They used to be ivy-covered halls. Now networks are more characteristic than the ivy.
The Digital Age has transformed just about everything in our daily lives and some of the greatest change has happened at colleges and universities. Part of the reason is that lots of young people go to college.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just released a report called “The Internet Goes to College: How Students Are Living in the Future With Today’s Technology.” It’s got some fascinating findings.
The folks at Pew found out that 20% of today’s college students started using computers before they were eight years old. By the time they were eighteen virtually all of them had begun using computers. They’re comfortable online, too.
Almost 90% of college students have gone online. That’s compares with about 60% of the population as a whole. Referring to the students the Pew report describes the Internet is “commonplace in the World in which they live.”
Those computer-literate students have forced colleges and universities to change. They’ve got to provide a comfortable and productive place for the 85% of students who own their own computers. That means that computers are in dorm rooms and they’re even showing up in classrooms.
Students can take notes on their computers. They can tap into the school’s network to do all kinds of things. Some of those involve academics, like doing research and checking out resources for classes. Some involve administrative tasks, like checking grades, choosing classes or sending email to a professor. Some are purely social, like arranging a date or using email to request money from home.
College Internet users are twice as likely to have downloaded music files compared to all Internet users. Sixty percent of those students have downloaded a music file at one time or another. That raises all kinds of issues and it opens the universities up to legal action by trade groups like The Recording Industry Association of America.
Not only that, but all of that activity on the campus network can really slow things down. Several colleges and universities have found that they need to limit students’ access from their dorm rooms during the day so that the network can work fast enough for faculty and staff to get their work done. In most cases full Internet access to the dorms is restored in the evening.
Even that’s going to be tough soon, because campus after campus is unplugging and setting up wireless networks. Being on a wireless campus means that you can hook into the network from just about anyplace as long as your computer is properly equipped.
Suddenly that notebook you've taken to class can help you do more than take notes. You can check out resources on the Web while class is going on or shoot e-mails and instant messages back and forth to other students. And students aren't the only ones doing things in the classroom that weren't possible as little as a few years ago.
Professors have developed online resources that students can access over the Web. They've used different technology tools, some as simple as pagers, to engage students in classroom activity. On the whole, the colleges have done an excellent job of integrating classroom instruction with supplemental Web resources.
Not all experiments in online education have gone well. Colleges have had to wrestle with issues involving intellectual property rights that were never important before. As they moved to put course material for students on the Web many faculty pointed out that they believe they own the right to their material, not the university. Other faculty members are just uncomfortable putting that stuff up on the Web. They’d rather do things in the more traditional way.
Nevertheless, using the Net as an adjunct to regular classes has turned out to work pretty well. There's some evidence that students who learn through a mix of classroom experience and online material learn more than students who use either classroom learning or online learning exclusively.
At this point in our move into the Digital Age colleges seem like they’ve pretty well handled the issues involved in using the Net and the Web to support traditional classroom instruction. What they haven’t handled very well is setting up ways that the Net and Web could help them make money.
A couple of years back I spent several hours on a plane with an administrator at a major American university. We talked about how his school was going to put its courses online and reach new markets.
The plan was that they would be able to sell their courses to people who weren’t regular students at the university. The way they figured things it wouldn’t take a lot of investment or effort, and they’d make a lot more money without adding additional facilities. It sounded like a great plan.
Lots of institutions of higher education seem to be thinking the same way. Schools like New York University, MIT, Temple, the University of Maryland, and Columbia all rushed to put up online subsidiaries to sell their courses. Others banded together in joint efforts, like the California Virtual University.
Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Fathom.com for example, was the online effort of Columbia University. It was founded about two years ago. Today, according to Michael Crowe, an Executive Vice-Provost at Columbia, Fathom has not yet generated significant income. Profit is not even on the horizon.
New York University chose a somewhat different tactic. They started up NYU online in 1998 to deliver corporate education and training. They were looking to make money from the online equivalent of those executive programs that fill up so many executives’ summer. That idea didn’t work either.
The problem isn’t that people won’t take courses online. The US Distance Learning Association estimates that more than two million students are currently taking online courses. The association expects that number to rise to five million within four years. The problem for traditional colleges and universities is that those folks seem to be taking courses from other organizations.
Consider, for example, the University of Phoenix. They’ve got online enrollment of more than 37,000 people. They’ve got basic four-year programs and post-graduate degree programs up through the Ph.D. level. What are they doing that most colleges and universities aren’t doing?
Well, to start with the University of Phoenix has always been oriented toward providing education for working adults completing a degree. Instead of a faculty made up of academics, most University of Phoenix faculty are working professionals.
That means that the University of Phoenix started out without some of the encumbering issues that colleges and universities faced. University of Phoenix faculty tended to be more technologically oriented. They didn't band together in academic senates and spend time debating the philosophy of online education and the purpose of the university. As important as the issues in those debates are, the debates slowed and limited the online efforts of many traditional colleges and universities.
Even more important though, the University of Phoenix and other institutions that have done well with online learning, started out by knowing their customers. They designed their online offerings to meet student needs.
Traditional colleges and universities started out in a different place. They assumed that they had course material of high value and that if they made it available people would sign up. It was a kind of "if we offer it, they will come" approach.
The University of Phoenix saw their online efforts as an additional way to reach an audience that they were already serving. They expected to enroll more of the same kind of students.
Colleges and universities expected something different. They believed that lots of folks would consider online education as an alternative to onsite education. That turned out not to be true. By and large, the folks who are using online courses and pursuing degrees online aren’t folks who see it as an alternative to the traditional college experience. Instead, they see it as an alternative to not being able to pursue a degree at all.
There is one more thing. Many colleges and universities underestimated the cost and difficulty of delivering online courses. It's not a simple matter of throwing up a bunch of lecture notes and salting them with a lot of links. Effective online instruction needs good instructional design and effective supporting technology. It's different than the classroom.
Major colleges and universities are starting to scale back dramatically on what they’re doing. They’ve underestimated the cost of doing quality online education and misread the market for what they have to offer. They’ll have no alternative but to cut back quite a bit. It would be tragic though, if their efforts end with cost cutting.
Colleges and universities can look for ways to sell smaller bites for smaller amounts of some of their key offerings. There’s bound to be a market for this, particularly in professional areas.
Colleges and universities can draw some lessons from what they’ve learned on campus. Using the Net and Web for support of a traditional program makes that program more effective. That can be used for distance learning, as well as combining online offerings with physical class meetings in remote locations, and with teleconferences.
Colleges and universities can look at developing material over the next several years and offering it to their graduates first. These graduates are savvy about technology, willing to go online, comfortable with downloading, and they already love the school. Who could be a better market?
This feature appeared on 21 October 2002
