Stabilizing the Platform for Virtual Learning

Distance education's success depends on a well-managed infrastructure

Despite the enthusiastic embrace of distance education and virtual learning environments, not enough attention is being paid to the technological infrastructure necessary to support the effective delivery of those services. Almost all education conceived under the rubric of virtual learning seeks to leverage information technology (I/T), and so requires the implementation of powerful and readily accessible computer systems. But what are the technical and financial implications of upgrading network infrastructure to support virtual learning environments? And how will we support advanced applications using such technologies as virtual reality and streaming video?

There are other questions, too: The production of materials is currently quite expensive, both in courseware development costs and faculty time. What are the prospects for lowering these barriers? Will administrative systems provide the tools for access and customization to handle large numbers of remote students?

I/T-leveraged learning is more than just delivering content; the delivery of the atmosphere, the nurturing of inquiry and the building of a community of learners are equally critical. We need to ask not only how technology can help deliver content in a virtual learning environment, but if and how it can provide the broader environment that is necessary for effective learning.

Also, most of us, as institutional employees, tend to be institution-centric and forget other points of view. "Customers" (students) in this age of re-education—a major driver for distance education—may have some affiliation with multiple institutions, a fact that significantly raises the importance of interoperability and standards among institutions. More than common tools, education vendors will need common practices that use the tools in standard ways.

The points of view of the "supply side"—faculty and teachers—need to be understood as well. Teachers will want to use modules and instructional objects from a variety of sources to build their courses, which suggests the need for standards at the educational object level, and the creation and indexing tools that manipulate such objects. To some degree, teachers will move from being composers to being conductors, assembling materials and motivating students more than writing new scores from scratch.

The target courses for virtual learning are not clear. Automating large lecture classes would yield the highest payoff, both academically and economically. Yet some, by their nature, are poor candidates for virtual education.

Although consumers are free to choose from a variety of learning experiences and to customize course timing, content and interface, packaging, continuity and assessment of such experiences become difficult. It is important that higher educational institutions preserve such critical activities as programmatic sequencing of courses and assessment, even as their other roles as overall ed ucational brokers are eliminated.

Living with Technology

A key challenge in leveraging technology to support virtual learning is to recognize the volatility of emerging technologies. Some of the technologies that are needed for an effective infrastructure have not yet reached maturity. However, in a world in which performance doubles every 18 months, even relatively mature technologies have at best limited life spans.

Keep in mind a couple of technological axioms as well. Interoperability—open standards that allow a variety of creative entities (both academic and corporate) to build separate pieces that work together and leverage each other—is perhaps the most important principle underlying the rapid development of technology. At the same time, it makes the standards processes themselves Byzantine and occasionally inconclusive. Indeed, as networking has moved from an academic activity to a major industry, collegial standards processes have been replaced by competiti ve forums that often do not lead to consensus. Managing complexity is the most challenging aspect that we face as the technology builds on itself. Technologies must be able to accommodate not only increases in usage, but also differences in the variety and performance characteristics of environments in which users apply the technologies.

While higher education was the wellspring in the rise of computing and networking, much of that torch now has been passed into the commercial sector. It remains for us to focus on the factors that make us different from the corporate world, and concentrate our energies there. For example, unlike corporate workers, who tend to stay at a single computer all day, many of our workers (students) will work at several different computers. This creates a mobility requirement for services such as authenticatio n and customization.

A Taxonomy of Infrastructure Technologies

As we sort through the technological issues in building effective widespread virtual learning environments, it is useful to categorize technologies into four groups:

• Delivery Systems—technologies that include on-campus and residential networking, Internet, video servers.
• Middleware—the glue pieces, such as authentication, authorization, customization and localization, that transform raw delivery into viable service offerings.
• Creationware—tools such as authoring tools, applets and multimedia editing systems that allow authors and subject experts to develop electronic materials.
• Administrative Support—the systems that track not only the students, but also the online educational materials that students use to shop for courses and faculty to build new courses on other modules and components.

