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************************************************************************ The article below is submitted for publication consideration in On the Horizon and will be archived on Horizon Home Page (http://sunsite.unc.edu/horizon). Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use, posting to other lists, or for classroom use is hereby granted provided that copies include this notice. To republish in print form requires specific permission; please write morrison@unc.edu for details. ************************************************************************
Kenneth C. Green
Claremont Graduate University
Is there any doubt that distance education is a booming business? Or that technology plays a key role the future of distance education? Ten minutes on the Web at Yahoo!, Lycos, or Alta Vista yields literally hundreds of academic and commercial URLs for distance education courses, programs, and services. 1 Perhaps the most interesting public sector venture into distance education is Western Governor's University (WGU). Charter documents, available at the WGU's Web site (www. westgov.org), outline a technology-driven "regional virtual university through which instruction will be accessible at the learner's convenience via advanced technology. This learning can be certified to the satisfaction of both employers and academic institutions through the assessment of competencies, and states and the private sector will share in the development and use of instructional materials." An ambitious mission, fueled by great aspirations.
But are aspirations alone adequate? The California Forty-Niners who rushed to Sutter's Mill some 150 years ago were certain they would find gold just a few inches below the soil. Similarly, many campuses, academic programs, and commercial ventures are rushing into the distance and on-line education market certain that that too will find "the gold." Having spent some time wandering the WWW or sitting captive to local college telecourses on hotel cable channels while they travel, campus administrators and program coordinators are often surprisingly confident that instructional technologies (cable, video, and the Internet, among others) will provide low-cost, high revenue distribution vehicles.
Alas, developing technology-enabled distance education is neither simple nor inexpensive. It is best viewed as a business, one that involves real - and recurring - costs: money, time, personnel, content, and a significant technological infrastructure. Many campuses and programs that venture into the market will also find it to be risky business.
Demographic Drivers
The demographic factors pushing distance education are well known. Following a 16 year decline, the traditional college age population is rising. The size of the high school graduating class will grow by more than 20 percent between 1996 and 2005, returning to the peak levels of more than 3 million graduates last seen in 1979. Additionally, more students are enrolling in college a year or two after high school: college matriculation is approaching two-thirds of the graduating high school class, up from just 56 percent in 1980. Consequently, the coming increase in the size of traditional college cohort is fueled by both a growing numerator (i.e., more students going onto college after high school) and rising denominator (i.e., more students of college age).
Concurrently, the traditional college student represents a shrinking majority of the college-going population. US Department of Education projections suggest that by 1998 the age 25 and older population will account for 5 of every 11 college students attending US colleges and universities: perhaps most surprising is that the number of students age 35 and older will exceed those age 18 and 19.
Taken together, these two "customer cadres" could push enrollments in two- and four-year colleges and universities from current levels of some 15 million students towards 20 million "enrolled college students" by 2010. But the new demand will not create new capacity: given competing demands for social service dollars, it is unlikely that many states will provide the money to build new campuses. Consequently, the demographic drivers suggest significant opportunities in the distance education arena.
Plus ca change.
Agricultural extension programs begun some 140 years ago in the early days of the land-grant college movement are the programmatic precursors of today's distance education initiatives. Administrators responsible for coordinating distance education and agricultural extension efforts fifty years ago would no doubt see much that is familiar in many of today's practices and programs.
But technology changes the instructional methodologies as well as the content, costs, and certification of distance education.
Indeed, it is the legacy of many common distance education practices - part-time faculty in leased facilities - that creates problems for many campuses planning new distance education initiatives. The technologies that are an increasingly important part of the instructional infrastructure for distance education programs - computers, on-line libraries, video production facilities, low- and high-speed data and video networks, among others - are expensive. Successful implementation and dissemination depend on both instructor and learner having easy access to common resources such as cable channels, computers, and the Internet. . Moreover, the electronic infrastructure and digital content often have a short, often unpredictable half-life.
The Content Factor
Ten minutes spent surfing cable channels quickly brings into focus many of the content and delivery issues affecting the role of technology in distance education: can a campus-developed telecourse or WWW-based learning module complete with the content, quality, and production values routinely found in the programs broadcast each week on The History Channel, the Discovery Channel, or on PBS? In the new realm of campus-independent, technology enhanced education, how does a mediocre video of a professor lecturing to a class or a TV camera or a poorly designed WWW site compete with the proliferating availability of high quality instructional content available via cable channels, on CD-ROMs, and over the WWW?
