Why Higher Education Needs Internet2

I'd like to thank you for your interest in Internet2, and to invite you to visit the CREN and Internet2 websites for up-to-date information on these topics. I'd also like to thank Doug Gale for sharing earlier versions of this presentation.

I have been involved in higher education most of my life, working on programs at the intersection of information technology and higher education.

I am particularly excited to see the launching of Internet2. The first Internet simply was not up to the task of supporting many of the real-time activities that are fundamental to research, teaching and learning. Nor was it entirely reliable or easy to manage. I think it is fair to say that the first Internet provided only a tantalizing glimpse of what might be possible with a more powerful Internet.

Our current commercial Internet is providing some of the tools we need to meet the challenges we are facing in higher education. However, it is too cumbersome and expensive for some of the more demanding needs of the new higher education environment. The technologies of Internet2 are being designed specifically to support the core processes of research, teaching, learning and service. These processes are fundamental to a university's mission. The most important of these is the focus on data -- creating data, manipulating data and analyzing data. Other processes include the support of creative dialogue and collaboration between researchers, faculty and students. Internet2 may not achieve all these goals, but we hope it can achieve most of them.

What might the new higher education environment on the Net look like? One approach may be to create a new campus environment on the Net itself. With the power of Internet2, all of this may become not only possible but also potentially affordable, and manageable.

With Internet2, all of the communication, collaboration and research that we need to support quality teaching and learning may occur via tools and applications on the Net.

So, we need Internet2 to support communication and collaboration between faculty and students. This means real-time video and audio; it means multicasting, and it means Quality of Service. Other presentations in this Internet2 virtual seminar provide in-depth information and insight into the new applications made possible with Internet2. Be sure not to miss the presentations by Ted Hanss to get a preview of these applications.

We also need Internet2 so that our higher education institutions will be able to support transparent supercomputing, and interactive research environments -- across space and time. We need it to support our ability to control and manipulate data with equipment such as electron microscopes from remote locations. And we need it to be able to support interactive video, text and images at the desktop -- in other words, to make learning spaces of offices, homes, and flexible spaces wherever we are.

But you might ask at this point, why does higher education need to change? Why should higher education move to these new models? Why should we adapt our existing courses and curricula ? Isn't higher education doing a good job right now?

Let's consider a few facts about higher education and how we are doing. I think it is fair to say that we have not only a pressing need but a driving need to transform higher education.

This is not to say that higher education is weak or in a bad way. In fact, as it is now, higher education is a real success story. We have over 36 hundred institutions of higher learning in this country today, and we enroll over 15 million students. In many ways, our higher education enterprise is the envy of the world. If you walk across any of our campuses and into our engineering departments, physics departments, chemistry, math, or instructional design, you'll find that the students clearly reflect the global impact and attractiveness of our higher education enterprise.

We've also been successful -- remarkably so -- with research and technology transfer. The first Internet was a result of successful collaboration between higher education, government, and corporations. It is now an extraordinary success within the private sector. We see World Wide Web addresses everywhere our eyes fall: on TV and movie screens, in magazine and newspaper ads, on restaurant doors and truck sides. In just ten short years, the Internet has developed into a multi-billion dollar a year industry. So higher education has been remarkably successful at being a source of new technology and then collaborating to spin these technologies off into the commercial sector.

In addition, demand for our product and services is growing. There are two major events driving this demand: the baby boom echo and the expansion of the Information Age. Worldwide, the percentage of people seeking high school and college education is expanding at a phenomenal rate. In fact, between 1970 and 1985 college enrollments doubled worldwide from 26 to 58 million students.

In addition, industry consultants predict that information workers will need an equivalent of 30 credit hours every seven years just to stay current with the skills required in their jobs. In the U.S. alone, a 1995 projection suggested that these figures could translate into potentially 20 million new full-time equivalent learners probably over the next 10 years, or by the year 2010. In other words, the Information Age may be providing more new learners than there are students currently enrolled in all of higher education right now. Clearly higher education is on the brink of a period of tremendous growth. We really have a great opportunity here.

