Senate Plenary Session |
When I received the invitation to be a panelist, I deliberately did not ask why I was chosen. I was afraid that the answer would be that I was to present, in five minutes, the other side of the argument that Professor Noble just spent forty-five minutes advancing. After all, I am the University representative to both Educause and the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, organizations that Professor Noble singles out for their support for the "disaggregating" of the faculty role. I was also involved in the introduction of CourseInfo, an application that makes possible the asynchronous delivery of material that he says undermines the classroom experience. If I were to appear in the role of the antagonist, I would presumably argue that the changes in people's educational needs, which demand "just-in-time" learning and "flexible" time and place programs, combined with the impact of the new technologies, primarily the Internet, have redefined the educational landscape. As a result, the traditional institution, particularly the large public research university, will inevitably be replaced by new providers, largely constructed on a for-profit model and more attuned to the marketplace. The technology journals are replete with articles that develop this scenario at length: bricks replaced by clicks. Unfortunately, I make a poor spokesperson for this point of view because I do not share it, nor is it the attitude of this university. I also do not believe that the new technologies undermine the central role of the faculty member, who is in fact using them in ways that enable him or her to remain at the vital center of the educational experience. In short, I do not believe that we here at Pitt are in the midst of a fundamental revolution which either must be embraced or opposed in its totality. Professor Noble's metaphor of "High Noon" notwithstanding, the situation is not so simplistic. I do agree that the educational environment is changing significantly. The need for life-long learning, for example, will continue to grow. And life-long learning does not lend itself well to the traditional residential instructional patterns of the university. But that does not mean that either the practicing professional who has a continuing need to keep skills current or the traditional undergraduate student who learns best in a residential community has to be abandoned. It does mean that individual institutions will have to determine with greater clarity their own goals and priorities about the programs and populations they are best suited to serve. No single institution can or should try to be everything or do everything. This is a lesson we have tried to learn and to practice. Universities have been through such periods of change before, of course, so we do have some experience to fall back on. The articulation of the public land-grant mission, for example, represented a sea change in the role of higher education. The significantly enhanced access to higher education that began with the GI Bill and continues with the growing participation by previously underrepresented populations altered the public institutions at least substantially. The growing partnership with the federal government in research dramatically enriched the overall educational environment within the university. The new demands by society for a wider range of instructional programs accessible to different populations gave rise to new types of institutions-the community colleges, and, to a lesser extent, proprietary schools. Universities have shown a remarkable ability to adapt to such changes-changes that are largely dictated by legitimate societal issues-without losing sight of their core academic mission. At Pitt, for example, we have in recent years significantly improved the quality of our traditional undergraduate programs. One way in which we have done so is through the judicious use of an array of instructional technologies. Since the classroom remains at the heart of our educational experience, we invest on a continuing basis in the classroom environment, making sure that faculty have a variety of tools at their disposal-from instructional software to projectors to network connections to Smartboards-to enable them to teach in the way they find most appropriate. We provide an extensive array of training opportunities to assist faculty in determining the most effective approaches to attaining their own individual instructional goals. We provide faculty and students with dependable access to a high-quality network, so that they can easily access both internal and external educational resources, and to mail and communication services. We implemented a stable CourseWeb platform to support those faculty who wish to use that to enrich their courses. All of these efforts were directed at enhancing quality, not reducing costs or providing the commodities which Professor Noble describes. Enrich is the right word here, because the overwhelming use of the platform at Pitt is to support on-campus, residential, classroom instruction. While there are some professional and continuing education programs that use the asynchronous component of the platform to reach populations that could not otherwise take advantage of their programs, its primary use is as a supplement to otherwise traditional courses. We have not seen faculty using its capabilities in order to reduce formal class time, but instead using it to provide additional instructional opportunities. The CourseWeb component is not in its own right a course and it is not intended to be one. It generally has little utility outside of the instructional environment which the faculty member constructs for it. Those environments are as varied and diverse as the faculty itself. The fact that the platform has been adopted so quickly by so many faculty in so many disciplines-1100 faculty since Fall 1999 have voluntarily elected training-shows that many of our faculty view it as an effective instructional tool. If anything, the University has had to slow down the pace of adoption in order to ensure that the technology was stable and could be appropriately supported. Let me end with a quote that Professor Noble will presumably agree with, and one which will demonstrate to Professor Tobias that I have not forgotten everything he taught me. Thomas Carlyle, that most astute of observers about the impact of industrialism (what in the current setting we could call technology), noted that by the mid-nineteenth century, education was becoming "mechanical": "Instruction, that mysterious communing of Wisdom with Ignorance, is no longer an indefinable tentative process, requiring a study of individual aptitudes, and a perpetual variation of means and methods, to attain the same end; but a secure, universal, straightforward business, to be conducted in the gross, by proper mechanism, with such intellect as comes to hand." While we no doubt should continue to be concerned that Carlyle's prophecy will some day be realized, we have weathered the century and one-half since his expression of concern and have remained true to his definition of "Instruction." I see little reason to fear that we will not continue to do so. Robert F. Pack/3-18-2002 |