Daniel Salter
Penn State University
Editor

Stuart Brown
StudentAffairs.com
Executive Editor

Higher Education in the Digital Age

The following is an excerpt from the essay, "Higher Education in the Digital Age" written by Dr. Arthur Levine, President of Teachers College at Columbia University, that appeared in the 1998 Teachers College Annual Report. The excerpt appears with permission of the author.

Last summer, I met with a well- known business leader, who told me about his plans to create a for-profit virtual university. He said the train was leaving the station and Teachers College needed to get on board. We agreed and we disagreed. We both thought the train was indeed leaving the station. The only real difference in our thinking was that I believed the higher education community was driving the train.

Higher education brings to distance learning three critical characteristics. The first is reputation or in business terms a brand name in the field of education. The second is authorization to provide education--accreditation, certification, and licensure. The third element is content. Colleges and universities are in the business of discovering and disseminating content--information and knowledge. Today content is king. Digital technology gives television, telephones, and cable stations the capacity to distribute more and more content. Today there are more channels available to distribute content than there is content to fill them. The fellow I spoke with this summer was just another channel hunting for content.

These attributes may be only temporary advantages to higher education. With regard to reputation, Amazon.com, the online bookseller, showed the fragility of well established brand names. In the space of just a few years, it managed to eclipse powerhouse booksellers like Barnes and Noble and Borders. Amazon established a brand name in a new business, online book sales. In the same fashion, online educators may well have the capacity to establish brand names in distance education, distinguishing them from prestigious campus-based colleges and universities.

With regard to authorization, at a meeting of investment houses and venture capital firms, the consensus was that degrees, credits, and accreditation were obstacles, but perhaps only in the short run. They concluded that it would take between one and five years to gain these items in most states. The University of Phoenix was regularly cited as the model of what a tenacious institution can accomplish in overcoming these barriers, even in the face of powerful opposition.

As for content, the story of Microsoft and the Encyclopedia Britannica is instructive. Bill Gates invited the most eminent of encyclopedias to develop a CD-ROM edition. Britannica turned him down worried about losing the market for its traditional hard copy edition. So Microsoft bought Funk and Wagnalls and turned it into the digital Encarta. In less than two years, Encarta was the best selling encyclopedia in the world. Britannica sales plummeted. They went back to Microsoft and were told they would now have to pay to put their encyclopedia online. The lesson is that if distributors, like Microsoft, are unable to get content providers to join them, they may well buy the content or develop the capacity to create content themselves. This is the approach that Simon and Schuster has taken.

What this means is that the higher education community has a limited amount of time to decide what role it will play in distance learning. The decision is far more basic than whether or not colleges and universities should embrace distance learning. It is about the fundamental purposes and future directions of higher education.

At the heart of the decision are questions as fundamental as who should colleges and universities educate. Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Jim O'Neill describes distance learning as the next G. I. Bill. The original G. I. Bill of 1944 opened the doors of higher education wider than they had ever been opened before, more than doubling the size of the student population and enrolling unprecedented numbers of older, minority, part-time, and financially disadvantaged students. Distance learning promises to open the doors even further. For the first time higher education could be universally available.

Distance learning also raises the question of how and what colleges should teach? The cherished ideal of higher education is Mark Hopkins, the former president of Williams, at one end of a log and a student on the other. It's a romantic and powerful notion, which comports badly with both history and present day reality. Higher education in America is an enterprise with over fourteen million students. Recently, when asked for a definition of distance learning, I told of meeting Robert Coles (Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard professor and psychiatrist) for lunch at the end of a class he was teaching. The class must have had 1,000 students. I stood behind the last row of seats in the room, waiting for him. At the front, I saw this tiny man, who looked no bigger than 3 inches, Robert Coles. If this isn't distance learning, I don't know what is.

The fact of the matter is that new technologies, require new pedagogies. They are unfamiliar and less comfortable. Their strengths and weaknesses are less well known than existing methods of instruction. New teaching technologies may mean new roles for the professoriate, may require new forms of academic governance, may necessitate new rules for intellectual property, and may demand entirely different types of professional development for faculty. They raise, too, questions of applicability to different subject matters. Could student teaching, for example, be performed at a distance without the student in an actual college classroom? What are the limits of new technologies?

Distance learning raises as well the question of who is an educator? Are colleges, businesses, and knowledge organizations equally appropriate and equally entitled to offer instruction to the public? Is it right for colleges and universities to form partnerships or joint ventures with the profit-making sector? In the current environment, it seems that colleges have only three alternatives.

• First, higher education can reject distance learning and the entreaties of the business community. It must do this on the grounds that it currently has a near monopoly on the educational content. It could do it on principle, saying a profit- making motive is incompatible with higher education. Or it could do it for reasons of quality, believing that distance learning and other notions being advocated by the private sector diminish educational excellence.

This will force the business community to take on higher education head on, much like the University of Phoenix. Under these circumstances, the private sector can be expected to create its own content by hiring the expertise currently found in universities. Profit-makers will do this at lower cost than higher education and see to reach larger audiences. For instance, a recent proposal I read from a venture capital firm suggested creating a distance learning university which would hire the nation's most eminent faculty at lucrative salaries for short periods of time to create curriculum material: and offer electronic courses intended to reach thousands. In short the proposal sought to create the equivalent of an academic all-star team found at no other university. While the salaries paid would be high, they would be far less than the full-time salary of a distinguished tenured full professor. And the enrollments would be many times greater than found in any college or university course. This is a potentially devastating alternative for higher education financially, especially given the changing expectations of current students.

• Second, higher education can attempt to preempt the private sector by developing the technologies, service delivery capacities, economies they now offer or at least promise. This seems the least likely alternative as colleges lack the substantial capital that will be required, particularly in a time of declining government support, and the speed of action of the private sector.

• The third and only reasonable alternative is for higher education to judiciously form partnerships with the private sector. This could be a wonderful opportunity for the nation's colleges and universities.

Throughout its history, American higher education has always had a patron--first the church and then the government. Government is currently withdrawing from the relationship. The business community is coming to higher education at exactly the same time and asking to join with it. This could be an excellent partnership for higher education, better than any in the past. The reason is that higher education entered its previous relationships, with the church and government, as the supplicant. Currently it comes with very real assets. It entered its past relationships casually and too often gave up too much for the dollars its patron offered. This is not necessary today. The imperative for higher education is to determine the ground rules by which a partnership with the private sector might be accomplished. This entails defining the meaning of quality--it must not be regarded as a synonym for doing things as they have always been done. This requires a clear statement of essential purposes and core values.

This is a moment of enormous opportunity for American higher education. What distance learning is truly about is not a new income stream for colleges and universities. It is about the power of ideas. Higher education is being presented with an opportunity to reach larger numbers of people with its research and teaching than ever before in history. As Professor Douglas Greer has said, higher education is being presented with a new set of clay tablets.

This is also a time of danger. It is not clear that higher education as it has evolved to the present day can survive unchanged into the future. Its present design and structure may not be sustained. It faces a radically different environment than in the past, characterized by the nation's transition from an industrial to an information society, dramatically different demographics, a demand to reduce the cost of higher education, burgeoning new technologies, and a legion of new competitors.

Before higher education are the choices of reform or revolution. Reform means that higher education must rethink how it carries out its historic purposes in light of a very different environment. Revolution, a shift in the power of who controls higher education, is likely to occur if higher education does not act.