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Services to Remote Users: Marketing the Library's Role - academic libraries can benefit from distance learning via computer - Abstract

Library Trends - June 22, 1998

ABSTRACT

Distance leaning is an emerging educational market of compelling interest to higher education. Driven by economics and enabled by innovations in educational technology, this new market presents significant marketing challenges to academic libraries. Libraries should approach support to distance education as a new business opportunity, utilizing techniques of market evaluation and analysis. Close alignment with faculty and administrators, together with meaningful performance measures, can position academic libraries to provide appropriate educational support while improving awareness of the importance of libraries as a competitive advantage in distance education.

INTRODUCTION

As they approach the end of the millennium, colleges and universities are engaged in an extraordinary investment in technological innovation. Educational technology has become an irresistible force on large and small campuses across the land, infiltrating institutions to a degree that rivals the level of corporate investment in information technology over the past decade (Cunningham, Tapsall, & Ryan, 1998, chap. 2).

Educational technology is a compelling investment for higher education for a number of reasons. The marketplace demands computer literate workers, and students must be introduced to computing technology while in school if they are to succeed in the workplace. Faculty can conduct research more easily and collaborate more productively if they have access to colleagues and research data via the Internet. And, as has been the case in the corporate world, an institution may well expect lower administrative support costs in a computing-rich environment.

For many academic institutions, the prospect of increased revenue from distance education plays an equal, if not greater, role in this technology investment decision. The revenue streams presently being realized by established continuing education and distance education institutions are significant, and forecasts for growth in this educational arena are consistently optimistic. The Western Governors University, the University of Phoenix, Britain's Open University, and Florida Gulf Coast University are representative of institutions that have already made serious investments in the success of this new form of higher education. Many other colleges and universities can be expected to seek much-needed revenue from distance education (Blumenstyk, 1997a, 1998).

Higher education also needs flexible capacity. After two decades of declining enrollments, the children of baby boomers now threaten to swamp colleges and universities. In another decade, the cycle will go bust again (Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education [WICHE], 1998). The difficult economic climate in which these market swings must be managed is well documented. Rapidly escalating tuition costs have brought market resistance and drawn unwelcome attention from the political arena. Physical expansion is increasingly problematic for many institutions. A declining federal research base must cover a growing number of research-oriented universities. Competition for grants and individual philanthropy is on the rise. These trends combine to place relentless pressure on institutions to find new sources of revenue and new low-cost educational models. Distance education is such a model.

As a practical matter, education at a distance has been available for many years. Correspondence schools, public television, training videos, and satellite download programs are familiar examples of educational opportunities available to those who live and work at a distance from traditional institutions of higher learning. Until recently, such educational alternatives held minimal interest for traditional higher education, and academic libraries had little reason to provide support to the students of these programs. As a result, academic libraries have, by and large, only recently turned their attention to the challenge of supporting this community of learners.

The rapid expansion of educational computing has dramatically altered the prospects for, and interest in, post-secondary distance education. Whether the prospect of distance education is imminent or distant, academic libraries dare not ignore this change. In his classic work on innovation, Peter F. Drucker (1985) describes in detail the transforming role of technological innovation on industries and market structures (chap. 6). Although academic libraries are not accustomed to thinking of their products and services as an "industry" with "markets," Drucker's insights are both enlightening and relevant to contemporary libraries as they seek to define a relevant role within the emerging phenomenon of distance education.

Like most venerable institutions, academic libraries are justifiably proud of their strengths. The current model of academic librarianship has developed over the past 100 years as a sustainable strategy for providing cost-effective information service and products to resident communities of scholars. Yet Drucker provides compelling examples of similarly stable industries that were plunged into crisis by changing markets--almost overnight. The U.S. health care system, long distance telephone service, and mainframe computing are among the industries that went, in less than a decade, from confident secure stability to a scramble for survival.

In describing the ways that seemingly solid enterprises can find themselves suddenly challenged, Drucker (1985) points to the convergence of previously unrelated technologies as one significant driving force for change (pp. 84-85). Information technology, for example, was created from the convergence of telecommunications, desktop computing, and client-server technology, and one need look no farther than the industries of insurance and banking to appreciate the profound transformation wrought by these converging technologies. Just as information technology transformed consumer banking and insurance work (Evans & Wurster, 1997), so too will educational technology transform education.

Rapidly changing environments always provide both opportunity and risk. Technology based instruction is clearly an emerging growth market for higher education, and academic libraries will, of course, develop service models and staffing patterns to meet this new demand. Perhaps the greatest challenge librarians will face is in managing print collections and traditional resources so that they remain high-value assets to students off, as well as on, our campuses. In this endeavor, librarians will be obliged to confront the pervasive belief that everything distance learners need to know is (or soon will be) online. Just as teaching at a distance is a new "product line" for faculty, so too is library service at a distance a new "product line" for libraries. Digital resources are but one medium of many available to libraries to meet the needs of students learning at a distance.

THE MATURING OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Colleges and universities, like the traditional academic libraries they support, can be understood in a business sense as maturing organizations. The life cycle of a successful enterprise generally follows a predictable path to maturity. In the early years of its existence, an organization will struggle to establish a place in the market. Once established and secure, the successful enterprise will grow quickly, often faster than the growth rate of the population or the economy. Success inevitably draws competition and, as competition enters the market, growth rates flatten. At the end of the life cycle, a mature organization is characterized by significantly slowed growth and greatly increased competition. For obvious reasons, every industry seeks to defer the onset of this unhappy state. Nevertheless, banking, publishing, utilities, and the automotive industry are prime examples of industries that have slid, like higher education, into maturity.

Fortunately, the phenomenon of business maturity has been the subject of intense interest and study for many years, as have strategies for forestalling its onset and restarting growth curves. One proven technique for delaying industry maturity is that of innovation in products and markets. Advances in technology routinely generate new products to serve existing markets and, likewise, new markets can be created by new technology (Porter, 1985, chap. 5).

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