Chapter 6: Visions for a Virtual University

Full-text of chapter 6 (pp. 203-221)

Introduction
What Is Distance Learning?
The Web as a Distance Learning Platform
The Pedagogy of Distance Education
A Look at Four Distance Learning Ventures
Vision for a Virtual University
The "Wired Professor"

Introduction
pp. 203-206

Lack of criticism and cultural perspectives have lead to an illusion of the power of technology in changing pedagogy. Instead of highlighting the technological solutions, we should focus on the goals and methods of education and establish after that the role which we wish to give to technology.1

Third-stage design in higher education is increasingly taken to mean a push toward distance learning. This is neither a fair nor an accurate assumption. However, because the connection between instructors with Web pages and distance learning has inevitably come up in conversations with administrators and faculty (outside of our small die-hard band of "professors with Web pages" co-conspirators), we realize that it is important to address this subject. However, it is important to stress that this is not a book about distance education, nor is distance learning the only logical outcome of adopting the Web as a teaching platform. As you will see in this chapter, depending on whom you talk to, distance learning is either seen as the next great educational tool or the ultimate technological evil about to be forced on vulnerable faculty by administration. In this chapter, we will do several things. First, we will show the current controversy over the use of Web pages in university courses and how this has become intertwined with distance learning in many people's minds. Then we will define what distance learning is and place it briefly in context of other recent remote-learning experiments. Finally, we will summarize the current pedagogy of Web-aided instruction. While we may not agree with the lumping together of course Web pages with distance learning, we do believe that the experiences of educators working with distance learning are a valuable resource for advanced instructional design.

Make no mistake about it--distance learning is a hot topic in higher education. Critics are alarmed at what they view as the coopting and commercialization of higher education. David F. Noble, in his essay "Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education" (1998), gives voice to some of these anxieties. He argues that by integrating technology and exploring distance learning, "universities are not simply undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that change, and camouflaged by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher education. For here as elsewhere technology is but a vehicle and a disarming disguise."2 Noble blames administrators, who wave vague and romantic ideals of reaching geographically distant or disadvantaged students with distance learning courses in front of unsuspecting faculty. In fact, Noble believes that administrators are focusing far closer to home and are eager to make money on the growing technology market while simultaneously looking to cut costs by replacing faculty and classrooms with computers and educational software. "It is important to emphasize that, for all the democratic rhetoric about extending educational access to those unable to get to the campus, the campus remains the real market for these products, where students outnumber their distance learning counterparts six-to-one." Noble blames as well "the ubiquitous technozealots who simply view computers as the panacea for everything, because they like to play with them." He argues that these zealots have received support and encouragement from the private sector and university patrons "without support for their pedagogical claims about the alleged enhancement of education, without any real evidence of productivity improvement, and without any effective demand from either students or teachers."

The ambivalence over the arrival of course Web pages on campus and distance learning is not limited to critics such as Noble. At York University, where Noble teaches, a recent faculty strike demonstrated how technology can become a focal point of a firestorm of controversy over university policy. In the spring of 1997, the faculty of York University in Toronto went out on strike for eight weeks. Among their reasons for doing so was a concern about the possible loss of quality of education at York. The faculty zeroed in on what they viewed as the administration's fascination with technology. In their contract negotiation they demanded that a provision be included "to protect departments and individual instructors against imposition of course and programme restructuring and of alternate modes of delivery."3 In a strike pamphlet titled "The Real Issue Is the Classroom against the Boardroom," strike organizers explained:

Our working conditions are your learning conditions. If we win, you win. Over the last ten years, we've watched our teaching situation deteriorate. Many of our classes have doubled and even quadrupled in size. Now we hear we could have even bigger classes some run by correspondence or on the Internet so that students will have little contact with professors.4

In their new contract, York faculty have the right to veto "any course conversion to a new technology."5

What is particularly interesting is that the technology provisions in the new faculty contract at York were a reaction to a perceived threat rather than an actual university policy. While faculty expressed their concerns about being forced to integrate technology and accept distance learning, the administration at York stated that it had "no intention of forcing faculty members to use the technology."6 In fact, one faculty member at York pointed to a policy adopted at UCLA as reason enough for faculty to "take a fresh look at their contracts."7

At UCLA, the College of Letters and Science launched an Instructional Enhancement Initiative in 1997. Not content with simply providing support for faculty who wanted to experiment with Web pages, UCLA's goal is to have "a Web site for every undergraduate non-tutorial course offered in the College of Letters & Science, the largest academic unit in the University of California system (about 3,000 courses per year)."8 At York and elsewhere, the UCLA policy is viewed with apprehension. Some faculty are concerned about a possible loss of academic freedom implied by such a demand. One professor argued:

The U.C.L.A. mandate may be defended as an extension of existing format requirements governing course materials. These must be typed or word processed, must be handed out by a certain date, must clearly state certain department, college, university policies, etc. But the mandate goes beyond the issue of format: it impacts the way that instruction is delivered, and that is an academic-freedom issue. Academic freedom means not merely having the right to take an extreme position in the pursuit of knowledge, but also having the right to adopt the instructional method of choice in that pursuit. The U.C.L.A. mandate, while not debarring other methods, does impose one.9

Another professor opined that "Web pages may prove to be the Sesame Street' of higher education, a useful attention-getter, but no substitute for a rigorous and engaging classroom environment."10 Another professor argued that Web pages were a sop to the "video generation" and would further pull instructors and students away from the printed word:

I think we all know how strongly our students are influenced as a "video generation." If they don't get sound bites, light shows (whoops! "slide lectures") and everything neatly packaged like a news anchor, they just do the academic equivalent of changing the channel. Having W.W.W. pages can play to these worst instincts. Worse still, the faculty who do utilize them can immediately get a privileged status in student eyes--meaning more enrollments, better course evaluations, and the like.11

At the heart of the controversy is a fear that as the shift of course content to the Web continues and increasingly includes integrating external resources and even educational software, college instructors will lose their autonomy in the classroom. George Sadowsky argues that even more important than this perceived loss of autonomy "is the perennial question of the extent to which instruction can be delivered effectively in a pre-packaged form, as a commodity, across potentially large distances. The traditional western model of education is, at the least, skeptical of this view, stressing the relationship and interplay between professor and students as an essential part of the learning process."12

While professors should be concerned about the commercialization of their courses, we would argue against the outright dismissal of this technology. If experimenting with Web pages in classes, or even requiring a Web page for every course, enriches the students' experience with the course material and enhances classroom instruction--and even, in some cases, goes as far as to revitalize an instructor's teaching method--then there is much to learn from this technology and, by extension, from experiments in distance learning as well. Sadowsky argues that "experimentation in distance learning can help us learn what this new medium can add to the increasingly diverse set of opportunities for education and training available throughout the world."13

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