagine that you are trying to put together all the pieces you need for a distance education class. You could search here to find details you need to complete or enhance a course you plan to offer. Or, if you are a creative distance education teacher, you could have your materials and time (as a guest lecturer) offered in this mode.
In this case, you would probably be prevented by contract from listing your own material and your own services as an individual and getting paid as an individual. But your institution might want to list you — and get paid for your work and your services or qualify for reciprocal benefits from the other institution.
Then suddenly, distance education ceases to be just another form of teaching, which, strangely, most colleges have never valued. Instead, it becomes a way to enhance the reputation of the institution and the department and to generate new revenue or other benefits for them.
You might think of this scheme as “educational outsourcing.” To build/enhance an online course, you can mix and match: focus on what you do best and “outsource” the rest. And at the same time, your college offers your services in this mode, with prices determined by demand, which depends on reputation. Then the quality of your teaching becomes a source of additional revenue for your institution, and your cross-institutional work builds your reputation and that of your institution/department.
Hence, distance education gradually becomes a critical factor in tenure decisions over time.
In summary, very interesting opportunities are opening up, which could significantly change how people teach and learn and get paid for their teaching. It will take a lot of creativity and effort on the part of many people to make this practical utopia a reality — but it can be done. Spread the word and help change the world.