  Delivery systems and basic instructional tools:
In general, higher-speed lines and frame relay services have made delivering virtual education to businesses and schools easier, but delivery to the home is still a major challenge. Emergent extensions of telephony called the DSL group (ADSL being the most promising) can offer high-speed access to the home, but much as with the earlier approach of ISDN, these digital subscriber services are limited to homes fairly proximate to telephone central offices. Satellite technology has been proven to be effective in a broadcast environment of one-to-many, that is, reaching great numbers of learners from single points of dissemination. There are low-earth-orbit technologies that promise to enable the delivery of two-way Internet services (including video) to rural environments, but they are not moving along rapidly.

What we see today in the Internet is pretty much what will be available for the next year or two. The Internet2 project suggests solutions to the challenge of enabling new and innovative network applications, especially those that require high bandwidt h or other committed transmission characteristics. In some sense, Internet 1 was about connectivity, Internet2 is about differentiation. However, Internet2 faces considerable logistical and technical challenges, and it will likely take some time before it can provide operational services for virtual education.

Despite this litany of technical realities, we should not despair. Virtual education is inexorable, not only for the power and economies that it may afford, but also for the changing customer base and their orientation to online activities.

Dedicated video links are expensive and do not scale well, making them an interim component of the distance learning technology infrastructure. While economics will continue to justify one-to-many video via satellite, most multicast video services will ultimately be carried on top of conventional data networks.

CD systems are another alternative for delivery of content that should not be overlooked. This technology can be used in conjunction with the Internet, so that it's easy to incorporate hot links as well as permitting updates via the Net.

    Information and communication tools:
Besides e-mail, which is already relatively mature, two communications tools, Net News and IRC (a.k.a. "chat"), can create an electronic agora. However, there still are limited filtering and archival mechanisms and very little structure, and they do not deliver content well.

In terms of information tools, the Web is obviously powerful. JAVA applets offer promise, particularly to facilitate simulations, but this technology is not without challenges. For example, for a short time one could be confident that a program written in JAVA would be executable in every Web browser, but JAVA is now fragmented and less a standard.

The University of Colorado is one of several campuses experimenting with desktop video across the Internet—commonly referred to as "video over IP" (Internet protocol)—and early experience indicates that it is truly a "killer app," both in its appeal and its impact on the network. Today we can cobble together off-the-shelf technologies to run coordinated conferencing—with video, voice and data—across IP networks. One C.U. distance learning class uses a real-time video of the instructor on students' computers. When the teacher opens a Web page, it simultaneously opens on the students' browsers. In another part of the screen, she can play a videotape through a VCR connected to her computer; the students see the video and hear her describe aspects of the scene. This technology may be costly today in terms of equipment and network capacity, but these costs will drop considerably in the future.

  Middleware: Middleware is the term for the evolving set of software tools needed to turn rough capacities into useful services. Today, these areas include network and individual security, customization (for example, bringing your folder of browser bookmarks, e-mail aliases and other preferences to your current location), and access to personal files. In the future, new applications such as calendaring and video may add new middleware requirements.

   Authentication:
Most critical in the development of a virtual learning environment is a campus-wide authentication scheme for students. Current instructional software controls, such as IP address, are broken; existing administrative support services use inherently insecure access schemes. Effective authentication will allow students access to site-licensed materials, such as databases, digital libraries or local courseware, and access to administrative support services, such as online forms and official recor ds.

There also must be interoperability of those schemes among institutions. Institutions will form consortiums to purchase instructional materials in bulk. The vendors of those materials want to have a common way to grant the consortium privileges. Individuals will have association with multiple institutions and want a common means to confirm those separate relationships.

The issue is less which option an institution chooses and more that one has an institution-wide authentication approach and an interoperability plan.

There are several candidate technologies for authentication, including "smart cards"—credit cards embedded with computer chips containing digital credentials. However, it is unlikely that home computers, the platform for many distant learners, will have readers for smart cards anytime soon.

