Bitten in the ASP (Abrupt Obsolescence in Postsecondary Education): Ken Baker

Both as an idea and as institution, postsecondary education in the western world has shown a remarkable resiliency, an imperviousness to radical change largely unknown in other social institutions. If, for example, we take as a starting point the year 1530 (the first reading of the Augsburg Confession), we note that 66 western institutions existing then still exist today in recognizably the same form (Kerr 1980). Both the Catholic and the Lutheran Churches are still around, as are the feisty parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man. The remaining 62 institutions are all postsecondary educational enterprises.

No doubt these institutions owe their persistence in part to the nature of their fundamental undertaking: That is, as recorders and interpreters of social changes, they must transcend those very changes. In this sense, postsecondary educational institutions have been in the world, but not of it. They've floated on the surface of the sea, recording and interpreting the antics of the multifarious sealife scuttling about the sandy seabed. A whale of a challenge, though, is about to ram the postsecondary ship while the crew sips tea on the poop deck. This challenge centers on the abrupt, discontinuous, and radical technological changes that will soon make obsolete somnolent postsecondary institutions, unless such institutions act quickly to reshape themselves in the tide of the changes.

About mid-December of this year, the United Nations will oversee a gathering of governmental and private-sector representatives from around the world, who will meet in Geneva, Switzerland, at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Although major US news media have paid scant attention to this convocation, WSIS will likely rank with the meetings at Appomattox and Potsdam in its longterm effects on our future social structuring, because this multi-government group has been tasked with an undertaking no less planetary than the full definition and structuring of a world-wide information society. Discussing the need for such definition and structuring, the UN organizers state:

The modern world is undergoing a fundamental transformation as the industrial society that marked the 20th century rapidly gives way to the information society of the 21st century. This dynamic process promises a fundamental change in all aspects of our lives, including knowledge dissemination, social interaction, economic and business practices, political engagement, media, education, health, leisure and entertainment. We are indeed in the midst of a revolution, perhaps the greatest that humanity has ever experienced. (WSIS 2003)

In the past, postsecondary institutions did well to float on still seas above the roiling undercurrents of the seabed. This present leviathan, though, will not allow such disinterested isolation. Those postsecondary institutions that fail to engage leviathan will find their futures as void of challenges as the future will be void of them.

Facing leviathan
In my kitchen I have a cutting board that's taken the whacks of three generations of cooks. At last admitting that the poor thing had earned the right to rest in peace, I stopped by a department store to buy a new one. While ambling through the store's kitchen section, I stopped to study a food processor that was a marvel of sleek technological design and function. Controlled by a computer chip, the promotional literature told me, this processor would allow me to select from a bewildering plethora of settings to do just about anything from chopping onions to crushing ice. Flipping through the owner's manual (22 pages), I got the clear impression that this processor could probably bring about world peace, nuclear disarmament, and widespread restoration of the environment, if I could just figure out the right combination of menu choices. Then I laid down the manual and bought my new cutting board. When I need chopped

Purple Rain 1, photograph by Bobby Morgan. Click for a larger view, and for more of Morgan's works.

onions, I grab the cutting board and butcher knife (neither of which came with an owner's manual), and when I need crushed ice, I wrap some ice cubes in a tea cloth and give them a few whacks with the back of the meat cleaver.

Though I admired the silly sleek thing, the technology of that processor far outstripped my willingness to absorb it. This disjunction between technological sophistication and consumer need illustrates the concept of "disruptive technology," one of the hotshot buzzwords now buzzing through business theory. In 1997 Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, published The Innovator's Dilemma, a well-received work that explored the impact of technological change on traditional business models and practices. Christensen essentially argued that the "relentless pursuit of excellence" often yields products with technological sophistication (and cost) that exceeds the ability or willingness of consumers to absorb (and pay for). According to Christensen, the widening gap between technological sophistication and consumer need opens the market to less sophisticated (and cheaper) technologies that more closely match the needs (and wallets) of consumers.

