The Promise

In testimony before the Web-Based Education Commission in 2000, the head of the for-profit UNext.com, Andrew M. Rosenfeld, buoyantly prophesied a spectacular future for education in a wired world. "Internet learning has the power fundamentally to transform educational opportunity and democratize access to education," said Rosenfeld. He argued that this would be particularly true for "those who because of the happenstance of financial and geographical circumstance never could hope to attend a physical college or university." Students would don pajamas and study at any hour without interfering with work and children's schedules. Distance learning promised them credentials that would otherwise be out of their reach due to everyday — but immovable — realities.

Energized by the sweeping enthusiasm radiating from Rosenfeld and other entrepreneurs, many leaped into the fray to serve new audiences of learners. They made plans to ramp up from initial enrollments of a few hundred to ten thousand students or more within five years. Enterprises such as UNext.com, Columbia's for-profit arm, Fathom, NYUonline, and Duke's Global Executive MBA program (GEMBA) attained marquee status as they developed offerings suited to undergraduates, graduate students, and particularly to continuing learners.

The Debate

Skeptics branded these visions of an exploding new industry and the revenues they promised as "digital diploma mills" and questioned whether distance-learning offerings could possibly measure up to the quality of learning offered in the traditional classroom and the experience of working face-to-face with experienced instructors. As Rensselaer's Carol Twigg writes, for-profit distance learning became a sort of bogeyman-a dark force of market-driven changes that will dumb down and misdirect the important pursuits of higher education.¹ This concern is sometimes accompanied by fears about burgeoning technology expenditures and how they might impinge on college and university expenditures in other important areas.

At a conference held at Columbia's Teacher's College, some who were unswayed by the excitement around computer-based learning argued that instructional methods that accompany online learning are often inadequately conceived. Another frequent allegation is that "business agendas and parents' fears about their children's job prospects — rather than compelling evidence that computers will improve education — are driving the push to computerize all levels of education."²

Supporters point to abundant data showing a compelling impetus for colleges and universities: young girls and boys are learning with computers, software, and games from a very early age now. Their K-12 experiences deepen the expectation that they should have access to high-quality, high-tech instructional methods in college. In 2000 the Fortunes Forum reported that 51 percent of U.S. households were connected to the Internet. The Web-Based Education Commission, which interviewed hundreds of citizens — teachers, students, public officials, and other citizens — found that "…the Web is a medium today's kids expect to use for expression and communication — the world into which they were born."³

Advocates also call attention to evidence that emerging technologies and software allow instructors to develop more effective pedagogy and tailor their approaches to the specific needs of their students. Software that can be adapted to an instructor's individual style is now commercially available in most disciplines. The new technologies enable professors to move away from a format that emphasizes lectures and a single textbook to include online problem demonstrations using multimedia, or materials from far-flung libraries (for a brief glossary of terms, see Appendix A).

A proven advantage appears in the way students interact in technology-augmented courses. Brown University Professor and head of the Futures Project Frank Newman points out that students who might otherwise remain silent in the classroom can communicate with professors and other students simply and quickly via e-mail and electronic bulletin boards. Faculty office hours that were barely used in the past have given way to animated online exchanges that offer students a compelling means of developing their ideas and thought processes. Many professors report that they explore topics more deeply and do not mind the additional time it takes to do a thorough job.⁴

The Reality

Will information technology become higher education's magic bullet? It is abundantly clear that virtual learning has made more than a trendy splash. Virtual courses are offered on topics that cover everything from public health to the cello. According to the Futures Project at Brown University, over 1,100 U.S. colleges and universities are offering courses via the Internet, not to mention hundreds more in other countries.⁵ A diverse range of computer-mediated learning methods has become more common and more vital to both traditional nonprofit and for-profit institutions. In fall 2001, fully 72 percent of the nation's 3700 (non-profit) colleges and universities offer some form of online learning. They range from public and private research universities to liberal arts colleges to community colleges. In addition, a 2001 study conducted by the Education Commission of the States shows that there are now 624 for-profit, degree-granting, virtual higher education institutions.⁶ The full range comprises nonprofit research universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges to burgeoning for-profits offering an assortment of courses that include everything from professional skills to degree programs. According to a report by the International Data Corporation, computer-assisted education will increase 33 percent through 2004, making online instruction a $12 billion business.⁷

