Informational Technology enters Educational Technology

The Role of Technology in Quality Education

G. David Garson

North Carolina State University Contact: David_Garson@ncsu.edu

Quality education is a universal goal. It is common to hear arguments that instructional technology will be the key to educational quality as we enter the new millenium (cf. Fiske and Hammond, 1997). Investment in educational technology is urged upon policy-makers as the path to educational quality (Mergendollar, 1996). In fact, enthusiasts for educational technology argue that quality has and will continue to increase rapidly, creating a "new educational culture" (Connick, 1997). Whatever problems exist are seen as ones which can be handled through better administrative and technological planning - that is, technology believers perceive no intrinsic obstacles to total quality assurance using information technology in higher education (ex., Roth and Sanders, 1996).

Other voices question educational technology as a panacea. Cardenas (1998), for instance, has written on the problems associated with technology in the college classroom in terms of issues such as poorly functioning equipment, over-promotion of technology-based learning to students, and lack of quality in courses delivered by technology. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on critics of educational technology who say students choosing online courses are not getting the education they pay for, and question whether universities should be providing such instruction (Guernsey, 1998). The American Federation of Teachers and other faculty organizations have also raised serious cautions about web-based education (Mingle and Gold, 1996) and have even gone on strike over it.

The unruly growth of online distance education is the basis of these concerns. One has only to look at popular books like, The Best Distance Learning Graduate Schools: Earning Your Degree without Leaving Home (Phillips and Yager, 1998). This work profiles 195 accredited institutions that offered graduate degrees via distance learning as of 1997-98. It acknowledges that "diploma mills" are a danger. Even accredited programs from recognized institutions of higher learning may have been thrown together as experiments or simply in quick response to administrative fiat. "Caveat emptor" is definitely a precept for student consumers of online education.

In response to growing criticism of the recent, rapid, unregulated growth of distance education, a number of recognized higher education organizations have formulated quality standards and guidelines. A prominent example is the document "Principles of Good Practice for Electronically Offered Academic Degree and Certificate Programs, " from the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications; http://www.wiche.edu/telecom/projects/balancing/principles.htm; see Johnstone and Krauth, 1996; Zuniga and Krauth, 1996; WCET, 1997). These principles have been endorsed by a number of higher education governing and policymaking bodies in the western United States, as well as by the regional accrediting community. The core assumption of these guidelines is that, "The institution's programs holding specialized accreditation meet the same requirements when offered electronically."

 Since these guidelines are a widely-accepted definition of "quality" as applied to online education, they are quoted below:

* Each program of study results in learning outcomes appropriate to the rigor and breadth of the degree or certificate awarded.

* An electronically offered degree or certificate program is coherent and complete.

* The program provides for appropriate real-time or delayed interaction between faculty and students and among students.

* Qualified faculty provide appropriate oversight of the program electronically offered.

* The program is consistent with the institution's role and mission.

* Review and approval processes ensure the appropriateness of the technology being used to meet the program's objectives.

* The program provides faculty support services specifically related to teaching via an electronic system.

* The program provides training for faculty who teach via the use of technology.

* The program ensures that appropriate learning resources are available to students.

* The program provides students with clear, complete, and timely information on the curriculum, course and degree requirements, nature of faculty/student interaction, assumptions about technological competence and skills, technical equipment requirements, availability of academic support services and financial aid resources, and costs and payment policies.

* Enrolled students have reasonable and adequate access to the range of student services appropriate to support their learning.

* Accepted students have the background, knowledge, and technical skills needed to undertake the program.

* Advertising, recruiting, and admissions materials clearly and accurately represent the program and the services available.

* Policies for faculty evaluation include appropriate consideration of teaching and scholarly activities related to electronically offered programs.

* The institution demonstrates a commitment to ongoing support, both financial and technical, and to continuation of the program for a period sufficient to enable students to complete a degree/certificate.

* The institution evaluates the program's educational effectiveness, including assessments of student learning outcomes, student retention, and student and faculty satisfaction. Students have access to such program evaluation data.

* The institution provides for assessment and documentation of student achievement in each course and at completion of the program.

Similar guidelines may be found in connection with the world's largest experiment in online distance education, the Open Learning experiment in the U.K. In reviewing this experiment, Mayes and Banks (1998) concluded that three factors combine to maintain quality and integrity of Open Learning courses: (1) common, structured course materials; (2) open assessment using a competency-based methodology; and (3) an extensive support and monitoring network. Numerous other efforts exist regarding quality assurance in distance education (Tait, 1997).

An inspection of leading quality-in-online-education guidelines reveals three central themes.

1. Quality is defined in terms of "appropriate" and "complete" online education, with appropriateness and completeness to be adjudged by faculty. Faculty agreement, of course, is apt to refer to faculty with interests in promotion of online education, with tacit consent of peers in a typical academic culture which strongly encourages faculty course development autonomy and an administration more interested in "getting into the online education game" than in creating quality standards impediments to launching online offerings. Using the same textbook as the traditional course is often sufficient to meet this criterion.

2. Students must have access to support services (ex., library, computer, faculty access, peer interaction). In fact, most make available to online students only a fraction of the library resources, computer resources, faculty access, peer interaction, and other advantages of on-campus students. However, as long as the most important resources are available online in some form, this standard is ordinarily deemed to have been met.