Key to Christensen's theory are the concepts of sustainable and disruptive technologies. Sustainable technology essentially refers to existing technologies already accepted by mainstream consumers, along with the occasional incremental or breakthrough improvements that enhance the performance of these established products "along the lines that mainstream customers have historically valued" (Christensen 13). This technological progress, however, sooner or later outstrips consumer ability or willingness to support it, a situation that Christensen characterizes as the dilemma of innovation. The widening gap between consumer need and technological sophistication opens the field to disruptive technologies.

Disruptive technologies fall short of the technological sophistication of mainstream sustainable technologies, so they're "inferior" products in this narrow object-oriented view. In a broader consumer-oriented view, though, these disruptive technologies cost less, are easier to understand and use, and more closely match consumer needs. Perhaps most important to business managers, the inferior technology isn't much of an issue in consumer decisions, given that consumers are already pretty well fed up with the increasing complexity and cost of the mainstream sustainable technologies that exceed their needs.

Consumers in so-called "lower tiers" of a given market are usually the first to seek out and support disruptive "inferior" technologies. Mainstream businesses in fact generally ignore these consumer voices, and the business managers justify their ignorance through recourse to dismissive and ultimately demeaning labels such as "low end," "low profit," and "low demand" consumers. These consumers, though, are in fact highly demanding, in that they aren't fooled by technological glitz, that they demand a cheap dependable product that meets their needs (not the needs of R&D weenies). In other words, these consumers aren't at all impressed with costly and complex products capable of doing things that the consumers don't want to do in the first place. And mainstream business managers often discover too late that these "lower tier" consumers are anything but low profit, when more and more "higher tier" consumers follow their lead in adopting disruptive technologies. As Christensen points out, "the new markets and opportunities opened by disruptive technologies require capabilities very different than those characteristic of firms whose prevailing . . . strategy is to pursue high-end customers and large markets and profit margins" (13). He goes on to point out that such business giants as Digital, IBM, Apple, Sears, and Xerox have all endured significant failures in vision, understanding, and market shares when faced with disruptive technologies.

But–- but-- this is education
What, though, does this business theory have to do with educational systems? Quite a bit, actually, at least if we properly conjoin two distinct but related facts. First, we must recognize that all educational systems are fundamentally systems that gather, archive, and distribute information. This fact is so whether we're speaking of a father teaching his daughter to fish or of a university granting advanced degrees in quantum mechanics. Second, we must recognize that computers (arguably among the top three technological advances in human history, third only to fire and agriculture) are also systems that gather, archive, and distribute information. Taken together, these two facts ought to give pause to any student of educational history and thought. Administrators and faculty in mainstream educational institutions (especially colleges and universities) are foolishly fond of portraying computer technology as an educational tool, an efficient handmaiden of the educational mistress, but this technology has in fact become a

Purple Rain 2, photograph by Bobby Morgan. Click for a larger view, and for more of Morgan's works.

raucous, rowdy, and highly fecund competitor to the mainstream educational enterprise itself. And if the mistress doesn't remake herself in the image of the handmaiden, then a new queen will soon rule the realm.

To fully grasp the inevitability of this last point, we must first confront an apparent paradox. A basic tenet of Christensen's theory holds that consumers demand less of their technologies than do technological innovators, that consumers tend to choose the simplest and cheapest tool that meets their needs. Can anyone therefore reasonably argue that computer technology (surely the most complex ever invented by humanity) presents any serious competition to our mainstream educational systems developed and honed through the centuries? Reasonably, yes. Despite their rich and (in many ways) deeply cherishable history, our traditional educational systems (especially our systems of postsecondary education) are highly inefficient, extremely inconvenient, and outrageously costly (even those such as community colleges that serve "lower tier" consumers). These systems are also unwieldy, relatively unresponsive to shifting social needs, turbid, and so bound by tradition that they're more accurately described as hidebound. With their forever growing physical plant, proliferating services and systems, burgeoning personnel pools, top-heavy administrations, and Byzantine complexities, mainstream educational systems have become the kind of sustainable technology that consumers have had just about enough of. In effect, traditional postsecondary institutions have improved themselves nearly to death.