Unfortunately, many institutional officials have opted to ignore the core financial question: What are the real costs of content and supporting instructional resources in the new, technology-laden world of distance education? $2.00 for a digitized version of a book chapter or scholarly article? $20-50 dollars to have a work-study student or a media specialist videotape a faculty lecture? $20-200 for hour for faculty time? $200-$2,000 for 60 minutes of an unedited classroom video? $20,000 for 30 minutes of a production-quality lecture? $100K for 60 minutes of commercial-quality video? $100-400K for commercial quality digital (or computer) simulations?
Compare these costs - real costs - against the way many campuses and academic programs build financial models for their distance education programs: supplemental pay for faculty to bring a course and syllabus from the classroom into an on-campus video studio. Work-study wages for undergraduates to write computer code and to develop multimedia resources. Extended hours for graduate students, committed to an academic apprenticeship, to help senior faculty identify supporting materials required for the transition from real-time classrooms to on-line or video environments. Unbilled hours provided by curriculum design specialists and technology support personnel. "Free" (or significantly subsidized) access to technology resources such as desktop computers, networks, servers, software and more.
This is familiar, if often forgotten, terrain. Higher education's first wave of desktop computing, during in the mid-1980s, was accompanied by some ambitious (if often unsuccessful) faculty efforts to create courseware intended to supplement and enhance instruction. These initial campus efforts were frequently supported by foundations, technology firms, or small, seed-money institutional grants; others were fueled only by the good intentions and instructional aspirations of individual faculty drawn to the potential of instructional technology.
Without question, the all-too-common campus investment strategy in technology-based courses -small seed money grants of $5,000 or $10,000 - clearly helps to fuel individual aspirations. However, the accompanying great expectations for significant (if supplemental) classroom modules or distance education courses typically require greater (and continuing) investment. Moreover, the junior faculty who participate in these projects too often are penalized by their commitments during promotion and tenure decisions.
But what about the campus project that readily consumes $50,000, or $100,000, or maybe even $500k? Probe beneath the surface at some campuses and it is often easy to find the stories of well-conceived development projects that were a sponge for institutional and foundation dollars. Although fueled by good intentions and great aspirations, many (perhaps most?) of these efforts unfortunately failed to produce an instructionally useful or commercially viable product.
Seen in this context, content development begins to look like a venture capital business - generally acknowledged as risky business. Venture capital (VC), like a campus seed grant, seeks the innovative idea and individual. But even with extensive due diligence, venture capitalists know that at best only one in ten investments will be successful. Easily half will burn through the initial money and crash; a few will break even, while less than ten percent thrive.
The Cost of Instruction
Be it the core syllabus or supplemental courseware, higher education typically has measured the cost of instruction via salary and individual service, rather than hours on task: faculty are hired to teach a course, not to produce instructional content. The common practice of bundling instructional costs is not necessarily good or bad; rather bundling instructional activities into one single cost - faculty salaries - has been a given (and still acceptable) part of the instructional process and operational infrastructure.
However, not all instructional costs are equal: senior faculty "cost more" than their junior colleagues or part-time associates who teach the same course; syllabus development "costs less" for an "old" class than for a new one; "unit costs" are lower for large, lower- division lecture classes than for upper-division and graduate seminars; humanities courses typically are "less expensive" than those in science and engineering because salaries and infrastructure costs are lower. Institutions - presidents, provosts, deans, and faculty - implicitly accept these cost differences as part of the nature of the academic enterprise.
But what happens to development costs as the content of distance education moves from short-cycle extension classes into mainstream (i.e., for degree credit) course and curricular offerings? What about the technology resources and infrastructure that are increasingly important to a growing proportion of distance education initiatives and offerings? Can all campuses and programs build a revenue stream against the real costs of developing commercial quality, technology-enhanced distance education resources? And the end of the course (or instructional cycle), would a CPA accept the allocation of real costs against actual revenues?
Certainly many campuses will (attempt or continue to) leverage their distance education initiatives against existing resources: faculty, graduate students, media centers, libraries, and campus networks. But if managed as a "real business" - i.e., absent both state subsidy (for public institutions) and institutional subsidy (for all institutions) - how many distance education programs (most programs? all programs?) would be both educationally viable and financially profitable?
Where's the (Technology) Plan?
Indeed, campus and program officials planning to leverage institutional resources as part of a technology-enhanced (or dependent) distance education initiative should ask pointed questions about the institutional technology plan. On many campuses, the plan simply does not exist.
Data from the annual Campus Computing Survey suggest that as of Summer 1996, less than half (43 percent) of the nation's two- and four-year colleges and universities had a strategic plan for the role of information technology in instruction and scholarship. Moreover, barely one-fourth (28 percent) had a financial plan for routinely amortizing and replacing computers, software, and other key components of an increasing critical and complex campus technology infrastructure. The same survey also reveals that only one campus in six (17 percent) has a formal plan for the role of information technology and WWW resources in their distance education strategy.