As the Internet and online learning have brought about a wide new range of available methods for communicating, teaching and learning, and conducting research, colleges and universities are supporting these new tools by allotting larger portions of their budgets to them. A 2001 Dun & Bradstreet report, corroborated by surveys conducted by David Smallen of Hamilton College and Karen Leach of Colgate University, shows that colleges and universities have budgeted an additional 13 percent more for information technology than last year. In 2000-1, a record high of 3.3 billion was allocated for administrative and academic hardware and software.⁸

All aspects of the academic enterprise are taking part in this technological revolution. While many expected the lion's share of impact from new technologies to affect the natural sciences, in fact, their implications for the social sciences and the humanities are profound, as well. Stanley Katz, former president of the American Council on Learned Societies and the author of the 1999 book, Dancing with the Devil: Information Technology and the New Competition in Higher Education, has discovered "the remarkable extent to which technology is changing how humanists do their work."⁹ For instance, the 12 members of the Associated Colleges of the South are collaborating to offer team-taught liberal arts courses available to students on the different campuses, which use varying calendars and span more than one time zone. Online learning methods have motivated innovation, adaptation, and risk-taking throughout much of academe.

Extending Access

As UNext's Robinson predicted, the thrill of intellectual stimulation in credit-bearing courses now extends to some traditionally excluded student groups, who are finding greater access to a college education. While distance learning has not yet worked to reduce costs, it has allowed people to enroll in higher education who would otherwise forego it due to their need, for example, to work full-time or care for children or parents. At institutions such as the publicly funded Open University of Great Britain and the for-profit University of Phoenix, so-called nontraditional students have enrolled in vast numbers, earning baccalaureate and master's degrees and taking non-degree courses to gain professional skills and promotions to new levels. These are students who are typically over 25 and up, employed, often have families, and, significantly, are highly motivated to complete their degrees. As one example, the nursing program at the University of Phoenix, now the largest such program in the country, is geared to working adults. Instructors are professionals who are currently working in the field they teach. "Courses are compressed into five-week periods, taught consecutively, and begin every month so degree-seekers don't have to wait for a new semester; classes are limited to 10 students, who are expected to spend about eight hours a week online, four to six hours outside of class."¹⁰ Students typically take 24 months to complete a degree.

These institutions have become models for many for-profit and nonprofit colleges and universities that have begun to experiment in online learning. Among their many strengths, the Open University and the University of Phoenix have developed comprehensive methods of assessment for students, faculty, and administrative systems, alike. Their strikingly rigorous quality-control systems allow these universities to maintain and improve the quality of learning, instruction, and curricula at each level. The fact that communications between instructors and students take place online facilitates regular and high-quality evaluations. In many ways, these nontraditional universities are ahead of their more established counterparts in finding useful methods for assessing outcomes and improving performance.

Concerns and Counsel for Colleges and Universities

Insiders as well as onlookers have expressed alarm at market-oriented hype surrounding some of the new purveyors of higher education. In the colleges and universities, where terms like "bottom line," "customer," and "product" are typically considered inappropriate descriptors for the academic milieu, many are appalled by the race to expand higher education's "market." They fear that in the pursuit of a new "business plan," colleges and universities might lose sight of their long-held educational objectives. The alumni magazine of one of the nation's top research universities recently published an article that promised, "The Internet is revolutionizing the way Americans learn. Driven by an information economy, where knowledge is the hot commodity, the online education market is booming… Online education presents a new revenue source, an innovative way of teaching and a means to bring courses to people who otherwise would not have access to such quality instruction."¹¹ Pointing to the questionable importance of a new revenue source, some ask whether launching into this new educational medium aligns with larger educational goals. The answer may well be a yes. The test is in whether the new programs meet or advance the standards of the institution's established principles.

With this in mind, some have raised red flags about the way colleges and universities have launched into online education without a systematic plan. Many colleges and universities have acquired and deployed computer-based technologies in a rapid yet piecemeal and haphazard fashion. At first, scattered faculty members began to experiment with and employ new technologies to advance their particular teaching and research pursuits. Only after this trend blossomed into a significant number of unconnected but significant new branches have some campuses prepared policy statements about the use of distributed or distance learning and its further development on their campuses. Other campuses have not yet examined the implications of these tools for their institutions.

