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While our students come to class with their iPods, cell phones and laptops, most of us are still converting our old lecture notes to PowerPoint presentations. While they are completely at odds with sequential access to information, we still force them into the “Listen while I lecture; read the chapters in the sequence I tell you; take my exams at the exact time I tell you; and don’t you dare fail because there are no second chances on my exams” model. Nothing that the new generation touches works that way. All the digital equipment we proudly put into service for them are random-access-based and encourage the try-and-try-until-you-get-it model. And while the very few tech-savvy teachers among us are completely redesigning their courses to cater to this new generation of students, the rest of us view online education as an exercise in migrating our PowerPoint presentations to a Website, without changing our teaching strategies.
Education in the 21st Century
So, given the current landscape of education, how do we go about creating a vision for education in the 21st century? Those of us who have been in the academic world for a few decades may have difficulty envisioning the future in education without fancier buildings, smarter classrooms and flashier PowerPoint slides. But, perhaps these elements are not the key contributors to the educational landscape in this century. The educational revolution of the new century is already solidifying its presence through a new series of courses, programs, degrees, and institutions. And its roots are no longer tightly bound to physical institutions, but rather to a virtual existence on the internet.
For us to stay relevant in the face of this new revolution, we must visualize the transformation that online education will bring to our current system and consider its affects on the educational experience for the students. We must also consider the occupational changes and challenges for the educators brought about by this revolution, and its assault on the very being of the traditional higher educational institutions.
Removing Geographic Barriers
The online transformation is breaking the proximity barriers of the past; the barriers that tied geographically-local students to our campus. In this new era of computer-savvy students with wireless broadband access to the Internet, students no longer have to take the English Composition or College Algebra course at the local community college campus. They are able to pick and choose their GE and major courses from online offerings from hundreds of schools. And it should come as no surprise to us that over time, they will start gravitating towards the best courses, with the best instructors, and with the highest recommendation ratings from not only their fellow students, but also by trusted Websites.
The general education unification agreements like the IGETC in California have already locked in the required GE courses for undergraduate degrees. These courses have also been articulated and standardized throughout the higher education system of colleges and universities. So, there is nothing stopping a student in picking from the best articulated course offerings in the nation.
Adapting to Interstate Courses
So, let’s say that our English 100 course happens to be the one that is starting to get packed every semester by students from not just across the State, but across the nation. What do we do? Would we consider hiring lower-paid assistants for our star faculty? Would we give him or her stipends for accepting more students? Would we provide additional help to that faculty to further improve the course? Would we at least want to raise the fees for this course? And would we over time, consider hiring lower-paid people from offshore to provide 24x7 support for our Discussion threads, Chat-rooms, Grading chores, and other online course activities? (Perhaps a terrifying thought for the conservative, pension-bound teacher in all of us!)
So, we are excited about our English 100 enrollment going through the roof. But, as an equalizer, we start losing our students from the College Algebra course; enrollment starts to drop for this cash-cow item without any changes in our course. But, we know exactly what’s happening, right? The word is getting out that the College Algebra course offered by another school across the state is, well… better than ours.
Competing for Students
Imagine if all institutions around the nation (or perhaps the world) were vying for the same students. Competition would be severe and the stakes would be high. At a price-tag of 100 to 200 dollars per course and a demand population in the tens of thousands, the possible market size would be gynormous. Perhaps no more than five, ten, or fifty institutions would succeed in offering courses like College Algebra and English Composition. And even then the survivors would have to constantly improve their course quality to keep alive. The same capitalistic principles that provide us with better, faster, and cheaper cell phones and TVs, would apply to course manufacturing institutions.
College Algebra will no longer be a series of weekly sessions of dry lectures and less-than-practical exercises in numbers. It will be a course filled with multimedia presentations, video game-based learning tools, online seminars hosted by internationally celebrated educators, buzzing chat-rooms and discussion threads populated with the most diversified student group from across the nation, if not from around the world. Investments in creating large question banks, would allow exams to be offered at any time and taken as many times as necessary for the required knowledge transfer to occur.
English Composition courses will offer prerecorded presentations and live seminars by world renowned authors and journalists. Papers and short stories will be read to them by some of the world’s best storytellers through prerecorded and live Podcasts. Video-enabled chat-rooms would connect native English speakers with ESL students, in the most diversified classrooms ever envisioned.
A New Learning Community
Of course, the face-to-face learning community can not be easily recreated online. In fact, some educators would argue that opportunities for human interactions created on a college campus can never be duplicated online. But, it seems that are students are already in the process of transforming their friendship networks. They tend to talk or text-message more on their cell phones than they do with the student sitting next to them. They build stronger friendships with their blogging friends than their classmates. And when they don’t feel like communicating, they hide themselves from the world by putting on their iPod headphones and transporting themselves into their private worlds.
