As networking, multimedia, mobile technology, and better software converge, schools and companies are discovering new ways to improve learning, increase information access, and save money
Andy Reinhardt
The refrain is all too familiar: For the past decade, educators and employers have been crowing about the enormous potential for CBET (computer-based education and training), but nearly everyone acknowledges that this potential has yet to be realized. Computers in the schools have soaked up huge capital expenditures without providing any appreciable return on investment. In companies, investments in information technology have been used mostly to automate old learning processes instead of to enable new ones.
That picture is starting to change, however, as new technologies begin making their way into schools and trai
ning centers. ``The old pattern of kids left in the corner to do flash cards on an Apple II is over,'' says Jeanne Hayes, president of Quality Education Data, or QED, a research firm in Denver, Colorado. Explosive growth in CD-ROM drives, LANs and Internet connections, multimedia, and collaborative software environments is fueling a new wave of better teaching tools. This generation of technology promises more than just an improvement in educational productivity: It may deliver a qualitative change in the nature of learning itself.
New approaches to educating workers and students are arriving just in time, in the view of many experts. The changing nature of companies and the work they do, especially with large-scale downsizing and the shift to an information-based economy, is requiring workers to be more flexible and better trained, especially in the use of technology. Businesses require schools to turn out students with a different set of skills than those emphasized in early-twentieth-century pedagog
y. And employers themselves are using new technologies to educate workers. ``Organizations are linking learning to productivity, rather than [training] in advance of the act,'' says Robert Johansen, director of the new-technologies program at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, and coauthor of the book Upsizing the Individual in the Downsized Organization (Addison-Wesley, 1994). ``This is what we call `just-in-time learning,''' he adds.
Tectonic shifts in computer-assisted teaching mirror those occurring throughout the computer industry--for instance, away from centralized, host-based systems to a networked, distributed model. They also echo a new way of thinking in education theory: Instead of a one-way information flow--typified by broadcast TV or a teacher addressing a group of passive students--new teaching techniques are, like the Internet, two-way, collaborative, and interdisciplinary.
``All the uses of information technology in the last decade--computer-aided instructio
n, networked information, distance learning--have had problems,'' says Carol Twigg, vice president of Educom, a Washington, D.C.-based organization for technology in higher education. ``The problem with all of them is that they were bolted onto current instructional methods.'' The convergence of new technology and modern teaching practices is finally breaking that mold, as each enables the realization of the other.
Of course, penetration of technology into classrooms dramatically redefines established teacher-learner relationships. Teachers change from omniscient leaders into tour guides for the infosphere. Instructional materials evolve from rigid textbooks into customizable software. Information becomes more accessible, users pick and choose what they want, and everyone is a content creator. ``Education on demand, in homes and on the job, will be a far bigger business than entertainment on demand,'' asserts R. Wayne Oler, president and CEO of International Thomson Publishing's Education Group in Belm
ont, California.
Growing Infrastructure
Indeed, education is already big business. The U.S. spends $275 billion yearly for kindergarten through high-school (i.e., K-12) education, or roughly 5 percent of the gross domestic product, according to QED. Of that, roughly $2.4 billion was spent on educational technology last year, says the Software Publishers Association of Washington, D.C.
In its July 1994 K-12 Education Market Report, the SPA says that ``more than half the schools in the country now use computers in almost every discipline.'' Ninety-nine percent of schools have at least one computer, says the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. Unfortunately, only one-third of schools have more than one computer for every 10 students; the national average is 12 students per computer, down from 22 in 1989, says QED.
Technology spending in higher education is harder to pin down (e.g., How do you categorize computer purchases made by st
udents?), but a report from IBM Academic Consulting pegs institutional spending at more than $6 billion for 1994. According to the report, American institutions of higher education have spent an estimated $70 billion on computer-related goods and services over the past 15 years; of that amount, as much as $20 billion was for teaching and learning technology.
The amount of money earmarked for corporate training is also huge. Training magazine, in its annual industry survey, estimates that U.S. corporations with more than 100 employees budgeted $51 billion for training in 1994. Arthur Gloster, vice provost for information technology for Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, estimates the total spent per year by all companies and their employees at $90 billion to $100 billion.
New Learning
The common thread linking schools, colleges, and corporations is that all are facing budget pressures and are looking for ways to improve education's return on investment. ``We're s
pending more and more on educational technology, but most of this spending is bolted onto our existing cost structure,'' says Bill Graves, associate provost for information technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of the Institute for Academic Technology (Durham, NC). ``We need to use the technology--use the network--to reduce costs and increase access,'' he adds.