Policies and Planning

In fact, the promise of new technological advancements and applications has led a growing number of colleges and universities to reassess not only their general policies, but also their blueprints for the future. An admirable example is the University of Illinois, where a group of faculty members and administrators collaborated in an extended examination of the university's policies and planning. However, many institutions have begun the process of developing principles and policies only after experimenting with new online technologies, and finding themselves without guideposts when questions and concerns arise. Those who have been through this process argue for an early conversation about critical issues among a broad-based group of campus community members.

One issue that will soon call for new policy — given the emergence of digital courses — is the question of whether an institution will grant credit for full-length digital courses offered at other institutions toward a degree in the home institution. A second issue would be whether institutions whose professors offer their own digital courses to current students would grant those students a course credit. The Committee on Wellesley in the Digital Age polled 20 private colleges and universities in January 2002 to ask how they were handling these questions.¹² Some of the large universities that have been leaders in developing digital learning tools and courses, including Cornell and Stanford, have policies in place that allow students to receive degree credit for online courses taken elsewhere and for online courses offered by their own faculty. Most smaller liberal arts colleges surveyed do not have specific policies for granting transfer credit for fully online courses taken at other institutions. A few, including Smith and Skidmore, are currently developing such a policy, while others use existing policy to evaluate the credit-worthiness of online courses. (See Appendix B for the results of the survey.)

Exploiting the magic of high technology

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid make a convincing case that colleges and universities have not, like other sectors, adapted their practices to take advantage of the magic of the digital age. This is certainly not for lack of high-tech equipment. In fact, they argue, we have a bit of campus schizophrenia. We have "high-powered computational infrastructures and highly conventional institutional practices...(It took an English academic to say to one of us, 'We've done things this way for 500 years; why should we change now?')."¹³ We are well equipped with cutting-edge tools that are ready to facilitate innovation and creativity in the higher-education experience. On the other hand, colleges and universities seem married to long-standing pedagogical practices, such as the lecture, that may not be optimal methods for learning.

While some institutions have explored the potential of new technology more thoroughly than others, most colleges and universities recognize its importance as a force for innovation and a significant point of competition. Experts predict that in the future, "distance learning" and "campus-based learning" will no longer be an either-or, one-versus-the-other concept. As Frank Newman of Brown University has pointed out, the lines have long since begun to blur. In the very near future, the two will blend and complement one another even more than they do now. We will soon arrive at a point where we no longer talk about "online" learning, because it will be recognized for what it is: one among other powerful tools in the educational process.

Developing a learning community

One limitation of many U.S. campuses is the notion that the teaching and learning process occurs only between faculty and students, and primarily in the formal setting of the classroom. Outside of that centuries-old classroom format, students, faculty, and staff members are segmented into separate areas, where they work together and tend to exchange ideas primarily with one another. One of the most exciting forecasts for online learning is that it may change our understanding of learning from a one-way, professor-to-student model to a more complex system where campuses and Internet-based realities become true learning communities. In addition to the expected teacher-student learning process, professors, staff, and even alumni also learn from students, students learn from alumni or staff, the community learns from visiting speakers, and so forth.

Mount Holyoke College President Joanne Creighton and Phil Buchanon of the Parthenon Group have written that,

Colleges and universities around the country are striving to achieve this inclusive community and the rich exchange of experience and ideas it can foster.

In the section that follows, we will describe several examples of online learning endeavors developed primarily by research universities and liberal arts colleges. For more information on these examples and others, please see the list of resources on pages 11-12.

The Landscape

New entrants. Over the past decade, new purveyors of postsecondary education have proliferated. Some that began with great promise and substantial funding have suffered setbacks, but continue to propel themselves forward. The for-profit UNext, offering courses through its Cardean University, has partnerships with Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of Chicago. UNext began with an impressive line-up of investors, agreements to pay each partner as much as $20 million and share in profits, and a recent multimillion-dollar contract for courses with General Motors. Yet, after spending as much as $700,000 to develop high-quality business courses, the company is not yet making money, and recently laid off 42 percent of its employees.¹⁵

Others have handed in the towel. Pensare, a for-profit e-learning company in California, planned to offer business courses to corporations. In spite of high-profile partners, including the business schools of Harvard, Duke, and the Universiy of Pennsylvania, Pensare folded in mid-2001. In November 2001, New York University's for-profit arm, NYUonline, announced that it would restructure and eventually discontinue its business offerings, citing an economy headed south. VirtualTemple, the for-profit arm of Temple University, folded in summer 2001.

