Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)
Dr. Anthony W. Bates Presentation
Dr. Anthony W. Bates, Director, Distance Education and Technology, Continuing Studies, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
My little presentation is based on the premise that the time to argue about whether or not we should be going down this road has passed, and the question to me is not is it going to happen, but how quickly and how well the use of technology is going to happen on our campuses for teaching and learning. Not to say there are not many issues that need a lot of discussion and thought. And do I believe we are going to lose our campuses and our face-to-face teaching? No, I don’t. But I do believe that we need to radically revolutionize the way we offer education at our universities. I want to say something very briefly about this, and particularly the three technologies, video conferencing, World Wide Web, and CD ROM, which are all going to converge over the next few years anyway.
I also want to look at why we’re using technology. There are a number of different reasons, and your reasons will affect, basically, how you organize yourselves. One, is to widen access--I’m a distance educator, that’s why I use it--to enable students who can’t access the campus to access the incredible knowledge and skills of our faculty and staff. Increasingly, for students on campus, many of whom are working their way through the university part-time, it enables them to have more flexibility in their studies. That’s not what’s driving the use of technology in our university, though.
What’s really driving the faculty is an attempt to improve the quality of learning. And I won’t go into too much detail on that, but there is a growing dissatisfaction amongst the faculty that there are too many students, not enough time, and that they are not able to do their research properly, so they are looking for alternatives and hoping that technology might be the solution.
Reduced costs--that’s what governments are probably looking for with the use of technology. But I have bad news for them, it’s not going to reduce costs, not in the short-term. And I have worse news, they’re still going to have to do it and fund it. So that’s another issue--cost-effectiveness. I do believe that we can increase our cost-effectiveness through the use of technology because it will enable us to reach out to marginally more students, 10 or 15 percent for the same dollar investment, and more importantly, to improve the quality of what we do. I haven’t got time to go through how that can be done--that’s another presentation.
Another very important reason, probably the only real end here in terms of technology, and technology as an end in itself, is that our students need skills in life-long learning, and in particular, they need to know how to use technology to seek, organize, analyze, and apply information appropriately. This is a skill that’s required right across all subject areas these days. If we’re not teaching through technology, how can we expect them to develop these skills?
Now, when it comes down to how integrating technology and education actually works, there are basically three different ways in which we can use technology. One is as classroom aides. This [computer] is a classroom aide--a nice, fancy projection. It’s a lot better than me writing on the blackboard, but I haven’t changed the fundamental nature of the lecture. What we're doing with technology today is that we add it on to what we’re doing, and as a result it increases the cost. I’ve now got to have a Powerpoint presentation and a nice G3 computer, and we’ve got to have a projector here. And we’re just adding costs to what would be a normal lecture.
Distance education is another way in which technology has been used in the past. It’s a different market. Generally, it has been nice and separate. I’ve been lucky to be left alone by the rest of the university because I really don’t get in their way, I’m dealing with a different market, and it’s a separate operation altogether. Well, what’s happening now is we’re getting a third thing happening, we’re getting distributed learning, which is convergence. It’s the only time when we use that term, but, again, our teaching is beginning to converge. Distributed learning is a mixture of face-to-face teaching and outlying multimedia, so students are getting both. And what’s more, we’re replacing something with it. So instead of having three lectures a week, students will get one lecture a week, and do the rest on-line. So we’ve replaced something. And there we start getting some benefits. But more importantly, it changes what we do, it changes the way we organize ourselves as teachers.
But before we go on to those changes, we go through those different reasons. We were having a discussion recently among a task force at UBC, looking at planning to support learning technologies across the campus. And we went through all those reasons: how do we sell this to faculty? And one of the faculty on the team turned around and said, ‘You don’t have to put those reasons in the report. The fact is that most of us now are using technology.’ That was a really interesting statement. So that’s why the university needs to have a plan: because we’re not getting support. So the argument, as I’ve said, has moved on from, should we be doing this to, how best can an institution support the faculty who are moving in this direction? Not everybody is moving in this direction, of course, but a large enough number now do expect the university to do a better job than we’ve been doing in providing support for them.
This means some major new changes. The technology and the world around us are changing very, very fast, and universities are having to look at how we are going to deal with the issue of new target groups, and particularly those people in the work force who want to come back and upgrade and continually renew their knowledge. If we have a knowledge-based society, there are major implications for our universities. And my university, quite bluntly, systemically discriminates against mature students. We took 10 students out of 36,000 last year under our ‘mature students’ policy. Basically, we’re focused on creaming off the best of the high school leaders. Now, this is a strategic issue. Should the university be moving into this market, or should we leave it to the private sector, this new market of those in the work force? A strategic issue. If you come down on the side of, yes, we do have to be involved in that area, to get votes and get support for our public higher education, then we’re going to have to look at technology as a means of delivering to them, because they’re not going to come back to the campus for four years to get another degree, and it wouldn’t be appropriate.
Secondly, we have to change the way we teach--sage on the stage moving more to guide on the side--helping students find their way through the huge amount of information out on the Internet and so on. New jobs in the universities-- I use the broad term ‘designers,’ meaning Web programmers, graphic designers, multimedia producers -- to work with faculty to produce good quality learning materials, and good quality courses and programs. New organization of how we work. Increasingly, we’re going to see faculty--and this is a major cultural change--working in teams with non-faculty people, working as equals together, working with instructional designers and program developers to produce quality courses. And lastly, we need new systems. It’s going to impact more, probably, on our support services and our student services than it is on our teaching. Students will expect to have a website of their own, which is their student portal into the university where all their records are kept, and be able to go in and order things, where they’re allowed to order them, to make sure they’ve got all their courses up, their grades in there, and so on. And so it’s going to have just as important an impact on student services.
