The Technological Transformation of Higher Education

THE primary technologies which are transforming higher education are computing and telecommunications, both of which are expanding in capacity at exponential rates or beyond.1 Unfortunately, however, the question states and institutions ask most frequently about educational technology is how to pay for it. The current reality is that both states and universities deal with technology as an add-on to existing structures and not as a new way to do things--78 percent of U.S. colleges and universities fund computer purchases from one-time budget allocations.2 Higher education does not consider it particularly relevant that other industries have invested in technology in order to reduce costs by increasing productivity.3

So far, the focus of state and campus consideration of the impact of information technology has been distance education. Information technology is revolutionizing the role of distance education within state systems of higher education, greatly expanding its potential. Distance education has shifted from the fringes of state policy to a prominent role in many states, and the issue of how best to fund distance education is one that states are struggling to address.

Information technology's even more revolutionary impact is to eliminate the requirement for synchroneity in the delivery of course content. The bedrock assumption that education must take place in classrooms, in which a professor teaches a group of students, underlies the entire organizational framework for higher education-affecting everything from course accounting and faculty workload to tuition and state funding. But this assumption is no longer valid, mainly because of advances in information technology. Other countries are moving away from the assumption of synchronous learning in their educational planning. As the Vice Chancellor of Great Britain's Open University, Sir John Daniel, put it, "…the U.S. system is peculiarly wedded to the technologies of real-time teaching and to the outmoded idea that quality in education is necessarily linked to exclusivity of access and extravagance of resource." 4

1 Scully, M. G. "Postsecondary Education and Society: The Broader Context." In Preparing for the Information Needs of the Twenty-First Century, Sanford, T. R. ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995) p. 4.

2 Green, K. C. "Technology Use Jumps on College Campuses." In The Campus Computing Project, January 1996a.

3 Baumol, W. and Blackman, S. A. B. "How to Think About Rising College Costs." In Planning for Higher Education 23, Summer 1995, pp. 1-7.

4 Daniel, Sir J. S. "Why Universities Need Technology Strategies." In Change, July/August 1997. p. 11.