The future used to be something you strained your eyes to see. Now it's something you stumble over while racing from one innovation to the next. It took nearly one century for the industrial revolution to reach the United States after the invention of the steam engine, by James Watt. But the transformations caused by advances in information and communications technologies are happening almost as quickly as we can imagine them. With the internet, geography sets no limits on where innovation can happen or where its effects shall be felt.
Challenges In Higher Education
This is cause for great excitement and great fear. Think of the industrial revolution giving rise to a sophisticated national and international transportation systems, which in turn gave rise to the suburbs and the great urban centers. Now try to imagine the potential impact of a global information infrastructure dissolving the miles between those cities and suburbs such that the movement of things becomes secondary to the flow of ideas. The possibilities are beyond our ken.
Challenges of the Future
While much about the future is speculative, some things are clear. For instance, just about everyone and everything will be connected, and there will be a lot more intelligence going around whether you're talking knowledge workers collaborating globally or smart devices communicating with each other and with people. When you can embed a computer chip into practically anything for as little as $2, the possibilities are limitless. Using information technology and its tools, through a personal computer or some other type of electronic device, is now the equivalent to driving a car. It's something that everybody needs to be able to do, to maintain minimal living status.
Tomorrow's Environment
Society's higher education needs are undergoing a fundamental transformation. A rapidly exploding student population is becoming older and progressively diverse. The new economy requires a workforce that is capable of handling an exploding knowledge base. Industries are looking at higher education institutions to provide the necessary training and education. Universities and colleges are under increasing financial pressure: they need to control and even reduce costs, as well as adapt to the new competitive landscape while responding to this growing demand. On their own, each of these factors is significant; collectively they now challenge fundamental higher education strategies and practices.
Emerging digital technologies are ideally suited to meet the new learning needs as they are best positioned to supply a new a digital learning infrastructure. But the new learning infrastructure must offer more than just education-as-usual on the Internet. It needs to provide a set of extraordinary new capabilities: self-paced learning, interactive multimedia modules; in-depth outcome assessments; and online interaction with peers and teachers that facilitates continuous feedback and improvement.
Noncompetitive Structures
Currently, individual colleges and universities bundle a number of functions, including standards setting, accreditation, content creation, and delivery and administration of instructional materials. In the new environment, these services can be disintermediated, globalized, and carried out more efficiently by separate, specialized entities.
Immersive multimedia and other technologies are changing how we think about learning providers and who we regard as providers. High-quality learning resources that were once only available through institutions now retail online in the form of multimedia computer-based courseware. Consumers can access learning products independently and learn at their convenience. Historically underrepresented sections within the society now collectively and directly spend billions of dollars each year on learning. This buying power will have a massive impact on who controls learning.
Virtual publishing is driving the costs of reproduction and distribution of content to almost zero, while at the same time admissions limitations - for cost considerations - are being progressively eliminated. Authoring templates are reducing the front-end costs of preparing instructional materials, while the ability to make small, continuous incremental changes is encouraging experimentation and innovation. Initially, significant investments are already happening where the payoffs are high, in courses with high enrollment, standardized curriculum and a wide variety of users.
A Significant Barrier to Change
Unfortunately, most countries still lack a clear mission for the development of new age learning infrastructure. There seems to be an apparent absence of the kinds of policy initiatives that indicate the intention to halve tuition costs, increase access to education by 50 percent, and demonstrate a general improvement in learning quality witnessed by improved course completion rates, reduced average time to degree, higher retention, etc.
Absent also is a defining mission tied to specific goals; most efforts seem to be still mired in incrementalism and ad hockery. National planning effort needs to avoid simple extrapolations of the status quo and set some aggressive and quantifiable goals for the creation of the new learning infrastructure.
In times of significant change, we need to interpolate rather than extrapolate. Extrapolation examines the past and assumes, that the future will be akin to the past because, in the past, the future was similar to the past. In most situations confronted by policymakers, this would be an acceptable approach. However, when a revolution is brewing, focussing on the past can be very misleading.
Programmatic Investments
Will most of the action in this domain, therefore, come from new, private enterprises who will step in to fill the void left as a consequence of higher education's choice not to, or inability to, redefine itself? Will current higher education institutions remain content to limiting their reach to in-house tuition only? Or will they seize the initiative and develop realizable long-term goals for a learning infrastructure and use those goals as milestones for making future investment decisions?
While interpolation runs the risk of overestimating the rate at which the future will arrive, it is the only strategy that can bridge the chasm. Extrapolation will be a failed strategy because it is impossible to cross a ravine with a thousand small steps. Tinkering at the margins is a strategy guaranteed to miss the sea change that is about to wash over higher education.