So this brings me to the questions for research, and this is what I think you wanted us to focus on. Let’s run through what we’re doing at the moment in research and evaluation in this area. So I’m talking collectively now. We’re looking at new learning outcomes or facilitating. I put a question mark--I’m not sure they’re new learning outcomes, but at UBC, for instance, we’re looking at how we can use technology in problem-solving approaches to teaching, to facilitate students in decision-making in real world examples by virtual expert systems, for instance, which students go into and make decisions and see the consequences of their outcomes.
Collaborative learning on-line, international collaborative learning with international students on-line. So we’re doing some research into whether we are changing our learning outcomes, or whether we are able to do things more easily that we haven’t been able to do on campus with the use of technology.
Student acceptance. Do students like learning this way? Virginia Tech has an incredible system called the Math Emporium, where I think it’s all first and second year students at Virginia Tech now go into this huge warehouse, ex-warehouse, full of computers, and they do all their math courses in this emporium. Will students accept that form of teaching? Their performance has gone up by 30%, but is it a satisfactory education experience?
New interfaces and application software. Everybody spends a lot of time on this; I think this is probably the least important issue. Should you be using Web CT, or Blackboard, and so on? I think much more important is how we integrate that into our teaching and what we use it for. But nevertheless, this is going to be a constant source of research as the technology continues to develop.
And lastly, an area that we’ve been very heavily involved in, cost-benefit analysis. And one of the things that’s come out of this is not so much the direct cost of on-line learning, but the indirect cost of face-to-face teaching. Forty-seven percent of all UBC’s costs for teaching are indirect--buildings, facilities, and so on. It looks at the moment as if our on-line costs, our indirect costs, are about 25%--infrastructure, technology, and so on. That’s a huge potential saving, and it also has major implications for the use of our campus. I won’t go into it, and, again, you can ask me about reasons for my statement.
I think the thing that becomes more and more important is that we’re talking about a cultural change here. How do we move our institutions, maintaining the core values of the university, but moving in this direction? I don’t think there is a grand plan for doing this. Let me tell you what we’re doing at UBC very, very briefly. We are going through faculty by faculty, asking the faculty to sit down and look on the one hand at the academic goals the university has set out--like making teaching more learning-centered, making it more interactive, internationalizing the curriculum--and asking them to develop scenarios of how they would like to deliver their teaching in five year’s time, to meet those academic goals, knowing what technology can do. In other words, how can technology enable them to meet those academic goals? But not just technology; obviously, there are other things that will enable them to achieve those goals. In other words, it’s a means to an end, it’s not an end in itself. So that’s one attempt on our part at inducing a cultural change.
We need research into the organization of research around these new technologies. Basically, we’re going to go into a very strong trial and error process over the next few years. We don’t know what’s going to work and what isn’t going to work, we don’t know what the side effects will be, and we damn well ought to make sure we monitor what we’re doing.
How do you support faculty? The issue is between centralization of support resources and decentralization, or in our case, no support services at all at the moment. How many technical people do you need to support faculty using technology for teaching? In my book, I’ve come up with a ratio of 1:20 for every faculty member who wants to use technology. Where are we going to find the resources for that, and how are we going to organize them, how are we going to train them?
What is the likely impact of the technology on the way we use the campus? Our Director of Campus Planning is getting very concerned. He came to me to say that, ‘I don’t want to be the general that fought the last war. I’ve got a 20-year building plan here, and I’m very nervous that I’m going to be building lecture theaters that aren’t going to be used in the future.’ One of the interesting questions for me is I’ve spent 30 years trying to defend the use of technology for distance education, and that’s been relatively easy to do because it hasn’t impacted on the campus. I think we have to turn the question around now and say: what are the really important characteristics of face-to-face teaching, and how do we preserve those on our campus in a technological world? We need to research that, because lots of things that we claim for face-to-face teaching can be done just as well at a distance, but some can’t. And I think there’s a real fuzzy area about what those are.
And, lastly, what strategies does an institution use for change? I’ve written the book on that topic, but that’s old news. There’s no research in this area, we have no evidence that these strategies actually work. I hate to say that, and still buy the book anyway, but we don’t know that these strategies are going to work. We need to track the way that institutions are trying to handle this change.
So, in conclusion, stress. Will it be a minor or a radical change? Is this going to be a nice, gradual incremental change over time, or is it going to come with a bang? Well, I think it’s going to be a radical change, and I think it’s coming very, very... well, it’s here, it’s with us already, and faculty are moving very quickly into this. I think that’s really a good sign from my point of view, that it’s being driven more and more by faculty now, and less and less by administrators and planners. New technologies require new organization. And if there are historians here, you will know that that’s true. And every evolution of technology has resulted in radical change in the ways people work. And universities are no more exempt from that than any other body. So as we move to new technologies as a source of our major means of doing business, we will have to change the way we organize.
And, again, last question in the back: what kind of research do we want? Well, I think we want more research into best practice, rather than the traditional kind of research which is based on data collection and empirical studies, and so on. I mean, we need empirical research, but it has to be part of best practice, not just isolated studies here and there. The American Productivity and Quality Center did a very interesting best practice exercise, 45 institutions around North America brought together to look at best practice in faculty development in the use of new technologies. It was a very instructive exercise.
And, lastly, who pays for this research? It doesn’t fit within the traditional research councils. Is this going to be something the institutions are going to have to pay for themselves, and do we have any strategies for doing that? Or are governments going to support this kind of research? There are some interesting questions there for public policy as well.
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