• Introduction

I'm here to talk about real problems in the virtual world. I've made a list (fanfold paper): copyright problems, Web server crash, mail server crash, student computer skills, teacher computer skills, not enough time for development, bandwidth, software incompatible,

But I'm not going to talk about those things. I'll narrow it down to a few, because wide variety of problems I have encountered keep leading me back to a very few problems; namely, those that have to do with the teaching in the classroom, with pedagogy and with the relationship between the virtual classroom and the physical university.

The question that concerns us all is: do the physical university and the virtual university share a common future?

I will approach these general problems by using my own on-line courses as a starting point.

• Background

I've taught on-line classes four times now. The first attempt was an upper-division Renaissance course, using a BBS. In 1995 I taught the Renaissance again, but this time on the Internet. Last spring I taught a freshman survey course in Western Civ and am teaching it again this fall and again next spring.

Since the Western Civ course is the more recent and the more ambitious, I'll use it as the model for my comments.

• Structure of HY101

There are three elements to my class.

1. Textbook - a real, live, physical textbook.
2. Class discussion - run through a listserv list - 3 messages a week
3. and a Web site for everything else
   • Syllabus
   • Full lectures, not just notes
   • Supplementary readings
   • Study Questions
   • even registration information and a Visitor Center
4. The site is open to all; the discussion list is closed - anyone may learn, but to be taught costs money.

• Classroom and Pedagogy
  • Marketing
    • The Division of Continuing Education handled my course, and they handled the advertising.
    • They put an ad in the local paper and had flyers at the extension campuses.
    • Even though they were helpful, ContEd had problems understanding my class, too.
    • I got the first indication of this when they asked me to write the copy - they didn't have the vocabulary to describe what I was doing.
    • The second indicator I had was that HY101 was listed along with the telecourses.
    • I didn't care much, because I had a completely different notion about my market.
    • I was busy advertising on the Internet. I sent messages to newsgroups; I listed my course at Yahoo and elsewhere; I announced the course on a couple of Bitnet lists.
    • I've stopped doing this now - What would it be like if I kept advertising semester after semester? What if thousands did this?
    • My Web pages are their own advertising; there are hundred of sites with links into mine, and it can readily be found through search engines.
  • Cultural Factors
  • If my market is truly those on the Internet, new problems arise. I have a student in Malaysia--everyone's impressed with this--so I don't tell them that she's an American from Idaho. I also have a student from Brazil. She can't speak English and can write it only with great difficulty. How international is my course? How international is my institution prepared to be?
  • The question keeps arising: who are my students? Are the on the Net? Or are they in southwest Idaho? Which is another way of asking: where is the university--on the Net, or in Idaho? And can it be in both places?
• Little problems keep raising larger issues.

Pedagogy

• Where is the teaching?
  • When I showed my course to colleagues, they were uncomfortable with the whole notion. Where, they asked, did the teaching happen?
  • They know where they teach - in the classroom. But my lectures I had written up and posted, which they claimed was really not lecture but a textbook.
  • Is that teaching? If that's not what I'm doing on the Web pages, what was it I was doing in the classroom when I delivered essentially the same information by voice? I had always called that teaching. But now that I wrote it up, it didn't feel like teaching any more.
  • Once class began, I knew the answer. The classroom is in the discussion list. That's where the teaching happened.
  • But I'd rather say that live classroom holds a variety of forms of teaching, and the Web pages are another form of teaching.
• The other issue was that of quality. How many lectures should I do?
  • In a live class, we have clear constraints that limit how much information we can present: basically, it's whatever will fit into 50-minute periods and a 15-week course.
  • I could put up so much material on the Web site that it would be unfair to the students, but how much is enough?
  • How do we determine whether an asynch class is equivalent? We are, after all, granting the same number of credits, and they are the same credits.

• Teachers ask me about contact hours and seat time
  • We can't use the same measure. Can we even use analogous measures? Or is this something wholly new?

Pace: Asynchronous discussions are slow

• Asynchronous discussions take days, at a minimum, to develop. The normal length for conversations runs a week to two weeks.
  • This affects course design: I cannot create a study unit that lasts one week. One week is not a viable unit of time in an asynchronous discussion.
  • This gives me no more than about seven study units in a semester. That's fine for my discipline, but maybe not for yours.
  • The semester isn't long enough.
• Not only is the pacing slow, virtual discussions are easily disrupted
  • It takes a week or so to get started at the front end
  • People wind down early - I've found that the conversations falter in the final week.
  • Spring Break takes out more than just a week, for it's a few days before everyone is back up to speed and all conversations are in full gear
  • These are all natural enough, but they eat away further at the ground one can cover. You can pretty well figure on scratching two to three weeks out of the semester when the class is in a state of flux in one way or another.
  • The consequences of this are even more significant for those on a quarter system.
• I wanted to break the semester barrier. I tried hard and even had the support of administrators. What we found is that too much infrastructure depends on the semester system (financial aid, full-time/part-time status, etc.). It won't break.