Taken together, these data suggest an ad hoc strategy underlying much (perhaps most?) institutional planning in the realm of technology: for too many campuses, great aspirations about the use of technology in instruction and scholarship play against institutional drift in the area of strategy and planning.
A Fourth Sector Strategy
Given the various factors affecting distance education initiatives - demography, market opportunities, state mandates, expanding markets, competitive pressures and postures, content development, start-up and operating costs, new instructional and delivery technologies, and more - is there a "macro" strategy that should guide institutional efforts and planning in realm of distance education?
Perhaps.
The higher education community would do well to approach distance and on-line education as a fourth sector of the non-profit postsecondary enterprise. The entrepreneurial initiatives of the University of Phoenix, Jones Education Company, and others notwithstanding, the advent of Western Governor's University means that distance education officially joins residential colleges and universities, commuter comprehensive institutions, and community colleges as yet another broad point of access to postsecondary education. Distance (and on-line) education warrants a distinct identity because of its special mix of pedagogy and clientele.
A fourth sector strategy has long-been been explicit in the offerings and operations of university extension programs: different clientele and curricula, to be sure, along with a different business and revenue model. Extension programs typically operate without an institutional (or state) subsidy and under a mandate to generate real dollars (i.e., profits. Consequently, the fiscal operations look more like a small (or often a large) business, rather than not-for-profit organization: programs and personnel live in a real market, immediately affected by market shifts.
How then should institutions and academic programs explore opportunities to launch (or expand) distance education programs? Three issues should drive and direct the institutional and programmatic initiatives: the business plan, content development, and faculty reward and recognition.
The Business Plan. The first task confronting any institution or program planning launch or expand distance (and on-line) education initiatives is the business plan: a concise definition of markets, products, consumers (who will buy it) and producers (who will create/offer it).
Viable business plans are not built on assumptions of fallow capacity. A key component of the business plan must be a solid financial foundation for all on-line and distance education initiatives. This means that everything - literally everything - that involves potential costs (e.g., instructional personnel, infrastructure, support services, content development, overhead) must be recognized as a real cost and addressed as such.
Moreover, amortization - virtually unknown in the campus community but well understood in the corporate environment - must become a critical financial tool for managing real costs. The "budget dust" strategy widely used by many colleges to pay for technology infrastructure - using year end money to fix problems and buy products - is no longer effective; moreover, it is irresponsible. This is particularly true in distance education programs, where the clientele may have very specific needs for and expectations about the technology component of the instructional experience.
Content Development. Technology-assisted (or enabled) distance education involves more than simply adding a few URLs to the course syllabus or posting a static syllabus on the WWW. Yet too often campuses have ignored (or deferred) the real costs of content development, or have lumped them under a broad heading of "instructional personnel."
Successful content development - individual modules as well as complete units - is a team effort. Consequently the real costs of the "content development team" - faculty, code writers, curriculum specialists, web designers, and others - must be factored into the assessment of content development costs. Additionally, the costs updating content must be part of the financial plan for on-line and distance education initiatives.
Recognition and Reward. Finally, campuses and academic programs must begin to recognize and reward faculty for their efforts to integrate technology into their classrooms, syllabi, and instructional activities. This applies to both traditional, classroom-based efforts and also to on-line and distance education initiatives.
The technology experience of American higher education over the past 15 years reveals very little in the way of formal reward or informal recognition for faculty who invest in developing technology-enhanced courses and classroom-modules. Indeed, too often faculty feel that their technology efforts are penalized when their portfolios go forward for promotion and tenure review.
Institutional aspirations to integrate technology into instruction really do depend on faculty involvement and engagement. Even in the fourth sector strategy, faculty remain the core resource of the educational initiative.
The Genie and the Bottle
Higher education has changed dramatically over the past two decades; the next ten and twenty years promise still more change. Information technology and distance education have been key factors in the contributing to the current and coming changes in the postsecondary enterprise.
The genie will not go back into the bottle: adult enrollments will expand, not decline; demand for technology will increase, not diminish; the opportunities for distance and on-line education will grow, not recede.
Aspirations, mission, mandate, and resources are key factors that determine the success of efforts to integrate technology into classroom-based and distance/on-line education programs. Yet the difference between the experience of technology as a guiding light and technology as a quagmire ultimately depends on an institutional and programmatic vision, a strategy, and a plan. These three components are not easy and are not quick; but each is clearly essential.
Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, is a visiting scholar at the Center for Educational Studies, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA. This paper based on a longer article that published in ED Journal (May 1997) the official publication of the United States Distance Learning Association. (c) Kenneth C. Green, 1997.
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