Some for-profits have reinvented themselves in an attempt to adapt to new challenges. Fathom, the for-profit arm of Columbia University, has struggled to draw both investors and students, in spite of its remarkable set of partners, which include notable libraries, museums, film institutes, universities, and scholarly institutes. Columbia has spent over $10 million to bolster Fathom.¹⁶ Recently, Fathom has reached out to two new groups with potential for large audiences: the AARP and Elderhostel. The Global Education Network (GEN), which opened in 2000 with financier Herbert Allen's backing, set out to develop liberal arts courses and programs on a quality level consistent with the best of the Ivy League and liberal arts colleges. It approached 15 top colleges and universities as potential partners, with mixed responses. Many institutions were concerned about GEN's proposal to offer students credit toward a degree for courses offered through GEN. In the end, those that agreed to work with GEN did so with the understanding that they would be "provided an opportunity to dip an institutional toe in the on-line distance-learning water," while GEN would cover the costs and take responsibility for producing and marketing the courses.¹⁷ Two institutions, Brown University and Wellesley College, along with a handful of professors from other top colleges and universities, are working with GEN to produce courses. Over the past year the company has filmed courses taught by five Wellesley professors and faculty from other institutions. GEN has focused its early production efforts on two courses — Wellesley Professor Guy Roger's course on Alexander the Great and Brown Professor Darryl West's course on the media. These courses, currently in beta testing, cost as much as $1 million each to produce.

Government-funded and multinational organizations are also investing heavily in online learning projects. Army University Access Online (AUAO), a $600 million project, offers soldiers "anytime, anywhere learning" (eArmyU.com). Service members can enroll in one of 89 programs and take courses through 24 different colleges and universities to earn certificates, associates, bachelor's, or master's degrees. The World Bank is facilitating many different types of distance-learning projects in countries such as Ethiopia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, India, and Ivory Coast.

Research Universities. A look at some of today's major players in U.S. online learning shows that some are moving at a fast clip in adopting new technologies and online learning methods. They provide a guide for other colleges and universities in the U.S. and around the world. Examples include Massachussetts Institute of Technology's MIT-Singapore Alliance, in which advanced engineering courses are offered simultaneously to students in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in Singapore via videoconferencing and satellite technology. Recently MIT launched its new and highly visible OpenCourseWare (OCW) website with a commitment to make all of its course materials available to the public, free of cost, as long as they are used for noncommercial purposes. Announcing plans to devote $100 million to the project over 10 years, the university calls OCW one aspect of its commitment to "disseminate knowledge across the globe" and "share our thinking about the content of a modern curriculum in all the areas in which MIT excels." In November 2001, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that MIT's plans for the project have sparked widespread interest at other institutions, and many see it as an important statement that course materials should be thought of not as commercial products but as scholarly publications, readily available for review and reuse by interested peers."¹⁸ However, since the project's launch, the university is finding significant variance in faculty skills with computer-based course tools. According to MIT Professor Steven Lerman, this presents a real challenge as MIT works to support faculty and course materials at "very different places in the technological spectrum."¹⁹ Initially, MIT is developing interactive web pages to serve students and faculty on campus, rather than moving to create resources for the wider public.

Two more leading examples are the University of Texas Telecampus and Pennsylvania State University's World Campus. The shared effort among state universities in Texas allows students to enroll in courses offered on any one of the fifteen campuses in the UT system via the new University of Texas Telecampus (UTTC). As the UTTC website announces, the system's "online courses and degree programs can be completed entirely at a distance and meet the same high-quality academic standards as their onsite equivalents. The UT TeleCampus provides everything you need to participate, including admission applications, registration and financial aid information, classrooms and academic resources." Pennsylvania State University's World Campus offers 13 undergraduate programs (including baccalaureate and associate degree programs and certificates), two graduate programs (a master's of education and an inter-college M.B.A. program), and five noncredit programs. World Campus courses are developed and taught by the same Penn State faculty members who teach in the university's campus-based classrooms. Distance-learning students receive the same credits as those who take the same courses on campus.

