Web brings radical changes to higher education

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March 22, 2000
Web posted at: 11:13 a.m. EST (1613 GMT)

by Margret Johnston

(IDG) -- Forces largely driven by new technologies and the Internet have the power to unmake the American university system, a top administrator at Columbia University said Monday.

New technologies, including hardware that could replace books as well as software that organizes and displays course material online, make it possible for universities to reach larger numbers of people spread out across the country and even the globe. Combined with other factors, such as changing demographics, such technologies are bringing radical changes to higher education, said Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University Teacher's College.

Levine spoke at a conference sponsored by Blackboard, a two-year-old Washington, D.C.-based company that sells software to universities to enable online learning and integrate back-office functions. About 350 educators and university information systems administrators gathered for the company's conference here Monday, which continues Tuesday.

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Technology already is being used to broadcast existing course material over the Internet, but the potential of many of the new technologies hasn't been realized yet, Levine said. The use of virtual reality, for example, will mean that the "talking heads" of traditional pedagogy won't stand a chance against a virtual walk around fifth century Athens or the Washington, D.C., in which Abraham Lincoln lived.

"On most of our campuses this is a very scary moment," Levine said. "For us as a group, it's a time at which the answers are uncertain, but no generation will have the opportunity we have to put our mark on the look of education in the future."

Technology also will call into question the need for the 3,600 campuses currently in existence in the U.S., as students take advantage of online offerings that are accessible from any location. Students will increasingly resist having to pay for university services they neither want nor use.

Levine predicted that there would continue to be traditional campuses in the future where students live and attend classes, but that they would compete with virtual universities that only exist online. However, the real educational battleground of the future could be for the territory occupied by bricks-and-clicks institutions, which is what most of today's major universities are likely to try to become, Levine said.

The experiment with e-commerce thus far has shown that online shoppers tend to favor the bricks-and-clicks models so they don't sacrifice having a physical location where they can get advice, view products or make an exchange -- a finding that bricks-and-clicks universities are likely to recognize and copy, Levine said.

Universities are beginning to feel threatened by the privatization of higher education by fast-moving technology companies that are putting course material online and offering it at worldwide electronic campuses, Levine said. A group of venture capitalists that visited Teachers College last year estimated that it would take a company just a few years to become certified and begin competing against traditional universities, he added.

Certain barriers still exist, most importantly the lack of an established brand name in higher education and the ability to award degrees, but businesses feel they will be able to surmount these barriers, which have come to seem "incredibly fragile," Levine said. Another force that has made university-level educators wary of the online world is that organizations from museums to libraries to symphony orchestras are all getting into the content business, mainly by putting information on the Internet. The result is that people who once turned to universities for instruction now have a lot more choices, Levine said.

More than 3,000 universities and schools in 70 countries use Blackboard's software to put content online, said Matthew Pittinsky, chairman of Blackboard, whose industry partners include Oracle, Microsoft and PeopleSoft. The majority of the firm's customers use the company's free service, which allows teachers to post materials at Blackboard.com, but about 560 schools use a version of the company's core product, Course Info, Pittinsky said in an interview Monday.

Faculty members at those schools have used Course Info to create fairly robust Web sites on which they upload content, manage discussion boards and chat rooms, post announcements and track what students view at the schools' Web sites, Pittinsky said. "Our job is to make it really easy to use, so that an instructor without a lot of technical knowledge really can get up and running on their own," Pittinsky said.

Instructors typically use Course Info, which costs $5,000 per server per year, to start their online offering slowly by posting only the syllabus and other general information. However, the instructors are sometimes prompted by their students to put more material online, so students end up with more opportunities to use the Web sites in their studies, according to Pittinsky.

Blackboard plans to provide versions of its software that are tailored to various countries and to improve its products to better reflect the way teaching and learning takes place. That might mean a future in which universities will use technological tools to find out what a student already knows and teach around that. As Pittinsky pointed out, that is quite a different approach from the current one, which assumes little about the knowledge of individual students, teaching the same syllabus to each person that is enrolled in a specific course of study.

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