Note: This paper was presented at the Second Annual Conference on Intellectual Freedom, Montana State University-Northern, April 1996.
In 1995, the Western Governors Association announced, with the usual trumpet fanfares, the creation of Western Virtual University. In so doing, these governors signalled higher education's adoption of rapidly unfolding information technology. A 15 April 1996 AP article in the Great Falls Tribune titled "College by modem not too far-fetched" proclaims that "anyone with a computer and modem should be able to take courses from state universities throughout the West via the Internet by June 1997." It concedes, though, that so far Western Virtual University is "just a collection of vision statements and proposals." The June 1996 Western Governors Association meeting promised "the coming-out party for the concept." Obviously a lot of planning must take place quickly. Equally obviously, the professoriate needs to become a full partner in planning and using information technology.
My impression is that such is not yet the case. Administrators and policy makers have jumped on the bandwagon of distance learning, their enthusiasm matched by their naïveté. (In this essay I treat information technology and distance learning interchangeably, knowing that the latter at best exemplifies the former.) With distance learning and related technologies, we are currently witnessing accelerating usage without accompanying critical assessment. Given the unfolding changes in educational delivery systems and the campus, for example, how can academics protect intellectual freedom? By taking the lead in articulating the critical assessment of information technology (hereafter: info tech) and demanding this assessment be incorporated into policy, the professoriate might see info tech expand, rather than limit, their intellectual freedoms. So far, however, I do not feel overly optimistic.
Info tech is sexy, and distance learning makes obvious geographical sense in such locales as the Big Sky Country. But most position papers I have studied do not address tradeoffs. The "College by modem" news story sounds both exciting and scary, and the professoriate must decide exactly how college will remain college if it exists primarily electronically--by modem. Distance learning raises a host of practical and philosophical questions, and to its credit the Great Falls Tribune story cites at least two. The story quotes new MSU Provost Joseph Chapman: "Each state...must accept the fact it needs resources. This kind of technology is very expensive." The traditionally underfunded Montana University System (MUS) is as financially strapped as ever, yet is being asked to pay the traditionally high costs of this new electronic technology. How can we do so in any kind of coherent, systemic way, given our budgetary austerity? And to ask, "How can we not do so?" does not address the dismal question of cost. Many faculty and administrators eagerly accept the fact that their campuses need info tech resources but just what does such acceptance mean?
Beyond the question of cost is the question of suitability, with some academics suggesting that distance learning probably makes good sense for particular sub-populations of college students. In the "College by modem" article Provost Chapman raises a caution flag: "Those who come to a campus are coming for more than just book-learning.... They're coming to learn how to be effective adults. The virtual university does not give that kind of interaction." Some of our increasing number of nontraditional students already are effective adults, but they do not constitute a majority either on my campus or in the MUS. Chapman's statement invokes a traditional definition of campus purpose and life, one near and dear to academic hearts. If distance learning zealots define the purpose of college as solely preparation for work rather than life, we must resist them. Rather than see distance learning accelerate the vocationalization of higher education, we must give it a human face and discover ways it might enrich, rather than eviscerate, pedagogy. That, I suspect, is the intent of the American Federation of Teachers' platform calling on its members to oppose courses taught on the Internet, through videoconferencing, or with other technologies unless they meet faculty members' standards of quality (1).
Aye, there's the rub: faculty members' standards of quality! Faculty must be forthcoming in using this standard as the litmus test for judging any and all info tech applications. I do not oppose distance learning per se, but I do believe we desperately need substantive evaluations, however, rather than more cheerleading. A lag time always exists, of course, between technological innovation and assessment, but in a sense we cannot afford that lag time. Evangelical advocates also cite, as is their wont, threats from outside: threats that assume the shape of out-of-state, for-profit enterprises. If we don't complete our own market surveys, so to speak, and get more of this expensive stuff in place quickly, then other profit-driven companies will swoop in and take our prospective students. But if the MUS, for example, allows itself to become merely another player in the competition out there, then higher education has surrendered a vast portion of its uniqueness. Rather than assume this scenario, I shall cheerfully and naively assume that the academy will retain control of its own definition even as it continues to electronically transform itself off and on campus.