Some research institutions have found ways to combine their reputation for high-quality curricula and exceptional instruction with new technologies, making only relatively minor modifications to deploy these resources in virtual classrooms. Three prominent examples offered by top research universities include Stanford University's electrical engineering program, Duke University's Global Executive MBA program (GEMBA), and the University of Pennsylvania's PennAdvance program. With very few changes in pedagogy or curriculum, the universities transfer these offerings to the Internet.²⁰

Partnerships. Many colleges and universities are beginning to collaborate through partnerships or consortia. The Indiana Partnership for Statewide Education is a voluntary association of Indiana's private and public colleges and universities with the goal of delivering courses and programs via distance-learning technology for the benefit of all Indiana residents. The SUNY Learning Network is a consortium of 37 campuses offering courses for undergraduate and graduate study. The Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance, made up of 10 institutions that span the map from Michigan State to Iowa State to Texas Tech Universities. The alliance offers master's degrees in family financial planning and will soon expand to offer master's degrees in youth development and gerontology. The portal of the Southern Regional Electronic Campus allows students to enroll in courses from colleges and universities in 16 southern states.²¹

Alumni offerings. Continuing education courses for alumni and other adult learners are increasingly popular in the online environment. Recently Harvard University began offering "course vignettes" in a limited number of subject areas. Announced in March 2001, the first offerings included "Rediscovering Homer: Poetry and Performance" and "Making Waves: Quantum Billiards to Concert Acoustics."²² Modules or mini-courses are becoming the preferred formula, whether for stand-alone alumni offerings or as self-contained elements in a longer course. Since September 1999, Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale have been collaborating to produce a series of online mini-courses for their collective alumni. In Fall 2001, the group piloted eleven courses with approximately 30 alumni enrolled in each course. While these universities teach a similar, highly selective group of students, in actual practice, they found that there are differences in their cultures, connections to alumni, and approaches to risk. These factors complicated their early collaboration, and in November 2001, Princeton announced that it would withdraw from the partnership.

In addition to offering continuing educational opportunities, colleges and universities are looking to new technologies as a means of deepening their bonds with alumni. Alums with impressive experience in a variety of fields may be tapped to share their knowledge with other graduates of their alma maters. Some may be invited to participate in one or more class sessions with students and to make themselves available via the Internet for follow-up exchanges with professors and students.

Liberal arts colleges. Should colleges whose reputation is based on small classes and accessible professors in an intimate campus setting attempt to compete in the virtual world? Some well-respected members of these communities have questioned whether the high-tech revolution should invade their communities. They point to the valuable "brand name" readily associated with a first-rate education. After all, many families across the U.S. recognize the lifelong benefits of a liberal arts education. As one example of success, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that "an estimated 40 percent of the Fortune 500 chief executive officers in 2000 graduated from a liberal-arts college or received a degree with a liberal-arts major."²³

However, even those who are not yet interested in expanding their offerings to students in distant locations can benefit from the innovations made possible by emerging technologies. Liberal arts colleges, with their strong emphasis on excellence in teaching, have an imperative to find ways to use all means at their disposal to improve the teaching and learning process. As one tool, information technology has great potential for transforming the college experience by engaging students and providing a more effective learning process.

Some liberal-arts-college professors have used their imagination and creative skills to develop new software to meet their particular teaching styles, making practice exercises and problem-solving sets available with text and graphics in an online environment that allows students to return and review areas they find challenging. Three examples at Wellesley College include Professor William Coleman's instructional software for chemistry, Professor Barry Lydgate's French in Action multimedia tools, and Professor Jing-heng Ma's online aids for learning Chinese. Professor Coleman's multimedia software offers, among many other tools, a "molecular gallery," which allows students to review molecular structures and compare them side by side to others. Professor Lydgate, with his colleague Pierre Capretz of Yale University, developed the widely-used program French in Action, a course in beginning language and culture that combines video, audio, and print to give students access to authentic French (French in Action was funded principally by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is part of the Annenberg/CPB Collection). Professor Ma uses sounds, text, and animated images in her multimedia software to aid students with Chinese pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, calligraphy, and Chinese fables to improve students' listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. These software programs are designed to be used outside the classroom, leaving more time for interaction and conversation in the classroom.