These real problems kept reminding me that, no matter how hard I and others tried, the class didn't seem to fit very well. I began to suspect something.

The class itself was great. The students loved it, I loved it, the university loved it. But I kept encountering problems and I could see further problems up the road.

The most serious problem I anticipate is that my approach does not scale well. You can't teach a hundred students the way I teach this class, but the administrators talk of teaching thousands. This can be done, but only by completely removing dialog and contact between teacher and student.

I've taught non-traditional courses before. Courses based on films. Courses over cable TV and over closed-circuit TV with two-way audio. Courses on video tape with correspondence.

This was different.

Why?

General Issues

These and other problems stem from the fact that the Net and the University are profoundly different environments. If the two are compatible, they are complementary rather than identical.

The importance of place and time

• A university is fundamentally physical and synchronous.
  • We recognize this fact every time we observe the difference between a residential and a commuter campus.
    • The whole vocabulary of the university relates to place; e.g., "campus".
  • Physical because a university is a community of scholars.
  • Into this community we admit students.
    • The very word "admission" indicates the nature of what is happening.
    • Those students don't merely learn information, they imbibe the values and practices of this community.
    • They have special privileges while they belong to this community.
  • At some point, they leave the community--they graduate--and go back into the wider world.
  • Despite all the changes wrought, the university remains a community and that is its peculiar strength.
  • The university also exists within the cycle of the year.
    • Much of the structure of the university is centered around the logistics of moving several thousand people at a time into and out of rooms, and moving them through the curriculum.
    • The semester system, as I've said, simply will not break, and with good reason--it is an integral part of the university.
• The Net is independent of time and place.
  • Place is rendered meaningless on the Net; it is culture that matters, as my own students show. What matters is not where my students are, but who they are.
  • The Net is not necessarily independent of time--witness Internet phone and chat rooms
    • but when you go synchronous, you re-introduce place as a factor.
    • With time and place as factors again, the Net loses much of its peculiar strength.

Since the Net is placeless and asynchronous, it is a fundamentally different environment than the university.

• Both the live classroom and the virtual classroom are effective teaching platforms, but they are different teaching platforms.

Problems and Obstacles

• There are any number of things pertaining to physical universities that will make it difficult for them to be competitive on the Net.
  • Decision-making process is too cumbersome.
  • Funding cycle is too slow
  • Funding is inadequate
  • We are locked into the semester system.

• And, in any case, is going virtual a good idea?

How far should the university virtualize?

• Let's assume well overcome these problems; or, more likely, that we'll simply have to live with them. How far should we, can we, go?
• I have these conversations with legislators and administrators
  • Shall we move our existing students onto the Net, leaving our classrooms to stand empty?
    • No, that's not the scenario most advocates want to see.
    • When I talk to them, they speak of gathering in new students - reaching new markets, they call it.
  • Very well, if we intend to teach new students, then we have to hire more teachers, for someone needs to be teaching the current student body.
    • But the legislators and administrators I talk to don't much like that idea, either.
  • They suggest that we offer only certain degrees on-line, aiming for special markets like high-tech markets. BSU is doing this with our Instructional Technology degree.
  • If we offer an entire degree virtually, then the virtual students need to have virtual access to (virtually) the entire university
    • Don't they deserve the same range of educational choices as the on-campus students?
    • If we do offer virtual degrees, then the university is looking at funding the same program twice.
    • And no, the legislators don't like that one, either.
• The one thing I'm fairly certain of is this: existing physical universities are not going to be the ones to create the virtual university.

1. Conclusion

"Universities must change or die" - piffle. Universities have survived profound change and they will survive this. But not without effects.

• The Physical University
  • All universities will use the Net on campus, as a supplement
    • like the library
    • this will excite no one, because all it does is improve education
  • Virtual classes will be peripheral, just as correspondence and TV, and for the same reasons--they have a different market.
  • Loss of market share as competitors snatch up special items (e.g., recertification)
  • Bright days ahead for the small, liberal arts college that specializes in the residential campus and live teaching
  • Big losers: large, public universities, who are mandated to do everything
• The Virtual University
• Lots of on-line education that is outside any university
  • The Waite Group provides one example
  • Virtual tour groups is another
  • Non-profit foundations is another
• A true virtual university
  • The funding model would be that of a private school
    • faculty work on contract
    • research follows the private model, too
  • I could take a cohort of students through European history
    • Other teachers in the VU might even be available in their specialties
    • The students would be taking other classes, too
  • The key thing would be the creation of a sense of community-reproducing the community of scholars but with a wholly different model of teaching.
  • This approach is expensive and does not scale
  • The best subjects are the liberal arts (some subjects aren't going to virtualize well, or at all)
  • This is the on-line version of the small campus, except this one specializes in no live contact.

I find this prospect very exciting. I've worked in this model and it is extremely rewarding. And the students value it as well. But I recognize that we again are talking about a niche market.

This is the reality of the future: market segmentation, narrowcasting, niche players. We will see new forms of education. The ones that succeed best will be those born and bred on the net.
Papers ToC