In "Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity" (November 1995) authors William F. Massy and Robert Zemsky state, as a "general proposition," that IT [info tech] "offers mass customization: Technology allows faculty to accommodate individual differences in student goals, learning styles, and abilities, while providing improved convenience for both students and faculty on an 'any time, any place' basis" (2). No one would quarrel with info tech enhancing individually paced learning, but the pledge of improved convenience could quickly become for faculty, on practical terms, a logistical nightmare. If the lass period per se disappears, to be replaced by "any time, any place," those distant student populations could enlarge faculty workloads in quantum leaps and eliminate time used in other dimensions of professional life such as service work or research and writing. Such statements make our enterprise look like a twenty-four hour Quik Stop convenience store. If the class period or classroom is replaced extensively by the home computer, many dimensions of learning will be lost. Of course, online teaching offers certain new and potentially intimate forms of interaction, but it is hard to see how such forms improve upon those occasioned by professor-student proximity
Massy and Zemsky's article does not address this sense of loss when they assert that in one state with extensive distance learning programs, "faculty have discovered that good communication between teachers and students remains important but direct physical contact is less so. IT will bring the best lecturers to students via multimedia anytime and anywhere." Customer satisfaction guaranteed. That ring of the ad jingle should serve as a wake-up call for academics to resist the invasion of the consumerist metaphor in higher education, for I believe the consequences of consumerism seriously threaten intellectual freedom in academe. Those of us who believe "direct physical contact" lies at the heart of the peculiarly magical professorstudent connection worry about the ways in which a video screen destroys this connection. Distance learning advocates must address and specify the advantages of electronic transfer as well as the disadvantages adhering to the loss of physical proximity, else all discussions remain superficial. Faculty, including those already teaching on-line, must lead these discussions and suggest how distance learning might possibly compensate for the substantial losses ignored in some policy papers.
In Montana, then Deputy Commissioner of Higher Education Richard A. Crofts published a paper entitled "The Montana Learner Imperative" (December 1995) in which he contends, "information technology provides the opportunity to increase access to higher education, improve the quality of students' learning experiences, enhance the faculty role as teacher/scholar/learner, and control the costs of education--simultaneously." Such inflated posturing may not, in fact, advance the cause of distance learning. I concede the point about increased access, but the next three claims seem open to dispute. Crofts's paper links, as do many such arguments, new faculty productivity measurements with faculty contributions to student learning. Such a linkage assumes the faculty's degree of success is based upon what students learn, when in fact productivity in pedagogy often proves resistant to quantification--if assessment means solely quantification, as it all too often does. The relationship between faculty work and student learning is much more complicated than this facile linkage suggests
Crofts sees info tech at the center of "Phase III" of the MUS restructuring. Consider this paragraph about the new faculty:
The nature of the role of faculty will change (from the "sage on the stage to the guide on the side"); the faculty will spend more time developing learning materials and more time with students ("virtually") helping them interpret what they have learned; faculty time spent in regular periods in the classroom dispensing information to groups of students will diminish as recognition spreads that it is an unproductive use of faculty time; dispensing of information to students electronically, rather than by lecture, will become standard.
Current faculty must revise this scenario, the language of which is fraught with problems. Crofts, like Massy and Zemsky, makes mock of pedagogy with his parenthetical jingle, which assumes some kind of monolithic shift in locus and focus (touché!). Of course, the professoriate typically combines, in all manner of fluid ways and proportions, the roles of sage and guide; it's not either-or, nor will it ever be. I'm an English professor who teaches writing about as frequently as literature, and in my discipline there's such a wealth of "learning materials" that I do not see myself spending much more time than I currently do developing more. I spend most of my time with students "helping them interpret what they have learned," so how might distance learning change this condition? And precisely how does "more time with students ('virtually')" constitute more quality time? The questions pile up. What else obtains in the professor-student connection than the "dispensing information" metaphor? Those who bash lecturing as an enduringly valid pedagogy sometimes caricature it as a model that merely dispenses information. Lecturing represents rather more than this caricature, but again, how can distance learning demonstrate this truth? Or will it reduce pedagogy to this caricature? I shall return to this "information dispenser" caricature subsequently.
Jeff D. Baker, until recently Montana's Commissioner of Higher Education, published a pair of position papers at the close of 1995. In "Policy Goals for Postsecondary Education in Montana," he talks epigrammatically of "delivering education to students, not students to education." A catchy phrase and, at best, a half-truth. As mentioned earlier, distance learning makes manifest geographical sense but this notion of "delivery" raises red flags. When, one might ask, has education not "gone to students"? It, of course, does so when students, whatever their age, have gone to some special place: a place that recognizes undergraduate education as a peculiarly intensive institution, a season of one's life that promises more than job preparation or advancement. If "education" is construed as being solely on-line transmission, as Baker's motto implies, we have given away far more than we might gain. Baker's paper sounds the same fearful note about outside entrepreneurial forces heard in Massy and Zemsky's article: "in-state institutions will face ever-increasing competition from out-of-state delivery systems...; program offerings will increase greatly as schools and businesses market their offerings on the information superhighway." If education remains something more and something richer than a "delivery system," then the professoriate must engage in better public relations and control the metaphors. Elsewhere he states, "Scholarship (content) and teaching (delivery) go hand in hand." "Delivery," an unfortunate word, bastardizes ars pedagogica. If our business in fact differs from "businesses"--note Baker's linkage--we must insistently educate our administrators, policy makers, and various publics about our uniqueness. If the academy is to remain something other than a designated "Rest Area," or pit stop, then we need to advocate other metaphors. "Superhighway" connotes, above all, speed, convenience, and visual uniformity, and these criteria hardly preserve intellectual freedoms.