In contrast, educational systems shelled over computer technology are efficient, convenient, and relatively cheap. They're also easily malleable, highly responsive to shifting consumer demands, and completely scalable to existing consumer needs. Perhaps most important, they make and break their own traditions as they go along. Although the technology itself requires an investment of educational effort, consumers are increasingly willing to make that effort because of the vast simplification it brings to their lives and the remarkable goals that the technology suddenly puts within their reach. Moreover, computer technology is rapidly shifting from the realm of laboriously acquired skills into the realm of osmotic acceptance. Older adults, for instance, often struggle through beginning computer classes to master skills that their children take for granted. Conversely, grade school children easily, almost unconsciously ply computer skills that their parents would certainly not take for granted. When I've sometimes asked such computer-literate children when and how they learned these skills, they look at me in much the way that I might look at someone who asked me when and how I learned to watch television.

Discussing the inevitable and radical changes already underway as a result of computer technology, William Wulf (president of the National Academy of Engineering) warned that college administrators and faculty must "ask whether the particularly quaint ways that we manufacture, distribute, and deliver higher education will survive the arrival of the information railroad," his metaphor for the IT component of computer technology (14). Wulf doesn't think so. "There will be major changes--changes not only in the execution of the mission of colleges and universities, but in our perception of the mission itself" (12). Wulf also seconds the warning of Marye Anne Fox (chancellor of North Carolina State University) that these changes will be profound, rapid, and discontinuous. In the view of Wulf, Fox, and other experts deeply immersed in the issue, those colleges and universities that do no more than dabble around the edges of computer and information technology will wither through obsolescence, and that quickly.

To better grasp the very real threat of abrupt obsolescence, postsecondary administrators and faculty might fruitfully study Western Governors University. Just this February, Western became the first and (so far) only online postsecondary institution to receive simultaneous accreditation from three regional accrediting commissions (the Northwest, North Central, and Western Associations of Colleges and Schools). This university offers associate, baccalaureate, and masters degree programs entirely online. The degree programs are so designed that new students may begin their degree programs at the beginning of every month (no twice-yearly registration hassles); moreover, students pay tuition only every six months (about $1,800 per six-month term, payable through convenient installment plans, with none of the in-state/out-of-state nonsense). Western's library offers all services fully online, with a great many library resources in digital format; when students need non-digital resources (books, for example), the library ships the material right to the students at no cost to them.

Western also appears to respond quickly to emergent social and educational needs. The University, for example, already has in place a complete online associate degree program that will allow educational paraprofessionals (teacher aides) to meet the certification requirements of the No Child Left Behind act. Western also has in place a fully online degree/licensure program that will allow students to gain baccalaureate degrees and meet teacher certification requirements of the No Child Left Behind act. The US Department of Education (tasked with implementing the act) has vigorously praised Western "as a potentially integral tool for states to comply with upcoming deadlines for hiring highly qualified instructors under the 'No Child Left Behind Act' of 2001" (Cavanaugh 2003).

Note carefully the use of the plural "states," a clear indication that the US Department of Education has accepted and begun to promote colleges without boundaries, an effort whole-heartedly endorsed by the Western Governors Association (parent organization to Western Governors University). In a recent resolution, the Association (representing the 19 states west of the Mississippi) called for the creation of an entirely web-based teacher training program, with a national certification process that would do away with parochial state certifications. The member states even went so far as to call for the creation of "curriculum markup language" (cml), a new computer language specifically designed to meet the demands of online course delivery. The Association asserts that such technological approaches allow quick

Purple Rain 3, photograph by Bobby Morgan. Click for a larger view, and for more of Morgan's works.

and comprehensive approaches to meet the nation-wide teacher shortages and the requirements of the No Child Left Behind act.