Can you visualize this trend? Or perhaps a better question would be, have you been witnessing these trends? If so, can you further image newly launched dot-coms evaluating and rating courses across the nation, encouraging direct student evaluations (similar to Amazon.com’s customer rating feature)? Actually, a few of these sites (www.ratemyprofessors.com, www.rateaprof.com, and www.studentsreview.com/professors) are already quite popular.
Service Websites
But in time, these Websites will offer much more than just course and instructor ratings. By completing a questionnaire about a student’s background and educational goals (the colleges a student has attended, information about her prior courses, financial information, desired degree(s), and future college transfers) the site will track her progress, maintain an active GPA, rate her chances of getting into her desired college and provide suggestions for increasing her success. Over time, these sites may utilize her financial data to recommend and eventually obtain financial aids, grants, and loans. They may map her transcripts into her desired GE pattern or desired degree program, providing her with recommendations on her upcoming semester’s schedule and tracking her progress.
They could offer 24x7 online support, counseling and tutoring services. And in time, they could establish partnerships with local colleges for in-person counseling and tutoring. Once the student is ready to transfer, they could automatically request transcripts from all the colleges she has attended and electronically transmit them to her school of choice.
Future Competition?
Now imagine if these sites could offer their own programs, comprised of the highest-rated courses from various colleges. Imagine if they could get these programs accredited… and imagine if they could grant degrees and certificates! Of course, accredited online degrees and certificates are nothing new. But again, what if these new breed of programs were compilations of the best courses from across the nation?
Could you visualize the above scenario as a possible future for our higher educational system? Would you let your kid matriculate into an online program that is a compilation of the best courses in the nation? An online institution that constantly monitors your kid’s academic progress? Updating you via emails and text messages to your cell phone? Keeping you as involved and informed as you desire?
Influence of Technology on Education Careers
The impact of this revolution may be just as significant on the educators. They will no longer have to perform all the duties required of them in today’s higher educational institutions. Careers may be further refined into Video Presenters, Audio Presenters, Multimedia Designers, Lecture Planners, Lecture Material Researchers, Data Analysts, Chat-room Monitors, Discussion Thread Monitors, Blog Monitors, Exam Writers, Course or Program Administrators, Grading Technicians, etc. And perhaps these positions would no longer have to be filled by people based on their geographical proximity to an institution, but by anyone from around the globe who is able to contribute over the Internet.
And how will the sleeping institutions be impacted by these changes? As the cash-cow courses are lost to best-in-class offerings elsewhere, what will be left for the brick and mortar institutions? Will they be limited to handling remedial education for the underprivileged students? Forced to work quickly to get this group of students ready to get on the online fast-track? How will they afford their expensive labs and justify their expensive real estate holdings to the tax payers? Will this revolution only impact undergraduate programs, or will it reach into the generic graduate degrees? And how will the higher-level institutions support their research programs and pet projects once their generic undergraduate and graduate programs and students have moved on?
Planning for the Future
These may be disturbing questions to contemplate for the traditional institutions and teachers. But perhaps the picture does not have to be so gloomy if we start planning and preparing today. By trimming out the weak programs and diverting resources to core offerings we can refine our focus on what we do best. Since lab-intensive vocational programs are not as effective online, perhaps we could start building a portfolio of highly targeted Voc Ed programs to serve the particular demands of our geographic region. Perhaps by being more selective as to the specific courses we move online we can further control and improve the quality of these courses. By refining the transitional interfaces between the content of our online courses and our online/on-campus courses we could reduce the highly stand-alone nature of each course. By identifying the factors that raise the “switching costs” for our students, we could improve our student retention rates and possibly even increase our enrollment. For example, by creating professionally designed, easy-to-use, and more importantly, a consistent user-interface across all our course offerings, we could make it easier for our students to move from course to course. Another example could be to provide online students with a well-conceived portfolio of traditional services such as registration, financial aids, counseling, and tutoring; thereby maintaining happier customers that won’t abandon ship even if they could have their choice of a few better-rated courses elsewhere. Of course, we must ensure that our IT infrastructure is designed to support a growing 24x7 online program offering; there is nothing worse than a Website that goes down in the middle of an exam! And finally, perhaps we could work with institutions that have best-in-class courses, on opportunities for re-branding and integrating those courses into our curriculum.
Given the rate of change brought about by computers and the Internet in the past few decades, a rapid transformation in education is not unlikely. Clearly the above vision or any variation of it could have major impacts on the students, the faculty, and the existing and future academic institutions. But, with the proper planning and self-imposed transformation, we could be supportive, relevant, and perhaps even innovators in higher education in the 21st century.
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