Educational Uses of Information Technology: A View for State Leaders
in Transforming Postsecondary Education for the 21st
Century
Denver: Education Commission of the States, 1999.
Margaret A. Miller and Steven W. Gilbert
"If everything's under control, you're not going fast enough."
Attributed to Mario Andretti
Introduction
Higher education is being swept up in an irreversible transformation. Technology is spreading everywhere, even in the academy: more than 40 percent of all courses in American colleges and universities now include some use of new technology (according to Casey Green's Campus Computing, 1998: The 1998 National Survey of Information Technology in US Higher Education). Most mainstream teachers and learners, not just the "pioneers," routinely use word-processing, electronic mail, the Web, and discipline-specific software applications. As Green notes, students increasingly "come to campus expecting to 'learn about' but also to 'learn with' technology."
Faculty and students who rely on these tools would no longer give them up. Recognizing that most careers now require frequent and capable use of information technology, students not only learn to use tools they will be deploying later in jobs-they learn to ask questions that technology makes it possible, for the first time, to answer. Web-based instruction also familiarizes them with the vast informational resources and virtual communities that they will need, not only in their jobs but also in their private and civic lives.
Broadened access to education is sometimes seen to be at odds with high quality. But historically, technological revolutions--such as the development of writing, printing, and even college campuses--have improved both. The new telecommunications technologies promise to release some kinds of education from the constraints of time and place and thus provide citizens with new opportunities for access to higher education. Adults need the opportunities that technology opens up for lifelong learning, but some traditional-aged students, most of whom work and more than half of whom attend more than one college, may also want to take part or all of their collegiate education on line. As telecommunications options for video, audio, and text increase in power and decline in cost, students who cannot conveniently or inexpensively meet directly with their peers and teachers have new options for participation.
For some kinds of learners and some educational goals and circumstances, learning via telecommunications can even be superior to doing so through face-to-face interaction. Whether used for distance education or on campus, technology enables--and in some cases forces--faculty to rethink teaching strategies and account for learning results. In the process, the quality of teaching-both with and without technology-can be improved. The best technologically enhanced teaching has attributes that we know enrich student learning. Students can be active and self-reliant, receive individualized instruction and immediate feedback, work in groups, interact with people who are not nearby, control the time and place of their learning, and have access to extensive data networks that they can shape and use.
But if it is to achieve its potential to extend access and improve higher education, technology faces some major challenges. Most of these challenges have long been part of our lives, but technology gives them new urgency. They include being clear about what we are trying to accomplish, planning and paying for it, distributing resources and opportunities fairly, providing opportunities to students based on ability to benefit rather than ability to pay, promoting best educational practice, maintaining the value of our investments, containing costs, and keeping track of results. When it comes to technology in particular, policy-makers and educators must find ways to
1. Articulate visions and plans for the uses of technology at every level-personal, departmental, and institutional;
2. Plan realistically and fully for the costs of educational technology;
3. Ensure equitable distribution of technological resources across sectors of higher education and to individuals;
4. Match teaching strategies and technologies with the needs and abilities of individual teachers and learners;
5. Identify the combinations of new and old technologies and teaching strategies that work best for deep learning; and
6. Track the results, costs, and benefits of the investment in educational technology.
Critical policy issues
1. Creating the vision and plan
Visions of how technology will transform higher education run from utopian to nightmarish. Both extremes paralyze rather than energize, and both impede rational planning. The most realistic visions recognize the strengths and limitations of technology, focus on those aspects of higher education and state policy that enable or impede its effective use, and link to action.
Plans need to be developed in a coordinated way at both institutional and state levels, since each needs the other to turn its vision into reality.
At the institutional level, groups like the TLT Group's Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtables bring campus constituents together to link institutional mission, educational goals, teaching strategies, and technology applications, as well as to find practical and structural solutions to the many challenges that technology poses. These include how to ensure faculty and student access to technology; change the faculty role and reward system; provide adequate support services; train faculty, staff and students to make the fullest use of the new technologies; and support libraries in their use of information technology. To be effective, such groups need to develop strategies for consensus building, planning, and project management.
State-level planning needs to start with a realistic and publicly credible vision of what the state hopes to gain by using educational technology (for instance to expand access, make the curriculum more relevant, improve teaching and learning, meet workforce needs). It needs to explore which state regulations and procedures enable or impede nimble responses to a fast-changing technological environment. It should examine ways to encourage the development of partnerships-among institutions and between institutions and business and industry-to leverage resources and avoid unnecessary duplication of expenditures. The state's plans should also include long-term financial planning that will ensure adequate and equitable funding of what must become a permanent part of higher education's resource base.
