Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Education in an Information Society Last month’s editorial pointed out that higher education may well change significantly as a result of the tremendous impact that information technologies are having on society. It quoted a white paper (1) by Russell Edgerton, Director of the Education Program of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Edgerton argued that higher education is currently failing to meet three challenges: to provide higher quality education; to reduce costs; and to regain its former stature as an important player in shaping public policy. Edgerton recommended that the Pew Trusts should encourage colleges and universities to set more ambitious goals for undergraduate education, to enter the public arena and play a major role in the reform of K-12 education, and to develop an academic profession interested in working toward these goals. Four new aims for undergraduate education were identified: “encouraging institutions to take learning seriously, encouraging faculty to take pedagogy seriously, demonstrating that technology can be used to reduce costs as well as to enhance learning, and developing new incentives for continuous quality improvement.” One wonders why institutions of higher education should need to be encouraged toward goals that seem obviously congruent with their mission and self interest, but today’s colleges and universities seem more likely to respond to outside offers of funding than to develop their own plans of action. As members of the faculty of such institutions, it behooves us to consider what some of those outside influences are likely to be and what effects they are likely to have on us, on our institutions, and on our students. Higher education is seen as a growth market by Michael Dolence and Donald Norris (2). In 1995 they projected that in five years there would be an increase of 20 million fulltime equivalent enrollments in the U.S. and more than 100 million world wide. However, this growth was not projected to be traditional, on-campus students. Most was expected to come from those whose knowledge requires continual updating (engineers, medical personnel, computer programmers), or from those who need to acquire new skills because their employment has been terminated. If education is a growth market, it is sobering to realize that the existing system invests precious little in research and development. In the pharmaceutical industry some 23% of expenditures for medications is applied toward research and development. For growth industries on average, the figure is 10%. For education it may be as small as 0.1%. This situation seems not to be a major concern of faculty or administrators at colleges and universities, but it has attracted the attention of venture capitalists. In the past year or two they have started investing heavily in companies that propose to create educational software, Web-based materials, and other applications of information technology to education. Perhaps Disney, Microsoft, or an upstart successor will provide the best hope for the future of education in this country.
But won’t college and university faculty be involved in writing the new technology-based materials just as they write textbooks now? Perhaps they will, but development of these new materials is far more a cooperative enterprise than is writing a book. It requires daily interactions among individuals with many different kinds of expertise, and it is an incremental process that requires continual input and revision. Even materials that have been thoroughly evaluated and refined must be continually updated to make them compatible with the latest technology. A textbook author does not have to transpose from Apple II to IBM PC to Macintosh to Windows to World Wide Web to…. It seems certain that to produce new kinds of technology-based educational materials will require team efforts and far greater investment of time, money, and equipment than is currently applied to textbooks. Colleges and universities are the institutions most likely to have the combination of personnel, experience, and facilities to become effective suppliers in this growth market. They could also alleviate existing problems by developing and adopting information technology more widely. For example, students are less likely to drop out of courses in which effective learning technology is employed, and remediation of poor background can be individualized via technology. Students who do not retake a course represent savings in time and effort on the part of their teachers, in institutional resources, and in dollar costs to the students themselves. Quality of education can be improved and costs reduced by information technology, even within the traditional campus setting. Energizing universities to lead the way in development of new educational approaches will not succeed unless much greater kudos and rewards are accorded those who collaborate to produce appropriate materials. For a university it is only a small stretch from generating income through overhead on grants to generating income via off-campus distribution of educational materials. The requisite cognitive scientists, subject-matter experts, learning theorists, and information technology staff are available on many campuses. Institutions that evolve a workable system for initiating, stimulating, and rewarding development of technology-based educational materials are likely to become the leaders of the 21st century. Literature Cited 1. Edgerton, R. Education White Paper, Pew Charitable Trusts, 1998 http://www.pewtrusts.com/Frame.cfm?Framesource=programs/edu/ eduindex.cfm (accessed Feb 1999). 2. Dolence, M. G.; Norris, D. M. Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century; Society for College and University Planning, Ann Arbor, MI 48105, 1995 (catalog is at http://141.211.140.59/catalog/catalog.htm; accessed Feb 1999).
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 76 No. 4 April 1999 • Journal of Chemical Education
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