Other faculty members, including some at Wellesley, have chosen to adapt the software innovations developed by faculty members at other institutions to augment their courses. Many faculty software developers, such as Professor Coleman, are making their digital innovations available free of cost to anyone who asks for it or locates it on the College portal.

At Wellesley, faculty members and the Division of Information Services are increasingly involved in developing and implementing computer-based tools for teaching and learning. Course web pages, electronic conferences, interactive assignments delivered via the Internet, multimedia instructional tools, and videoconferencing are enriching the classroom experience-and extending it. Using FirstClass, the College's centralized e-mail and conference system, Wellesley professors are interacting with students beyond the traditional classroom and office-hour settings. Almost 75 percent of the College's Fall 2001 courses used First Class online conferences, which allow students to continue course discussions outside the classroom, post assignments and receive professors' comments, and view a variety of course materials 24 hours a day. Currently, faculty, staff, and students are interacting in a total of nearly 6,000 online conferences focused on a broad range of topics.

In addition, more than 150 Wellesley courses had an online component other than FirstClass as of December 2001. Twenty-three departments have one or more course-related websites. The most active departments in developing and using websites for their courses are Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, French, Political Science, Spanish, and the Writing Program. One recently developed website serves as a resource for Art History Professor Lilian Armstrong's course, "The Beautiful Book: Medieval and Renaissance Book Illumination in France and Italy." It contains over sixty images from the five Books of Hours held in the Wellesley College Special Collections Library. This online resource allows students to review the images at their convenience and reduces handling of fragile manuscripts. For her Tropical Ecology course, Professor Marianne Moore, with Mellon interns Cristi Collari and Sophie Lee, created a web-based preview of the fish, plants, and coral that students study and then go to see during Wintersession in Belize. Each page has a hidden definition so that students can learn to recognize the different species. They may also quiz themselves using the QuickTime slideshow, which shows the fish and coral in random order. (For a summary of other digital materials used at Wellesley, see Appendix C).

Other liberal arts colleges are advancing their commitment to teaching with new instructional tools, as well. At Colgate University, a program called "Collaboration for Advanced Learning" is making small changes across many departments with the goal of making a significant impact on teaching. In a Fall 2000 geology class, students watched films on the advent of the atomic bomb. Members of the Colgate Board of Trustees were asked to view the same films at home. After viewing the films, students and board members logged into an asynchronous online discussion about them. Near the end of the course, two alumni came to help tie threads together by speaking with Colgate students about their experiences in World War II and how they affected their thinking about the decision to use the bomb. An English course called "Living Writers," makes weekly live lectures by a series of authors available online to alumni, friends of the University, and prospective students. Each of the interviews and readings are taped and made available in audio and video over the Internet. The sociology and anthropology department has created a digital archive of over 1,500 artifacts for professors and students to use with class projects (see http://cel.colgate.edu for more information).

Partnerships among liberal arts colleges are opening exciting new horizons. As President William Durden of Dickinson College has said to prospective participant, "Enjoy the distinctly American residential socialization that the liberal-arts college provides, and we will bring in, via technology, not just elements from our own campus, but a globally networked enhancement to your education."²⁴ Dickinson is one of 13 members of the Associated Colleges of the South (ASC) to participate in a virtual classics department called Sunoikisis, after an alliance of Greek cities that revolted against the Athenian Empire.²⁵ Faculty members are working together to offer inter-institutional, collaborative courses such as Greek Lyric Poetry and the Literature of the Roman Empire in an online environment that spans campuses and even time zones. Another example is a collaborative project between Kenyon College and Denison University known as "Proximity Learning." Courses in Chinese, Japanese and Arabic are taught synchronously via videoconferencing on both campuses. Currently, one professor teaches each course, however the goal is to encourage joint-teaching projects. Smith, Mount Holyoke, Amherst, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Haverford Colleges are members of Five Colleges, Inc. The colleges have installed interactive videoconferencing (IVC) classrooms with plans to offer team-taught courses available on more than one campus. In Fall 2001, Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges collaborated with a jointly offered physics course.