Baker, an economist, unsurprisingly employs economic terms that distort, at times seriously, the business of the academy. In "Policy Goals," he advocates "Human resource development related to technology and the use of technology in teaching' " adding this qualification: "Special attention should be paid to the humanization of technology--how we integrate technology, and the humanistic qualities we seek to develop in our students." Such recognition is all too rare in the writing of those aboard the info tech bandwagon. This admission occurs in the middle of Baker's paper, when it should be a point of departure for an article that might help us all understand distance learning as, for example, a valuable supplement to the campus rather than a competing force that might replace it. But instead of such a discussion, in Baker's longer, companion paper, "What Lies Ahead?," we discover, amidst some puffery and grandiose claims for info tech, several disturbing statements. I'll cite three that directly threaten intellectual freedom. In the near-future, Baker argues, "There will likely be fewer tenure-track faculty and more support personnel. Graphic designers and technical/communications specialists will be partners in program and course development." In my discipline and many others, the past couple of decades have seen increasing use of an army of part-timers who, as commuters, patch together livelihoods without benefits, job security, or much of any professional identity or political power. Will info tech accelerate this morally repugnant trend? And in what ways can graphic designers, for example, possibly be partners in curriculum or pedagogy? I doubt the professoriate will stand by and allow such support personnel to become equal players in what are, after all, the former's areas of expertise.
Elsewhere in "What Lies Ahead?" Baker, echoing his other paper, again dispenses with the essential notion of campus: "Campus location is no longer center stage--the focus is the match between delivery system and needs." In this vision, again the academy becomes nothing more than some electronic means of dissemination--which strikes me as about as eviscerated a notion of education as one can conceive. Equally disturbing is one of Baker's definitions of faculty, including faculty evaluation: "To stimulate the development of the teacher-scholar," he confidently predicts, "reward systems are needed based on performance and group accomplishments rather than individual achievement." Baker's hyphenated label shows him following the lead of such luminaries as the late Ernest Boyer, and I personally laud the academy's newfound interest in pedagogy. I even agree that "reward systems" ought to reflect measures of "performance," but determining valid measures proves quite tough. We desperately need something far less capricious and more sophisticated than most extant student evaluation forms, for example, since in recent years the academy has seen such forms used in ways that increasingly threaten job security and subvert intellectual freedoms. Baker's blind privileging of "group accomplishments" over "individual achievement" seems to me so fraught with problems as to be indefensible. Among other problems, this mistaken judgment recognizes no disciplinary distinctions or traditions. Often in English, for example, academics continue to work solo rather than in settings that eventuate in multiple authors. What kind of naivete accounts for such statements that ignore so much and seem to stack the deck against some disciplines? If by "group accomplishments" Baker means professor and any given classroom of students, he could be construed as advocating faculty evaluation according to student test results. Often in discussions hailing higher education's shift in focus from the professor to the student-as-learner, professors are held utterly responsible for student outcomes. Such foolishness ignores the complexity of pedagogy, including the commonplace that the locus of responsibility for learning centers at least as much, if not more, upon the student than the professor.
Most of the way through "What Lies Ahead?" Baker offers a key concession about the value of campus location in the near future: "today's campuses will focus on what is more difficult to replace, on where fewer substitutes are available, and where hands-on learning is preferred or required." So our physical campuses may retain a big role after all, because what, finally, isn't "more difficult to replace"? What general education courses, or upper-level courses in what disciplines, clearly work better electronically than face-to-face? Where is hands-on learning not preferable, in fact? An advanced algebra course? a chemistry course with lab? A music or drama course, or a sophomore literature survey? Maybe an electronics course, or a philosophy course? This qualification about "today's campuses" opens a Pandora's box and dampens some enthusiasm for that new old-time religion because it goes to the heart of pedagogy and campus and classroom. Maybe we need to leave the proverbial convenience of one's home to best participate in the production of knowledge. That "heretical" notion brings me to my last point.
In the opening two paragraphs of "What Lies Ahead?" Baker makes a fundamental mistake typical of some info tech advocates. Rolling the drums and building an analogy to the Industrial Revolution, he twice refers to our times as "the knowledge age" and "the knowledge era." I think his epistemological assumptions quite wrong; I think he means, as is often noted, the information age. Certainly increasing quantities of information bombard us daily, as many have discussed; equally certainly, vast spaces exist between information and knowledge. I tend to believe, in fact, that an inverse relation obtains, and that many students, saturated with information, own less knowledge. That may be true of the population at large. Our daily bombardment of information renders that much more difficult the discriminating, integrating, reflective activities that constitute knowledge. Education, conceived thus, remains far more than an information dispensary service. If that be true, then the academy's business--the promotion of critical inquiry, above all, self-inquiry--becomes all the more precious. Can distance learning assist our precious business? Again, the professoriate needs to lead the discussion and figure out how to take the "distance" out of distance learning; how to make electronic transmission a respectable rather than bogus facsimile of a classroom. If distance learning cannot be made to satisfy all faculty "standards of quality," then faculty should avoid the hype and sustain the example of Socrates while "college by modem" recedes as has the eight-track tape and the 45-rpm record.