How Information Technology is Transforming Higher Education

Programs can be structured around asynchronous learning. It is no longer necessary for educational programs to be built around the assumption that students and teachers will meet face-to-face as a group for learning to take place. Because telecommunications allows people to share virtual space as well as physical space, many of the activities that have traditionally been conducted in classrooms can now occur over telecommunications networks. E-mail and video conferencing allow high levels of interaction among teachers and learners but don’t require schedules to be synchronized. This change affects on-campus students as much or more than it does those participating in distance education.

Distance doesn’t matter. High bandwidth networks allow the faithful replication of the classroom experience, for better or for worse. Soon, bandwidth growth will permit the widespread delivery of classroom-like experiences to individuals at home, but by that time we will have moved beyond curricular structures based on the classroom into new models that are media-rich and asymmetrically interactive. As a result, markets for higher education programs will be larger and not defined simply by geography. Likewise, no market for higher education will be secure as a result of its geographic isolation.

Delivery will be customized to the needs and schedule of the student. Because content is becoming a commodity, and networks permit its rapid and flexible dissemination, programs can be custom-designed around the needs and interests of the recipient instead of the schedules and resources of the provider.7 Programs will be organized around flexible course modules which can be combined by students into a variety of forms based on their particular needs. Technology-mediated instruction makes traditional academic calendars and curricular structures at best irrelevant and at worst barriers to effective education.

Most programs will be learner outcome-based. As more and more jobs demand specific technical skills, both students and employers expect higher education to insure that students master them. More significantly, however, consumers of higher education can increasingly choose from multiple providers. In this environment, being able to make some judgment about the quality of competing program offerings becomes critical. Traditional site-based measures of quality, like accreditation, are having a very difficult time coping with new network-based program models. Learning outcomes, as measured by student competencies, is the quality measure that makes the most sense to consumers.

The structure of technology-mediated education is inherently collaborative. As direct instruction is replaced by more complex interactive learning systems, the organizational structure of academic program development and delivery will necessarily change to more collaborative models.8 Development of learning systems is best done by teams, the members of which do not have to be located on a single campus. Likewise, the high up-front cost of program development is a powerful incentive for institutions to pool their resources and share development costs, or to purchase programs which have been developed elsewhere. 

True competition comes to higher education. Colleges and universities believe they operate in a competitive environment, but they do so only on the margins. They are protected from true competition by the physical constraints of geography on student mobility, the hurdle of accreditation, protectionist state policies like designated service areas, and the financial subsidy of public institutions. The new competitive environment is characterized by multiple providers–private for-profit institutions, industry-based education (which has grown beyond training), and public and private institutions that are seeking to serve students outside their traditional service areas.

5 Norris, D. M. and Morrison, J. "Leveraging the Forces of Transformation on Campuses." In Mobilizing for Transformation: How Campuses Are Preparing for the Knowledge Age, Norris, D. M. and Morrison, J. L. ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997) p. 1.