But it's time for a reality check. We've got some problems. College costs are soaring. In a course that I teach, one hour of instruction actually costs more than a first-run Broadway play. Now, I like to think that I do a good job of teaching, but somehow comparing an hour in my class to an evening at a Broadway play is rather sobering.

If you look at the cost of college tuition and expenses as a percentage of income, you'll find that over the past 30 years the cost of going to college has increased faster than any other index -- faster than medical care, faster than the cost of living, faster than disposable family income. For example, the rate of inflation in 1996 was 2.9%, but that same year college tuition increased 5%. A college education is becoming so prohibitively expensive, that many folks must go deeply into debt for the privilege of attending college. In a nutshell, we're pricing ourselves out of the market.

One obvious reason for increased cost is that overall we're seeing a decline of federal and state aid to higher education. Another is that our physical plants are aging. We've been playing the deferred maintenance game for years, but it's now starting to catch up with us. At the same time, our students are asking for more amenities and services. When I was in college, we mostly got our exercise by jogging around campus and playing tennis outside. Now we have to have a health club at our institutions -- new multi-million dollar buildings called "Wellness Centers." What once was simply a gym now has become a spa. These amenities that we're providing are part of what's dramatically increasing our costs.

Another fundamental problem is that we have stagnant productivity. We teach people the same way now that we taught people 500 years ago. The rest of society has been changing the way it does business, but we have not.

In addition, our higher education culture generally runs counter to budget controls. We often believe that if more money is needed to support the current enterprise, then we simply ought to increase the funding. We don't look long and hard, at how or why our culture and the processes within that culture may need to change. We simply don't work that way. But in the outside world, the relevance of the higher education community is increasingly being called into question because of our resistance to change in these areas.

The bottom line is that we're a community in denial. We spend more and more of our time on fund raising. We have people in charge of enrollment management. We talk about discount rates, we give scholarships -- all of which effectively reduces the tuition rate for some lucky students, but raises it for others. It's not a scaleable model.

One higher education cost model that I'd like to cite is Maricopa Community College. Maricopa is a high-quality, low-cost producer serving over 150,000 students in the area surrounding Phoenix, Arizona. Within Maricopa, 25 courses represent 50% of the credit hour production. Or, phrased differently, an entrepreneur in Phoenix could select 12 courses, spend a million dollars designing and developing each of them, go to some university and say, "Will you give my students academic credit if I give you a 5% cut of the action?" With that, they will have just yanked 25% of the revenue stream from a fine, high-quality, low-cost producer. How many of us are not subject to that kind of competitive pressure? Many of us are in even worse shape because we are high-quality, high-cost providers.

What do some of our friends in higher education have to say about our dilemma? William Massey and Robert Zemsky identify a potentially serious result of this competitive situation. They suggest that as more and more undergraduate education shifts to non-traditional providers, some of higher education's traditional values will be at risk. What they mean by traditional values is not a canon of treasured works; rather, these traditional values refer to a philosophy whereby higher education can invest programs and people into areas of inquiry that a corporate or for-profit market may not deem profitable. Non-traditional providers may do a quality job with the large undergraduate courses, but we have to be concerned about what happens to the support for less obviously important fields of inquiry in any new funding model.

What do our critics have to say? Our critics say that we are in deep crisis because costs have risen but quality has not. This assessment comes from Peter Drucker. Drucker predicts that big university campuses will become relics within 30 years. Drucker also predicts that residential colleges will cease to exist. I think that Drucker probably overstates the case. I think that college campuses provide an ideal environment for 18 to 22 year olds needing a comprehensive life base of learning. For the older adult learner, however, the situation is not as clear.

So we see lots of signs of coming change, whether we're ready for it or not. The virtual university is one of these signs. Is a virtual university part of the answer to the growth market in education? One virtual university that you have probably heard about is the Western Governors' University. It is being created by a group of governors from about 16 western states. This is a university with no campus. It is also a university with no faculty. Rather, it issues franchises for delivering courses and programs. We have already learned how to deliver presentations and programs in a virtual environment, and we know that it can be done. But, you might ask, how do we do assessment and certification in such an environment? We might not currently know the best ways to do that, but again, we can learn and we can do it.