In West Virginia, state and local bureaucracies have already scrambled to gut the act's implementation, in effect trying to ensure that no child will be left behind except the state's hardscrabble hillbilly kids. Instead of looking for innovative ways to duck and cover, these bureaucracies ought to seek out ways to meet the act's requirements for improved teacher training and classroom instruction; and the state's postsecondary institutions ought to be the tugboats leading the effort. So far, though, the state's postsecondary institutions have spared scant attention to this significant emergent need. Recognizing this fact, we ought not be surprised when education students, teachers, and teacher aides turn to those institutions (such as Western Governors University) that give them what they need when they need it, cheaply and efficiently.

If through willed blindness we still refuse to see the writing on the monitor, perhaps this list of recent developments will help underscore the eminent and imminent aspects of this issue. I don't intend this list to give the most compelling or most important developments, but instead to give a sense of the far-reaching pervasiveness of the changes now afoot.

Over the past decade, enrollment in traditional 4-year baccalaureate programs grew at the agonizingly slow rate of one-half percent (US Department of Education 2003).
During the same decade, nearly 500 postsecondary institutions went belly up (Christensen et al. 2003).
During the same decade, corporate universities increased from 400 to 1,800, most of which offer customized just-in-time courses with heavy IT components (Christensen 2002).
About 1,000 virtual universities (no doubt of widely and wildly varying quality) were in existence as of 2000 (Duderstadt 2000).
Jones International University (JIU) became the first fully accredited university that offers all its degree programs entirely online.
Founded in 2001, the US Army's distance education program (eArmyU) recently added a dozen institutions to its roster, thus adding 68 additional degree programs to its existing 100 programs; currently enrolling 31,000 students, the Army expects to have 81,000 students enrolled by 2005.
According to the best data and estimates included in a report prepared by the Southern Regional Education Board, online course offerings among West Virginia postsecondary institutions rose from 106 courses (1,100 students) in 1999 to 343 courses (6,800 students) in Spring 2003 (Mingle and Chaloux 2003).
According to the most recent reliable statistics from the US Department of Education, 2- and 4-year institutions offering distance education classes rose from 33 to 44 percent between fall 1995 and 1997, and the number of such classes nearly doubled; of the undergraduates who participated, more used the internet (60 percent) than live audio or television (37 percent) or prerecorded audio or television (39 percent) (US Department of Education 2003).
Not long ago a prospectus for venture capitalists argued that "education represents the most fertile new market for investors in many years" because of "a combination of large size, . . . disgruntled users, lower utilization of technology, and the highest strategic importance of any activity in which this country engages," and also because "existing managements [that is, administrators and faculty] are sleepy after years of monopoly" (Duderstadt 2000).
Intel and Dell Computer no longer recruit MBA employees from Stanford Business School because the graduates require too high a starting salary to justify (and pay for) the cost of their educations (Christensen 2002).
Despite their widely varying histories and cultures, Michigan and Kentucky share this one trait at least, that they now have virtual universities associated with their statewide postsecondary educational systems.

Shift happens
The Millennium Project at the University of Michigan actively develops and models new paradigms of learning. According to the project directors,

The forces driving change in higher education, both from within and without, are formidable. It seems likely that the pace and nature of change characterizing the higher education enterprise both in America and worldwide will be considerably beyond that which can be accommodated by business-as-usual evolution. While some colleges and universities may be able to maintain their current form and market niche, others will change beyond recognition. Still others will disappear entirely. New types of institutions, perhaps even entirely new social structures for learning, will evolve to meet educational needs. (Millennium Project 2003)

Those colleges that insist on business-as-usual evolution will surely be undone by these forces of change. Those, though, that develop a clear technological vision and undertake swift actions can draw on the energy of these very same forces to remake themselves.

But what, exactly, is this vision, and what actions ought to be undertaken? While definitive answers still lie shrouded in the fogs of change, broad outlines at least are apparent. Above all, the postsecondary educational institution must cease conceiving itself as a place, a physical location in geospace. Rather, it must reconceive itself as a knowledge server, as a point in cyberspace from which motivated consumers can extract the knowledge that they need to achieve the ends that they've chosen. This conception necessarily entails the concomitant realization that the knowledge server must be as volatile, as malleable, and as current as the knowledge that it serves.