2. Paying for it
State and campus leaders have long struggled with how to pay for equipment and other higher-education capital investments. The high capital costs and even more unwelcome but essential support and replacement costs of technology have exacerbated this problem. The early hope that technology would make higher education more affordable to a state is not likely to be the case. As with other capital- rather than labor-intensive enterprises, technologically delivered education is likely to become cheaper on a per-unit basis only after a certain critical mass is reached. Even then, if the state's higher education system becomes more accessible as a consequence of using the new technologies and more students enter the system, total costs will rise even as the per-unit costs fall. Higher education can be more productive, but it will not cost the state less.
Most institutions and states have been slow to face the challenge of calculating the full costs associated with educational uses of information technology. States often fund the new technologies as if they were buildings whose maintenance will be deferred: they provide one-time funding for hardware acquisition without an understanding of or commitment to the on-going costs of maintenance, software acquisition, training, support services, and replacement. As users flounder in the absence of financial support, equipment becomes obsolete (usually within three to five years), pressure grows for another "one-time" major budget allocation for new hardware, and finally there is another round of funding. This pattern may be described as crisis, lurch, crisis, lurch-with good will, responsible planning, and opportunities to engage less venturesome faculty and students lost in the lurches.
Each state and campus needs to decide what it is willing to guarantee regarding access to technology for all students and faculty, as well as to calculate the costs of minimal access. Some elements of the calculation include the amount of convenient access time to equipment that will be guaranteed (especially for part-time working students who cannot easily or frequently use campus-based facilities), the power and sophistication of the equipment, the replacement and upgrade cycle for it, the software configurations that will be necessary, and the support services that will be available. The degree to which students should subsidize technology-through technology fees and requirements for ownership of computers, for example-should also be considered. Beyond this, plans should include publicly defensible criteria for funding advanced applications-for the uses of "pioneer" faculty, programs, and institutions-in order to ensure innovation. Willingness to support those able to experiment with educational uses of information technology is essential to its most effective uses, but it does entail risk, delay, and occasional failure. Every institution and state must decide how much to invest in this arena.
3. Ensuring equity
Equitable distribution of technological resources among and within institutions is another challenge for leaders. Whatever the utopian vision of technology as a social leveler, the fact is that wealthier institutions have been able to make computer-related technology more conveniently available to their students, to purchase more frequent replacements and upgrades, and to provide better support services and training. Within institutions, some departments have been able to use grants and special funds to acquire and integrate information technology into their research and instruction. Consequently the gap between "have" and "have-not" departments has widened-with schools of education, where the technological sophistication of the next generation of schoolteachers is determined, often being among the "have-nots." Planning at the campus and state levels needs to address these inequities on an on-going basis.
The "have"/"have-not" gap has also widened at the individual level. Early access to technology, at home and at school, will have a lasting impact on children's capacity to function at full effectiveness later in their lives. A state's educational technology policy should reduce the inequities in technological resource distribution to individuals, which now varies depending on their region, income, race and ethnicity, gender, and disability. Cutting some learners off from the new opportunities afforded by educational technology has ethical, political, and economic consequences: it is unfair, it further marginalizes some individuals and groups, and it reduces the potential for a highly skilled and broadly prepared workforce.
4. Meeting the needs of teachers and learners
As new technology applications arrive at an accelerating pace, the temptation is to adopt them wholesale. But every teaching tool (the lectern, the blackboard, the Web) limits the teaching and learning options of those who use it. Leaders at all levels should recognize that mandating specific combinations of pedagogy and technology without attention to the varying needs, goals, and capabilities of students and teachers is to unduly restrict possibilities for the appropriate and innovative use of developing technologies. Premature standardization will not get the best results-an evolving set of teaching strategies and technologies, arrived at through collaboration, is more apt to do so. For instance, publishers, instructional design professionals, and faculty members need to develop compromises about formats for course materials on the Web that will shift over time, depending both on what we learn about their efficacy and how the technology develops.
Meeting the needs of learners also means that students should have choices about which forms of education best meet their needs, independent of ability to pay. Some colleges and universities will continue to provide a traditional residential campus experience that stresses face-to-face instruction. Others will want to provide the working adults who comprise a large segment on their on-campus population with the convenience and flexibility of on-line work. Still others will offer education that occurs primarily in cyberspace.
