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E-Learning and the Tradeoff Between Richness and Reach in Higher Education

Change - September 1, 2000

While sober minds have prevailed since the precipitous fall of the NASDAQ in mid-April and the subsequent closing of the IPO window, once-promising initiatives like drkoop.com, toysmart.com, CDNOW.com, Petstore.com, Furniture.com, boo.com, and Reel.com are on the critical-care list, have been taken over, or have found their final resting place. The effects of the dot-com shake-out are now being felt in educational ventures like eCollege.com and VarsityBooks.com.

Through the haze of missed opportunities and dashed dreams, there is an emerging consensus that the current travails of the dot-corn industry will create a more stable foundation for the Internet-based economy. There is good reason for such a rosy outlook. Within the next few years, the convergence of data, voice, and video over the Internet-coupled with residential broadband, wireless connectivity, and a host of Internet appliances-will give new meaning to the concept of being online. For good or for ill, the theological concept of omnipresence will have no better earthly exemplar than the Internet.

The events following "bloody April" have also brought about a renewed appreciation for the old-fashioned virtues of economic performance over market potential. The "B2C" (business-to-consumer) craze that drove the IPO marketplace simply lacked a rational foundation. One only needed to look at the huge discounts and saturated advertising of dot-coin ventures during the 1999 Christmas season to conclude that this was not sustainable.

Academia, too, has had its flirtation with dot-com grandeur. The establishment of "for-profit" subsidiaries to market distance-education programs at Columbia, Cornell, Duke, NYU, Temple, Maryland, and Nebraska is only part of the story. Many, many more schools are collaborating with commercial providers toward the same end.

Are colleges and universities drawn to distance education because they believe it will deepen and extend the learning experiences of students, or are they just trying to get a piece of the dot-com action? The question is admittedly simple-minded, even deceptive; multiple aims fuel the interest in distance education, and many well-motivated people are endorsing it. But if institutions were truly concerned with using distance education to enrich collegiate learning experiences, Internet-based learning, we expect, would look much different from what we've seen thus far.

PORTING THE CLASSROOM TO THE INTERNET

Much of what constitutes Web-based education is little more than porting the classroom-including its less-than-successful ritual, the lecture-to the Internet. The aim is to reproduce the functionality and the "look and feel" of the classroom in a new operating environment, similar to the reproductions resulting from porting a software program to different platforms.

The result, most often, has been little more than an exercise of posting on the Internet an enhanced syllabus that includes lecture content, reading assignments, and practice tests, along with using discussion groups and e-mail to respond to students' questions. Distance-education providers advertise how easy it is to place one's course content on the Internet with their software; one provider puts entire colleges online in under 60 business days. To these parties, the Web is primarily a delivery system for that which already exists-not a fundamentally new medium with the potential to birth new pedagogical models.

There is no more eloquent (or disturbing) testimony to the port-the-classroom approach than the so-called "No Significant Difference" literature, critiqued earlier in Change (see Resources). This body of research maintains that the learning outcomes of distance education are the same as those of classroom-based education. Regardless of personal views and conclusions, the significant thing about the "No Significant Difference" finding is that the research question would be deemed significant in the first place. Why hold up lecture-based classroom education as the benchmark for evaluating new educational delivery systems? If there is no significant difference between distance education and classroom-based education, advocates of distance education should hardly trumpet this claim; they should be deeply troubled by it. How could they think of making the status quo the standard for evaluating learning technologies that have so much more to offer? Taken as a whole, the "No Significant Difference" literature may r epresent the most egregious application of benchmarking in the past 20 years.

Further evidence of the port-the-classroom model is seen in the apparent gravitational pull of video technology on educators. This fall, Northwestern University will have completed an upgrade of its campus networks-using access to Internet2-so that students will be able to receive videotaped lectures and other instructional materials in their dorm rooms. More institutions that belong to the Internet2 consortium are likely to follow suit. Northwestern's vice president of information technology predicts that video will be the next hot technology in higher education.

What explains this interest in video? Perhaps this is Internet2 in search of a "killer app"-an arresting application that justifies all that bandwidth. I suspect, though, that the compelling thing about video is that it is the easiest way to digitize what goes on in the traditional classroom, but is hardly much of an advance over the use of videotaped lectures in correspondence programs. It is as though nothing has advanced our understanding of learning since the days of instructional television in the 1960s. The difference is that you can now receive it on a 24/7 basis in your dorm room-like cable TV.

Proponents of distance education will likely object to the port-the-classroom characterization, citing findings that distance learning can entail a higher degree of student interaction than is possible in the traditional classroom--particularly among students who are less apt to speak up in classroom contexts. This is a legitimate point. Yet, it is striking how advocates of distance learning easily tolerate the dichotomy between distance-learning and face-to-face classroom interaction. Why does such a blatant manifestation of "either/or" thinking go unchallenged--particularly when the vast majority of distance-education courses draw primarily on-campus students?

In The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid argue that the educational payoff of digital technology is evidenced primarily across time instead of space. Digital technology is far more effective in maintaining the interactivity of established communities than it is in creating new communities from scratch. Hence, the authors state, "paradoxically, technologies may do a better job on the conventional campus than on the virtual one."

THE TRADEOFF BETWEEN RICHNESS AND REACH

One explanation of the forced dichotomy between distance education and traditional education is found in the analytical framework developed by Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster of the Boston Consulting Group. In Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), Evans and Wurster argue that all businesses are subject to a tradeoff between "richness" and "reach." Richness refers to the overall quality of information (for example, currency, accuracy, interactivity, relevance), and reach refers to the number of people involved in the exchange of information. The significance of the Gutenbergian invention of the Internet is that it "blows up" the existing tradeoff between richness and reach, since information can be exchanged at the speed of light at virtually no cost. Even traditional "brick-and-mortar" enterprises, ranging from small retail stores to large industrial conglomerates, are affected by this change, as "information is the glue that cements ve rtical linkages together and defines a large portion of competitive advantage." Consequently, entire industries face the prospect of being "deconstructed" because much higher levels of richness and reach can be achieved with the same bundle of economic resources.

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