This conception also suggests several immediate actions that must be undertaken. Postsecondary institutions, for instance, should immediately begin recasting all courses into virtual formats; any course material that can be offered through asynchronous online media ought to be so offered. With such a recasting, the physical presence of students within college facilities will become the exception rather than the rule. Will classrooms entirely disappear? Of course not. Especially in the case of specialized laboratory work, students will still need access to facilities and equipment maintained by their educational institutions. But do students need to brave winter roads just to listen to an instructor expound on Hamlet's existential crisis? Must they absolutely choose between a sick child and a lecture on quadratic equations? Should institutions really demand that they lose an hour's pay every Tuesday and Thursday just to arrive at their poly sci course on time? Imposing these false alternatives on students is pure hogwash.

Postsecondary institutions should also immediately abandon their unholy alliance with dead-tree publishers and the collateral insistence that students purchase obscenely priced textbooks. College bookstores are quicksand bogs sucking down ridiculous quantities of institutional and student resources, in return providing printed textbooks that are out of date before they're ever printed. Moreover, each semester students are inundated with vast flurries of photocopied handouts as faculty strive to make up for textbook deficiencies, to shape the content of their courses to meet their preferences, catalog expectations, and (usually last on the list, if at all) student needs. In place of this costly, inefficient, and seriously flawed hardcopy technology, postsecondary institutions ought to embrace the resources of the web. Of course we stumble across quite a bit of flotsam on the web, but so do we in life. People have always had to separate the wheat from the chaff, even when hardcopy textbooks were all the rage. Nothing new here. What is new is the fact that, in the not-too-distant future, colleges and faculties that insist on the use of antiquated textbooks will find themselves faced with students who insist on other colleges and faculties.

Practically any course in any academic field can now be taught with materials freely available on the web, with the added and substantial benefit of cutting-edge currency. The vastness of the repositories of knowledge stored on the world wide web already surpasses human comprehension, and similarly vast resources are available off the web in easily shared electronic formats. Carnegie Mellon University, for instance, has undertaken the Million Books Project, which aims to digitize at least one million books and offer them on the web, free for the downloading. CMU's Universal Library already offers thousands of works online, from Abelard to Zola. Similarly, the Internet Public Library (maintained by Intel and Sun Microsystems) now includes over 20,000 etexts within all areas of human endeavor. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France has undertaken an ambitious digital effort, with over 100,000 digitized images completed as of late 2002. The US National Library of Medicine and the Library of Congress also maintain vast estacks of publications available over the internet. In my internet bookmarks I've already bookmarked 43 internet libraries, just a rough indication of the remarkable resources available in cyberspace.

Moreover, a huge number of individual and corporate researchers, scientists, and scholars maintain their own sites at which teachers and students can access etexts cataloging the most recent developments in all fields of human endeavor. We use the term "portal" to refer to individual and corporate sites that primarily function as information disseminators. Information portals on the web have grown so rapidly that we now have directories to the directories of these portals. And they grow daily, so much so that the venerable Internet Scout Project (an endeavor of the University of Wisconsin) now makes available an easy-to-use, fully customizable portal toolkit to help info warriors get information portals up and running lickety split. The project managers state that this toolkit "allows groups or organizations that have a collection of knowledge or resources they want to share via the World Wide Web to put that collection online without making a big investment in technical resources" (Internet Scout Project 2003). The toolkit software, by the way, is absolutely free to users.

