1. Director, The Flashlight Project
The Third Revolution
Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D.
Director, The Flashlight Project
x42

2. Outline Why so much IT - what’s driving it?
Parallels to two previous technological revolutions in education
Problems likely to be caused by the third revolution; brainstorming some responses

3. Rising Use of IT in Instruction

4. Why this Mudslide of I.T.? Content< Access<
Personal productivity
Competition for $$, students
Desire to teach better
Tight resources (?)<

5. Moore’s Law
Price performance of computer chips doubles every 18 months
No matter when in time you are in time (past, present, future) half the chip’s power (per dollar) just became available in the last 18 months.

6. The Digital Treadmill(Content)
Where the work world uses chips, thinking often changes & divides rapidly
Colleges must adapt curricula to avoid slipping behind

7. Pressure for Curricular Change
Where the work world relies on empowering technology, students need higher order thinking & creativity C

8. The Digital Treadmill (Access)
Job market: more jobs require sophisticated skills(partly due to I.T.)
Demand for lifelong learning (partly due to I.T.)

9. The Budget Treadmill
More knowledge capital needed per learner (in many fields)
Productivity improvements in other sectors increase standard of living, forcing college wages up, then college prices
More learners splitting the subsidy

10. Summing up
Technology helps put higher education on several treadmills.
Curriculum, access arrangements & budget all must change, continually, just to “keep up.”
Money is tighter than ever
Be driven to, and through the wall?
Or transform?

11. “This Changes Everything (?)”
Two previous technological revolutions:
wider range of offerings, AND
wider range of learners and teachers, AND
economies of scale
1) Reading-writing (and, later, printing)
2) The Campus (organization, shared facilities)

12. Some of our Other Findings
Those revolutions were qualitative changes in the organization of learning
They enabled more specialization, new kinds of roles and organizations, larger scale
They changed how people spent time-when people learned, scheduling, paces of thinking
They changed how people learned, while alone and together
Their losses mirrored their gains

13. The Third Revolution Campus- BASED Campus- BOUND Distance Teaching
and how they’re used to widen offerings, access
Computer, Web, , etc.
Distance
Teaching
Distributed
Learning
Environments

14. Infrastructure for Integrated Access
Many
Inst’ns
Infrastructure
for Integrated
Access
Students
Western Governors University (public, no shared technology, centralized assessment)
Oregon EdNet (public network)
JEC College Connection (private network)

15. What Do You Think?
Do you know of examples where use of IT helps simultaneously extend access and enrich quality (diversity of offerings and/or quality of outcomes)? in an affordable way?
Assignment? course? course of study? other?
Split into groups for a couple minutes to brainstorm; each group identify three examples

16. Issues of Concern The curriculum?
How can we help assure that the Third Revolution will really be an improvement, and not merely survival?
The curriculum?
Redefining the campus (and online) work?
Making sure that BIGGER can be better, too?

17. 1. Focusing the Curriculum
In the light of increased specialization, open-ended resources, the need to control costs, etc., what are some important foci for general ed and every major?
1. Educating students to take more responsibility for their learning, individually and collectively
2. ??

18. 2. Redefining the Campus
How do we invest in our academic environments?
Question 2: What teaching and learning functions should campuses be best at supporting? How about the online environments that we’re (collectively) creating?

19. 3. Scale>>Support
Can being BIG help education become more personal or supportive?
Bigger library and more specialized reference librarians
Question 3: how else can BIGness provide important personal support (and economies, too)

20. Forming Small Groups
1. Foci for the undergraduate curriculum that would help advance the third revolution (digital treadmills, better outcomes, larger and more diverse student body, etc.)
2. How should the on-campus environment be specialized? the online environment? (e.g., where do large “lectures”?)
3. How can being BIG be made an advantage in providing more personalized or supportive education?

21. Quality (& the TLT Group)
As in the past, a more specialized, decentralized structure for education creates dangers of
Lack of shared educational vision,
Lack of collective responsibility: if everyone’s involved, who’s responsible?

22. Responding (1)
- “We know we’ve reached the point of no return but we don’t know where we’re going...”
TLT Group “Visions” regional and inst’l workshops to help build team; clarify shared ideas about purpose, direction
“Degrees of Distance” workshops (ditto but specifically for access issues)

23. Responding (2)
Seeing what you’re doing through the fog- Flashlight Project’s evaluation tool kits, training,consulting

24. Conclusions Standing still doesn’t seem to be an option
Gains in accessibility and offerings ought to be pursued simultaneously.
Sharing on larger scale will often be needed
To avoid compromising quality, we’ll need to think in some new ways about organizing for learning (ways sometimes foreshadowed by previous revolutions)

25. Keep in touch Steve Ehrmann Ehrmann@tltgroup.org 202-293-6440 x42