The leaders of this virtual university cite multiple studies across many subjects and disciplines that show no significant difference between the success of students completing programs on campus, and students completing programs using distributed technologies. Now, if you've been a professor in a classroom for many years, this may be a hard pill to swallow. We all like to believe that our lectures stimulate students to new heights of understanding and enthusiasm. But the reality of the situation is that educational research has been unable to find any compelling data arguing for the superiority of synchronous live lectures as effective learning tools.

So, a major question facing the higher education community is, "Can we use information technology to enhance teaching and learning? To instruct in different ways? To teach the new skills that are needed? To increase the dialogue between faculty and students? To increase the speed and effectiveness of learning?"

We in higher education are a very conservative community. Our cultural values are deeply embedded with centuries of tradition. And yet we're facing the same kind of productivity change that was faced by the American manufacturing sector some years ago. It was very traumatic for them, and I suspect it will be even more traumatic for us. That sector of the economy had only about 100 years of history to undo. We've got 500.

What other challenges lie ahead of us in transforming higher education? We need to improve the quality of our teaching and learning. Most of the teaching and learning and research that needs to be done can no longer be done satisfactorily with existing tools and resources. There is simply too much to be learned. And too many skills to be learned. We have to deal with the increasingly complex content of higher education curricula.

We also need to address students' needs for learning highly complex skills. Not only are new materials and resources needed, so too is greater clarity concerning what can be taught and what needs to be taught. Also, complex learning often depends on access to expert people, programs and tools, all of which are not necessarily available in one spot on one campus. In fact, some of these tools and people may be located hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

Another part of a quality program is meeting the needs of students. Many of our students find it difficult to come to campus even once a week. Coming to campus multiple times a week is even more difficult. Students even find it difficult to come to campus to handle the administrative details of being a student. And we certainly don't make it easy! How many of us refer to parking permits as "hunting permits?" Students, staff and faculty at various institutions have been known to circle the campus or wait at entrances to parking lots for 20, 30 or even 40 minutes. Many students find looking for materials in a physical library so foreign that they sign up for courses only if they know they won't have to use the campus library. And what about the benefits of students meeting with students, a fundamental part of interactive learning? What learning outcomes might be possible if students could meet with their instructor in groups of two, three or more in the convenience of their home or office? Our new higher education culture needs to be friendly and convenient to these large new groups of students. We need to adapt our programs and offer part-time programs that are available not in our time and space, but in theirs.

So I think that we should consider the Net as a fundamental tool in teaching, learning and research -- perhaps as the foundation for a new global campus. I believe that the Net and the new applications made possible with Internet2 can provide a way to retain our core values in higher education while meeting our productivity and growth challenges.

So why do we need Internet2, and why do we need it now? We need it NOW because it will take time to develop and implement this network. It will also take time for our higher education institutions to develop "Net" programs, and for the faculty to adopt, learn and use these new technological capabilities. We have other related challenges. Can we use information technology and the network to enhance productivity? Can information technology provide more education to more students at a small increase in cost? Can we reach expanding student markets and more diverse student markets? Can we reach some of those 20 million equivalent learners and provide them with services?

We know how to provide those services. Colleges and universities know how to teach. In fact, it's one of the things that we know how to do better than anyone else. What we have to do is overcome our own cultural barriers to embracing these new students and new environments. If we don't initiate this kind of change, perhaps someone will initiate it for us. So I would say that another reason for Internet2 is survival. Survival of higher education as we know it. We can only survive if we are competitive.

In closing, I believe that we can meet the challenges of a growing educational marketplace and a changing higher education landscape with the Internet2 technologies -- and a change in cultural attitude. The Network is doable, although technologically daunting. Yet it may be the easier task. I invite you to join us all in helping to make these changes.

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