In any of these modes, some institutions will prefer to stress an instrumental education-one that prepares students for specific work-while others will offer learning that includes the student's development, not only as worker but as person and citizen. The deep learning we associate with campuses can also occur in for some cyberspace, as long as resources are devoted to recreating the rich social textures of the campus, exploiting the interactive possibilities of the new technologies, providing students and faculty with the technical support they need, and developing good instructional materials. Conversely, on-campus instruction can focus on job training and specific skill development, although distance education may prove especially cost-effective for more instrumental education. Policy-makers should ensure that students can choose among these options freely, depending on their needs, goals, and abilities. The campus should not become a gated community for the children of the wealthy, while the virtual university is where "other people's children" go.
5. Promoting superior practice
In this changing landscape, superior practices will evolve that will combine old and new technologies. In the past, each time a new technology has been introduced into education, it has been simultaneously hailed as a panacea and condemned as the ultimate mechanization of learning. In either case, the fear or the hope was that traditional practice would be replaced wholesale. The reality was usually that the technology was absorbed into a larger set of instructional strategies. For instance, many assumed that television would simply replace traditional education, especially lectures. Instead, many cost-effective educational uses of video have been developed, accepted, and integrated into classes that continue to include live lectures and discussions. With the new technologies as with previous ones, we need to learn more about the purposes and conditions under which people learn most from old and new strategies and various combinations of them.
Technology can stimulate pedagogical improvement when its use requires faculty members to plan their teaching more carefully and effectively and be more self-reflective about it. Some applications (for instance, "drill and practice" and testing programs) can also free up faculty time to do those things that require physical presence. As teleconferencing and asynchronous communications become more effective and less expensive, their capacity to capture the subtleties of interpersonal communication will increase pressure on faculty to understand and provide whatever it is that makes face-to-face interactions uniquely valuable. In the process, traditional forms of instruction will be rethought and improved.
6. Tracks results, benefits, and costs
Technology repeatedly forces us to face the cost-benefit question. We already have many examples of how information technology can be used to increase access to higher education, expand what can be taught and learned, enable certain kinds of learners to master new information more quickly and deeply, and increase the quantity and quality of communication among learners and teachers. However, we have few documented examples of uses of educational technology that do those things while reducing overall costs. The important exceptions are likely to emerge in the kinds of education in which students are trying to master specific skills, gain specific knowledge, or acquire certification confirming such accomplishments. As instruction for these purposes can be more standardized across multiple programs and institutions, publishers and others may be able to develop cost-effective instructional systems and materials. The more personalized and individually adaptive uses of technology are likely to require greater investments of faculty and student time and other institutional resources. Educational outcomes may well improve, but costs will go up.
Institutions should pay systematic attention to the costs and benefits of the various educational uses they make of technology and communicate that information regularly to state policy-makers. They should continuously assess the learning that results from various modes of instruction and work with state officials to construct budgets that accurately reflect program costs. These assessment and budgeting efforts may entail some fundamental changes in traditional measures of productivity. For instance, "contact hours" no longer work as a unit of measure when contact is not at issue and faculty (and other new members of the instructional team) are using their time differently than they have in the past.
Campus leaders should also rethink strategies to reduce the costs associated with technology. For example, the widespread use of students to provide elementary technical support within colleges and universities can be extended significantly. At William Paterson University and Seton Hall University, students are given training and managerial responsibility for improving the academic uses of information technology. Not only does the institution get low-cost but highly capable technical support-students receive some of the best preparation they could get for using technology later in their careers, and local industry benefits from people trained and experienced in this way.
State-level leaders also have a role to play in helping to keep technology affordable. State policy should encourage the development of partnerships among public institutions and between them and for-profit providers, as well as business and industry, to cover some of the capital and other investments required.
Policy tools
State policy-makers have a number of instruments at their disposal to articulate and realize the state's goals for the educational uses of technology in public colleges and universities. In descending order of bluntness they are persuasion, budget, regulation, and legislation. Following are some ideas about how each might be used.
1. Persuasion. Most states periodically establish commissions to study the future of higher education in their colleges and universities. If such a commission were designed to focus on the educational uses of technology in public colleges and universities, it could
· Establish a realistic vision for what the state intends to accomplish through the use of instructional technology. Such a vision should go beyond the campus to acknowledge the interconnections among the various levels of education and deal with the need for lifelong learning and teaching. Such a vision should have price tags attached.
· Develop financial strategies to realize the vision equitably and adequately. Those strategies should be designed to meet both the start-up and the on-going costs of technology-from wiring the campuses to buying hardware to upgrading software to training faculty to providing the continuing pedagogical and technical support that faculty and students will both need.