In recent years the Mellon Foundation has funded The Center for Educational Technology (CET), based at Middlebury College. The CET's mission is to investigate and facilitate "innovative and effective uses of technology in teaching and learning" at Middlebury and other liberal arts colleges in the U.S. Led by Clara Yu, the CET serves as a regional technology center for the New England and Middle Atlantic regions. The Center also collaborates with Southern and Midwestern regional centers under the auspices of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education.²⁶

Liberal arts in other contexts. Many types of colleges and universities offer liberal arts courses, whether their mission is the liberal arts or not. For example, by 1998 The New School for Social Research was offering over 300 liberal arts courses in the humanities, the social sciences, natural sciences, music and theater arts, and other areas. The goal for these web-based courses (www.dialnsa.edu) is to allow people from around the globe to enroll in New School courses at times and places convenient for them. The New School's DIAL (distance instruction for adult learners) program encourages students to communicate with faculty and other students asynchronously. Princeton University has recently announced the development of a Teaching and Technology Center, which will bring faculty members together with instructional technologists to explore inventive ways to improve liberal-arts teaching using digital technology.

Audiences for Online Learning

Students. Computers and telecommunications have become part of the everyday lives of working people in the U.S. and in many other countries around the globe. However, while the evolution to an information economy has rapidly permeated the business world, it is still relatively new to higher education. Its potential is great. The innovations made possible by emerging technologies already engages new generations of students who have grown up with a computer screen and a mouse in place of other toys and learning tools. The games they are learning and the images they view have taught them new, non-text-based ways of solving problems and learning. In the future, colleges and universities will compete, in part, based on their technological readiness and their facility with distributed learning methods that young people have come to expect from a very early age. Some of their parents and grandparents are currently finding the Internet and new digitally enabled course offerings to be powerful learning tools, whether they use Google.com for fleeting fact-finding missions or enroll in a course on world religions through their alma mater, many miles away.

Distributed learning also presents students with interactive tools they can adapt to their particular learning styles. Active learning techniques introduce a new means of relating to faculty members and other students. Those who might normally hesitate to enter into a discussion or offer an opposing point of view in a traditional classroom may find online discussions more comfortable, allowing them to find a new voice. On the other hand, the relatively anonymity or facelessness (when video is not available) of the distributed-learning environment with its still loosely demarcated boundaries of civility has led some students to abuse instructors and fellow students with uncivil language and expressions of opinion.

Student costs. Initially many purveyors of online learning believed that they would be able to deliver their offerings at lower cost to students. At this early stage in the development of distributed learning, this prediction has not come true. The costs of purchasing and maintaining technological infrastructure, paying the salaries of instructional technology experts, training faculty members in new methods and offering them leave time to take advantage of new tools, outfitting libraries in cutting-edge software and hardware, and in some cases, developing new software, are significant, indeed. These new expenditures, in addition to the many traditional expenses that come with providing postsecondary education, have deterred colleges and universities from lowering tuition.

In terms of a different kind of access issue, however, distributed learning has truly been successful in bringing higher education to those who might otherwise be excluded. As referred to above, full-time employees with an interest in acquiring new professional skills, completing a bachelor's degree, or beyond, can do so without sacrificing family income. Parents who choose to remain at home with children or aging parents can also take advantage of the "third shift" now available via asynchronous educational programs.

Faculty. College and university professors on campuses around the U.S. are using emerging technologies to add a new dimension to their teaching and in some cases, their research. Newer faculty members as well as those with more experience are experimenting with enthusiasm, whether they are communicating with students in online bulletin boards or live chat-room environments, or developing their own software, suited to the needs of the particular discipline and pedagogy. While some newer, tenure-track faculty members have been reluctant to devote precious time to developing online pedagogical tools, recent reports show this may be an unnecessary concern. The American Association for Higher Education and the "Merlot" project (http://www.merlot.org) indicate that a growing number of institutions consider innovation using digital tools a legitimate and worthwhile endeavor, and these colleges and universities are beginning to write guidelines that recognize such innovation into their peer review and tenuring policies.²⁷