3. Quality is defined in terms of "evaluation" of specific, measurable "learning outcomes" or "competency-based objectives." This is met by the instructor formulating a set of syllabus statements of the "At the end of the course, the student will be able to ...." type, and making sure examination questions relate to these statements. As in traditional courses, content of the objectives is the prerogative of the faculty member - having objectives, not their content, is what quality standards assess.

To be sure, there are some online offerings which do not meet even the minimal hurdles of the foregoing guidelines. Overall, however, it cannot be said that "quality" guidelines such as the foregoing are difficult to meet in practice. By the same token, such guidelines leave the critical observer wondering what else might be involved by some higher definition of "quality."

1. Controversy over higher standards for quality in online education has emerged as a major distance learning conference topic. Hillesheim (1998), for instance, has written on "the search for quality standards in distance learning." Based on a review of historical quality standards and on a case study of Walden University's online psychology courses, Hillesheim distinguishedthree dimensions to quality standards:                                                          (1) managerial quality/organizational criteria (ex., leadership and record keeping;                              (2) functional quality/technological criteria (ex., student support via process teams); and             (3) ethical quality/instructional criteria (ex., the relationship between students and faculty, faculty evaluation, and student and faculty empowerment). The first and second dimensions are those upon which promoters of distance education have focused, as discussed above. Achievement of goals in these two dimensions is necessary but not sufficient for quality education. Much more depends upon achievement of Hillesheim's "third dimension goals" such as establishment of authentic relationships and empowerment of students and faculty. This is the focus of the remainder of this essay.

The Borkian Vision of the Future of Education

Alfred Bork  is a leading educational technology guru, having for years headed the Association for Computer Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Uses in Education and having advised on this subject for the National Institute of Education and having been named Outstanding Computer Educator by the Association of Educational Data Systems, among other honors. In 1999 Bork was interviewed by Educom Review, the journal of EDUCAUSE (formerly EDUCOM), the leading association of colleges and universities for the advancement of educational technology. In this interview (Educom Review, 1999), Bork set forth several aspects of his vision of "the future of education:"

1. Education will become highly interactive, engaging the student every 20 seconds or so for a response, much in contrast to present-day passive lecture methods.

2. Education will become highly individualized, with world-accessible records of learning attempts by particular students, to enable computer presentation of education tailored for each student's past learning experiences and styles.

3. Education will become highly flexible in interaction, enabling natural-language tutoring using the Socratic method of tutorial question and student response.

4. Education will become highly accessible, opening opportunities for the disadvantaged in this country as well as for the millions in developing nations.

5. Education will become highly computer-mediated, replacing (not supplementing, which would be an added cost) the lecture method in courses for 15 or more students.

6. Distance education will begin to displace campus-based education because the high costs of an interactive computer-mediated course can be justified only through their use by a large number of students than only distance education can provide.

In Bork's view, "Teaching faculty, in the sense we know them today, may cease to exist, except for in small, advanced courses" (p. 49). He foresees the conversion of large, lower-division courses - about 50% of university teaching - to online formats, resulting in "significant improvement in learning, at lower cost" (p. 50). He warns that those institutions which do not go this route may prove unable to survive the competition of the coming era.

Bork is hardly the only technology spokesperson who believes that computer-mediated distance education will spell the end of the traditional university as we know it. George Mason University's Peter Denning (1997) made such an argument before the National Science Foundation, basing himself on four arguments:

(1) The library as a physical place is soon to be replaced by digital libraries accessible worldwide by almost anyone.

(2) The "community of scholars" around the library is soon to be replaced by communities of specialists linked electronically, divorced from geographical location.

(3) The ideal-typical small undergraduate class has become unaffordable and cannot compete with commercially-provided education on the same subjects, such as computer science, nor can universities compete with commercial courses' glitz and entertainment production values.

(4) Job structure has changed such that universities can no longer hope to prepare students for or promise them a "lifelong career", the central selling point of higher education until recently.

Denning then asked, "What roles can universities fulfill that people would find valuable?" The answer, Denning argued, was increasingly Internet-based distance education for adult professionals. Similarly, futurists often see an inevitable economic shift from local material goods to global knowledge services, forcing education to move toward electronically-mediated education (cf. Alic, 1997). "A revolution is taking place in education," wrote Donald Norman and James C. Spohrer (1996: 25-6) in Communications of the ACM, the nation's premier computing journal. Norman and Spoher noted that though distance education has been around forever, only in recent years has new technology been available to fuel the hyperbolic growth of the Internet and energized a new vision of how to deliver distance education. Gerald van Dusen, in his The Virtual Campus: Technology and Reform in Higher Education, sets forth an optimistic view of how technology will transform education from faculty-centered to learner-centered, making instruction better by replacing the "sage on the stage" with interactive, individualized learning possibilities; will improve scholarly research by enabling far greater collaboration as well as information access; and will improve educational organization by facilitating interdisciplinary connections and encouraging academic "total quality management."

The hope Bork, Denning, van Dusen, and others of this school is that online education will do for the masses in the twenty-first century what the public library movement did in the nineteenth and the expansion of public universities did in the twentieth. Online education potentially may be disseminated to millions who previously could not have hoped for a college education due to circumstances. With the erosion of job tenure and job security, moreover, the challenge of twenty-first century university education will more and more have to do with dispersed adult learners who must remain at work but retool for career changes. This audience may be reachable primarily and often only through online education.