The ACM97 conference asks us to think about the next 50 years of computing. The SDCR workshop asks us to think about the next 50 years of computing research. I would like to discuss the nature of education in the 21st century and the kinds of research that will be needed to support it.
Have you ever heard of a "business design"? I am thinking of the overall framework in which a business is formulated, its style, approach, and basic assumptions. Most businesses are aware that products and services may become obsolete; so they have research, development, and marketing processes by which they invent and market new ones. But the RD&M processes all occur within a fixed business design. What happens if the business design itself becomes obsolete? There is ample evidence that this happens. The design of IBM and DEC worked very well for many years but became obsolete when Microsoft introduced commodity software, and now Microsoft is being challenged by the business design of Netcsape and Sun's Java. The designs of Maxwell House and Folgers are now challenged by Starbucks. The design of the Postal Service is challenged by Federal Express and e-mail. When a new company offers a better design, the customers migrate to it. The older company cannot seem to find products and services that will attract the customers back because all those products and services are formulated within a context that the customers no longer find attractive.
I suggest that the business design of the university is becoming obsolete.
Future customers (students, parents, employers) will migrate to educational
organizations that change their design and away from those that want to
stick with the traditional way. This is an enormous threat, bigger than
the potential loss of federal research funds. It is also an enormous opportunity
for new paradigms of education and for the technologies that will support
them.
The design of the modern university features four-year programs, large classes organized on semester (or quarter) schedules, midterm and final examinations, a small menu of degrees awarded after a student completes a certain number of credit hours with certain grades, a research program that occupies a lot of faculty time and energy and is accessible only to a few graduate students, and occasionally a continuing education program adjunct to the main academic offerings. You and I did not create this overall design; it was already here when we entered the academy and we have been designing new products and services within it. For example, it is easy to have a discussion about a new introductory course in CS, but difficult to conceive of a software engineering course leading to certification of competence.
Several major forces are at work undermining the assumptions on which this design is built. (1) The Internet and digital library are making the university library and attendant local community of scholars obsolete. (2) A college education is now seen as essential for getting a good job. (3) Many people want to earn degrees while employed full-time. (4) Many people think tuitions are too high for the value received and that universities as a whole are too bureaucratic and not responsive to customer needs. (5) The federal government plans to freeze or cut research dollars.
The business design of a successful educational organization of the 21st century is going to have to resonate with these changes in order to attract customers (students). The principal aspects of the new design will surely be:
Every one of the items on the list above represents a significant new practice, several of which do not exist yet. Getting to them offers enormous opportunities for research that will answer questions about the effectiveness of the new practices and about the technology and tools that will be needed to support them. I won't enumerate these opportunities here because most of us are well aware of the rich agenda of research questions surrounding education.
One of the opportunities that deserves special attention is tools to assist
in certification. What human competences can be certified by a machine?
Which ones require human judges? How do we learn to certify skills on
line? What tools will be needed?
Our practices of teaching will change. We have been trained in an environment where teaching is mostly presentation, and in which faculty development emphasizes classroom technique and presence. As machines take over much of the presentations -- often doing it much better than we can -- and as the machines take over testing and assessment, what will be left for the teacher to do? There is much. It is a complex of practices and skills that have to do with inspiring, motivating, and coaching students. Few of us have learned these skills because we never had to and in any case there was no one to teach us. We will need a massive program of faculty and teacher development to assist them in learning how to be highly effective teachers.
Walter Slywotsky has written Value Migration, in which he discusses at great length the concept of business design and has given many examples of customers migrating to new business designs that offer them greater value.
Lewis Perelman, in his book School's Out, discusses in great detail his vision of the future of education, in a paradigm he calls hyperlearning. If you haven't read this, you should. If you love the way the university works now, you will find this book deeply disturbing.
Peter Drucker, in his book Post Capitalist Society, lays out a vision of what teaching and learning for the knowledge worker will entail. This expands on an earlier version of his vision in The New Realities.
Various authors have written best-selling, apocryphal books about disease and corruption in the academy. Even if you don't accept the premises of these books, they were best sellers and hundreds of thousands of people paid $24.95 to own one or more of them. If nothing else, they give good insight into what ails the current business design of univerisites. I'll give you a list of these books if you ask.
Eli Noam wrote a provocative editorial on "The demise of the university" in Science magazine during October 1995. He spoke specifically about the way information technology is undermining the traditional assumptions of the university.
Eliott Soloway has written repeatedly about the need for effective teaching and teacher development, most recently in "Teachers are the key" in Communications of ACM, June 1996.
Andy Whinston and two colleagues have written about educational brokerages in "Electronic markets for learning: education brokerages and the Internet", Communications of ACM, June 1996.
Last (and least) I have written several articles containing some of these themes. You can find them in the Communications of ACM, December 1995, July 1993, and May 1996.