· Ask institutions to develop similar visions and plans. Institutions should also be asked to establish groups of stakeholders on campus to deal with the evolving pedagogical, technical, and financial challenges technology poses, as well as to periodically create (re)visions of the technology sections of institutional plans. Encouraging the development of stand-alone technology plans often results in plans for the acquisition and deployment of technology that bear little connection to institutional mission, while strategic plans that do not address educational technology miss a critical variable affecting the future of any institution.
· Suggest the kinds of partnerships (among institutions and between institutions and industry) that would enable campuses to leverage resources.
· Identify, for campuses, superior practices in meeting the challenges of technology use and support.
· Determine what information needs to be collected, and by whom, to track whether the state's resources in this area are used effectively and the state's goals are being met, as well as what research should be conducted about the learning that comes from various uses of technology. For those responsible for major educational technology investments at the state and institutional levels, clarify the nature and likelihood of educational benefits and at what cost. Support the development of instruments and procedures for this purpose, as well as the longitudinal aggregation of the data that results and its nation-wide collection.
2. Budget. Increasingly, states provide institutions with incentive funding to meet targeted state needs, whether as a part of the base budget or as a separate grant program. Another strategy used for equipment purchases in some states is to use the state's bonding authority for the purpose. Such strategies can be used to ensure that resources for technology are used for their intended purposes, distributed equitably, and focused strategically. In developing them, states should
· Provide all state-supported higher education institutions with the means to meet the full range of costs for baseline-level use of technology. Target certain colleges or universities to explore innovative educational uses of advanced information technologies, especially in distance education.
· Provide incentives for superior practices and for partnerships.
· Support research on how technology can be used to best effect for teaching and learning, for whom, and under what circumstances-as well as on the unique benefits and disadvantages of face-to-face instruction. Collect and disseminate information about the range of new distance education capabilities and costs.
· Support the development and administration of good competency demonstrations as the basis for awarding credentials and of tracking the learning productivity of the technologies. These should be subtle and sophisticated enough to capture the skills and personal growth sought by liberal-arts degree programs.
· Establish other data-gathering mechanisms to track the state's investment in technology-for instance, new forms of program budgeting. Collect and disseminate information about statewide and regional patterns of industry recruitment and hiring practices.
· Fund statewide solutions to some problems, such as the development of virtual library resources.
· Support need-based financial aid-as well as the adequate and equitable distribution of resources, including technology, into the middle and high schools-to ensure that students have choices in the forms that their collegiate education will take.
3. Regulation. State regulations that pertain to the educational uses of technology are generally focused on licensing out-of-state providers to operate in the state. The difficulty of regulating satellite transmissions means that protection of institutional territory can no longer be the goal of such regulations. At the same time, the state still maintains its historic obligation to protect its citizens from fraud. Regulations regarding distance education should have as their goal not turf protection but quality assurance. They should
· Focus on outcomes. Licensed institutions should be obligated to provide evidence that their credentials are based on demonstrated competence, which may include the skills and personal growth sought by liberal-arts degree programs.
· Permit new forms of partnerships between public and private providers.
· Be based on inter-state cooperation.
4. Legislation. Legislation should be used sparingly to guide the development of something that moves as quickly and unpredictably as technology. Built into any approach to policy-making in this arena must be the means of reacting quickly to new challenges and opportunities as they arise. One initial task would be to analyze existing legislation for the ways in which it may unintentionally create barriers for the effective deployment of technology. Federal and international intellectual property laws are especially problematic for educators who hope to use information technology to improve teaching and learning.
Conclusion
Since technology is a means, not an end, the first job of policy-makers is to decide what ends they have in mind when they invest in educational technology. If the goal is wider access to a better quality education-more cost-effective, "connected" education for lifelong learning in a growing variety of circumstances-then concerted and coordinated state- and institutional-level planning will be required.
Valuable new educational applications of information technology will continue to arrive at an increasing pace, and many will be costly to adopt, adapt, and sustain. Each state should establish and support both a baseline level of access to educational technology for all citizens and the capacity for some individuals and institutions to explore innovative educational uses of the new applications.
Policy-makers can use persuasion, budget, regulation and legislation to help colleges and universities combine various strategies-from face-to-face meetings in conventional classrooms to the newest forms of telecommunications-to meet their educational goals. With the help of effective state leadership and support, institutional leaders can use the new educational technologies to help citizens work more effectively, exercise their civic responsibilities, and find more satisfaction in their private lives.
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