    Authorization:
Authorization is a key follow-on to authentication by providing a set of attributes and characteristics of authenticated individuals that indicates permissible electronic interactions by those individuals. It is a very challenging problem for several reasons. First, the technologies are not evident at this point. Generally, each application has its own authorization internals and do not interoperate. Second, the maintenance of permissions on an individual basis is extremely time-consuming. It would be far better to have group characteristics as the intersection of various groups.

For example, a departmental secretary working on a research project would have a set of permissions that represented membership in the department, a job classification and a project code. But a group-based approach, while administratively viable, raises the hardest of issues—establishing the classifications. One major university spent two years establishing the 92 distinct relationships that an individual could have with the institution, only to discover during implementation that a president emeritus of the university was not in any category.

   Customization and directory services:
One of the characteristics of the information age is the concept of "mass customization," that is, developing applications that permit a wide variation in preferences and features while enabling valuable personal datapoints such as e-mail aliases and bookmarks. With increasingly complex software, we have come to rely heavily on these personalizations to make the world tractable.

Two further developments in mass customization could have positive effects on virtual learning. We need to learn how to make personalization portable, so that we see the same networked world regardless of location and computer. And, as odd as it sounds, customization must become standardized. There must be ways to move our preferences between applications and interoperable tools to manage this personal data. The core technology on which to build these services lies in directories. However, we have a fair distance still to go on refining these tools and putting them into effective use.

 Creationware: Beyond the basic information and communication tools described above, some virtual learning is based on advanced instructional environments, such as virtual realities and multimedia course ware. Creation technologies for these systems—be they Web-development tools, JAVA applets or multimedia authoring systems—are still immature, both as tools and as a marketplace. There is little interoperability, limited management mechanisms and volatility in key pieces of the technology.

The target courses for virtual learning are not clear. It is well known that a relative handful of core academic courses—Basic Chemistry, English 101, American History—account for the bulk of college education credits. Automating these large lecture classes clearly would yield the highest payoff, both academically and economically. Yet some, by their nature, are poor candidates for virtual education.

While not a "technical" reality, the issues of intellectual property greatly compound the complexity of creating educational systems. Few professors understand the ongoing changes in copyright and their consequence on the display of materials, as well as their ownership rights and limitations, especially with regard to institutional rules, around electronic materials they create.

 Administrative support—Systems upgrades and metadata creation: Two technical areas will be essential to the effective administration of virtual learning: opening up our current administrative systems to student access regardless of location, and developing new systems to administer and manage the instructional objects of virtual education.

Many universities have started to extend access to core administrative systems, generally through Web interfaces. These efforts must include authenticated updates and transactions as well as the inquiry mode usually deployed. The prospect of opening up institutional financial systems to student users, in a manner consistent with that student's access to academic resources, requires strong technologies and partnerships with internal auditors as well as faculty.

Right Level of Investment

It is clear that not all schools will find it strategically or economically appropriate to pursue virtual learning. Indeed, many may be adversely effected by the virtual worlds to come. The inventory of technological needs above is long and costly. On rule of thumb is that those pieces that are also germane to the broader academic enterprise—such as authentication and Web/e-mail/video servers—are clear wins. The leading edge is always more expensive and frequently leaves avatars with implementations that are inconsistent with final standards.

Although building new infrastructure will be expensive, there is great promise for decreasing costs in areas where human interaction is not required. Student services should be able to capitalize on technology to realize cost savings, as New Brunswick Telephone did when it automated its process for activating phone service—the cost dropped from $27 per customer request to 12 cents per request.

Next Steps

Despite this litany of technical realities, we should not despair. Virtual education is inexorable, not only for the power and economies that it may afford, but for the changing customer base and their orientation to online activities.

There are several steps that individual campuses should consider, regardless of their long-term commitment to virtual learning. Basic investments in networking, campus-wide authentication and administrative system interfaces should be considered now. Robust desktop computers on campus and standardization of the software on those desktops are obvious needs.

On the national level, we need to move toward interoperability and support the continued development of tools. Initiatives such as the CNI Authentication project and the Instructional Management System project are important efforts. Federal agencies need to promote the core technologies, assessment approaches and intellectual property structures that are still needed to move us closer to the promise of virtual learning.