Postsecondary institutions must also set sail from their provincial harbors to join vigorous educational armadas that include other institutions farther along in the digital voyage. Drawing on a recently consummated partnership, for example, some postsecondary institutions in West Virginia have offered online courses available through Kentucky Virtual University. These nascent efforts have of course encountered some systemic flaws and instructor failures, but so what? No flaw or failure has been fatal or insurmountable, and none has been particularly worse than the problems

Purple Rain 4, photograph by Bobby Morgan. Click for a larger view, and for more of Morgan's works.

that crop up every semester with classroom courses. With a little grit and perseverance, the West Virginia and Kentucky institutions will be able to shape this partnership into a remarkable academic resource for students. During Fall 2003, for instance, West Virginia colleges (and thus students) could choose among 288 online courses offerings; the Spring 2004 offerings will likely exceed 300. For the most part, these courses fall within college core and program courses, such as freshman composition, developmental psychology, introduction to computers, introductory sociology, human wellness and nutrition, general chemistry, US and world history, college algebra, PC applications, Java programming, first- and second-semester accounting, introduction to hospitality management, business management, technical writing, business law, principles of marketing, and so on. It will be a shame passing into moral reprehensibility if the postsecondary institutions of West Virginia allow the fruit of this partnership to wither on the vine.

Regarding a similar endeavor, postsecondary institutions in West Virginia should take immediate and vigorous efforts to fully integrate their campuses into the Electronic Campus. Established by the Southern Regional Education Board, the Electronic Campus serves as a broker and clearinghouse for online courses and degree programs offered by scores of postsecondary institutions in the 16 SREB member states. This online resource isn't presently as valuable as the Kentucky partnership, because the participating states have yet to remove significant barriers to easy reciprocal enrollment. Many institutions, for example, won't allow students to enroll in online courses unless they're officially admitted to the institutions; similarly, most participating institutions charge outrageous out-of-state tuition. Still, some institutions have already dropped the requirement that students seek admission before taking online courses, and some institutions have already adopted "electronic rates," under which tuition is the same for all students no matter where they live. The SREB is also actively coordinating efforts to shape the Electronic Campus into a multi-state campus without boundaries, a cyberpoint where students will be able to access online courses and degree programs without the bother and expense of multiple admissions, transfer headaches, tuition rates based on no-longer-applicable spatial considerations, and so on. West Virginia colleges ought to become an integral player in these efforts.

The possibilities for other new and deepened partnerships are frankly limited only by the reach of the internet and the resources of the world wide web, resources that for all practical purposes are approaching an infinite curve.

Faster than a speeding photon, more powerful than a loco petabyte
Most people simply aren't aware of the true magnitude of the digital revolution. Even those who do have an inkling still have difficulty grasping the exponential nature of the rate of improvement in information technology. Most of us can get our minds around the matter only through analogy and metaphor. Discussing this exponential rate, William Wulf offers an instructive comparison. He quotes a 1949 Popular Mechanics article that predicted computers of the future would have "only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1.5 tons." Wulf contrasts this prediction with his present reality:

Today I carry in my briefcase a computer that is one hundred times faster than the ENIAC [the first fully electronic digital computer]. This is not my laptop computer or even a PDA. It's a holiday card that plays a tune when opened! The computer in the card costs about twenty-five cents. The computer card is intended to be opened once, to make the recipient smile, and then to be discarded. Yes, its technology really is one hundred times faster than that of the thirty-ton ENIAC. (Wulf 23)

I have sitting out in my workshop an old PC (bought two years ago, really old) that I keep handy just to collect the odd farm document or carry out some moderately complex calculation relating to a garden project. Residing within this poor old castoff is more computing power than all that available to NASA when the agency put Neil Armstrong on the moon.

The knowledge and power of information manipulation available at our fingertips is absolutely nuts and profoundly exhilarating. Moreover, for as far as we can see into the future, this knowledge and power will continue to increase exponentially because the untapped technology to support them already exists. Because this technology and postsecondary institutions operate in the same bailiwick--gathering, archiving, and distributing information--they will certainly affect one another in expected and unexpected ways. One point, though, ought to be clear: Technology will affect educational systems far more profoundly, by orders of magnitude more profoundly, than the other way about. To hope otherwise would be about as sensible as expecting our body heat to warm the frigid air of a mountaintop in November. The collegiate body, though, can act as a sustaining crucible within which our systems of postsecondary education may reshape themselves and from which a quick and lithe new form may emerge.

May. It's all in the offing.