Some faculty members find these new media frustrating, as well. Expectations for prompt feedback have many benefits, but certain drawbacks, too. The fast and informal e-mail system-nearly ubiquitous even in relatively low-tech classes-allows students to interact with professors easily and without the social constraints some might feel in the classroom. It also asks professors to place themselves on call, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as students wait impatiently for responses. Online bulletin boards often require another level of increased time commitment. While students can now speed their assignments and term papers through the ether at the moment before they are due, professors are finding a rising expectation for them to provide comments, assessments, and grades almost as instantaneously. The promises and benefits of the "anytime, anywhere" online learning environment places substantial additional demands on instructors.

Faculty instructional development with new technologies is central to integrating distributed learning in any college or university culture. The role of instructional technology divisions becomes increasingly important as computer-mediated learning methods become more central to campuses. A national survey of faculty members conducted in 1999 by UCLA revealed that "keeping up with information technology" was a considerable source of stress for 67 percent of faculty during the past two years, ahead of more typical sources of stress such as the demands of research and publishing, teaching load, and for some, even the tenuring process.²⁸ Part of the solution to this problem needs to come through careful strategic planning that regards the use of technology in teaching as an important asset. Many are asking how to bring the teaching and research functions of their college or university fully into the information era. An excellent example of a project devoted to this pursuit is the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. According to Stanley Katz, it helps nurture "intellectually original and technologically sophisticated faculty projects."

Intellectual property issues have taken on new dimensions with the proliferation of computer-based teaching and learning methods and technology mediated research. The issues begin with the rights of authorship and ownership of course materials ranging from syllabi and class notes made available online to instructor-created software and beyond. Who owns these intellectual products? Whether the answer is the college or the professor, or both, has been the focus of animated and sometimes acrimonious debates in the last few years. Issues such as the scope of copyright protection, licensing, fair use, exemptions for libraries, and patents have led higher education institutions to examine the practices and laws of other spheres, including journalism, business, and entertainment, to explore potential applications to the many new questions they face in the intellectual property (IP) arena. Recent contributions on IP in higher education include Constance S. Hawkes' Computer and Internet Use on Campus: A Legal Guide to Issues of Intellectual Property, Free Speech, and Privacy, and Georgia Harper's succinct guide, Copyright Issues in Higher Education.²⁹

Administrators and Staff. Emerging technologies and distributed learning demand the attention of college and university administrators and staff from the president's office to library professionals to the admissions staff and well beyond. The introduction of new methods of teaching and learning impinge on a wide swath of institutional policies ranging from the mission statement to free speech and privacy guidelines. Substantial new pressures on college and university finances are another major challenge. A decade ago, many institutions were dabbling in computer and video-based teaching and learning as an appendage to the central operating budget. In 2001, experts on both the academic and financial-administrative sides are making one point abundantly clear: look at the big picture, and consider distributed learning within it. Technology assisted teaching and learning should not be regarded as an add-on, whether to course offerings or the annual budget. It should be integrated into the institution's overall design for offering high-quality education.

On the policy front, college and university leaders look to their particular educational mission as the primary focus when considering new opportunities and their potential benefits and risks. As they begin to adopt new practices and methods, administrators and faculty members are working together to revisit institutional policies.

One lesson Stephen Ehrmann of the American Association for Higher education's TLT Program (Technology in Teaching and Learning) has learned over many years is this: Do not separate parts of the process from the whole. Look at the entire recipe, rather than one or two ingredients, such as technology. The best way to approach a globalization program is to consider the globalization agenda as a whole and technology as one aspect of it.³⁰

Particular attention should be devoted to libraries and the diverse information services activities many institutions now offer. Katz argues that far too little thought has been given to how technology is permitted to change libraries. "Do we know what we want the virtual library to be and do? Is enough money and appropriate personnel being allocated to libraries to perform their potentially expanded role in both teaching and scholarship? Who should train faculty members and students to use the library's information technology? Does, for example, a teaching and learning center belong in the library?"³¹

Fundamental questions facing college and university faculty and administrators

This report will attempt to explore several vital questions facing Wellesley and many other postsecondary institutions. They include:

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Endnotes