Schools and companies are using similar technologies to address similar problems, because there is ample evidence that appropriate use of technology can boost retention rates, reduce boredom and misbehavior, and, in many cases, cut costs. The SPA's Report on the Effectiveness of Technology in Schools, 1990-1994, a summary of 133 studies, found that educational technology clearly boosted student achievement, improved student attitudes and self-concept, and enhanced the quality of student-teacher relationships.
Especially promising technologies were interactive video, networking, and collaboration tools.
Computers are ``amazingly patient teachers,'' says Jan Davidson, president and founder of software maker Davidson & Associates (Torrance, CA); they can spur creative thinking, promote enterprise, and whet curiosity.
But in study after study, another vital conclusion emerges: Technology alone is not the solution. Reaping the benefits of computers first requires extensive teacher training, new curricular materials, and, most important, changes to educational models.
Modern educational concepts
, derived from the work of scholars such as Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, MIT researcher Seymour Papert, and Russian psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky, emphasize individualized, hands-on learning; teamwork; and guided discovery of information.
All these concepts are not only well suited to technology assistance, but, given the economics of teaching and training, they are nearly impossible to effect without the help of computers. Says Britton Manasco, editor of the Learning Enterprise, a ne
wsletter about corporate education, ``We have to tailor [learning] to the individual student or employee, but there's no way we can afford to do this without technology.''
Another problem with today's education ``is that people are learning in a large group, and they're afraid to speak out because the culture makes them feel foolish if they make a mistake,'' says professor Roger Schank, director of Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences (Evanston, IL). ``The greatest value of computers is that they will watch out for you and let you do stuff without fear of embarrassment,'' he adds.
Schank sees computers as electronic mentors. ``They can provide built-in experts that are available on-line, looking over your shoulder,'' he says. ``So, instead of today's model, where you have one expert at the front of the room talking to a lot of people, it's reversed: You have one user at a computer with hundreds of experts built in.''
This permits--and makes economically feasible--
the return of a very old educational model: apprenticeship. ``Apprenticeship has always been the best learning model, whether from other people or simulations,'' Schank says. ``Computers allow apprenticeship in fields where it's hard or impossible to do it in real life, like surgery or learning to fly an airplane.''
The implications of this transformation affect both students and teachers. Instructors become more like coaches, while students are free to discover knowledge on their own. ``There is more information about topics these days than anybody can handle, so teachers have to rely on technology to help,'' says Anita Best, editor of the Computing Teacher magazine, published by the International Society for Technology in Education (Eugene, OR), or ISTE. With computers, ``teachers become facilitators, collaborators, and brokers of resources. The networks have the information, but the students need a guide.''
Computers are also a huge aid in preparing course materials, whether through conventio
nal tools, such as word processing, desktop publishing, presentation, or illustration packages, or as a means of access to far-flung resources, ranging from Internet news groups to shareware lesson plans on AOL (America Online). ``Making it easier to prepare materials means teachers can focus on explaining information instead of conveying information,'' says Robert Cavalier, a senior faculty consultant at the Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA).
New Technologies
The emerging technologies that are mak-ing the biggest difference in training and education fall into three broad categories: networking, multimedia, and mobility. Networking includes LANs, WANs, and on-line services (especially the Internet), as well as applications enabled by networks, such as audio conferencing and videoconferencing, E-mail, collaborative software, and instructional management. ``Telecommunications will probably have the most long-term impact on t
eachers and students,'' says Dr. Greg Kearsley, a professor of educational leadership at George Washington University, or GWU (Washington, DC), and a member of the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (or AACE), in Charlottesville, Virginia. ``It's like word processing: It will become more a part of the infrastructure than an application in and of itself,'' he explains.
Networked applications run the gam-ut, from Internet survey courses to Lotus Notes-based collaborative projects. At the public schools in North Reading, Massachusetts, students use the Internet as a means of accessing authoritative sources, says Tom Hashem, a math teacher and the guiding light of the district's computer program. ``It gives them access to timely information they couldn't find in the local library,'' he adds.
One high-school class studying an Amazonian tribe joined an anthropology list server and contacted ethnographers who were experts about the tribe. When they got contradictory responses, Dr
. Maryanne Wolff, a teacher, says, it taught the students that informed sources sometimes disagree. ``Students begin to learn the need to dig into the background and perspectives of their sources,'' she notes.
At the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, professor Arthur M. Geoffrion teaches a popular course on using the Internet and commercial on-line services in business. He teaches students how to use the basic tools of the Internet--ftp, gopher, search tools, and the WWW (World Wide Web)--and almost all class time is spent ``in front of the tube,'' learning from doing.
Geoffrion asserts that ``networking power'' will become a new metric of professional skill. ``Knowledge of networked-based communications and on-line resources, how to use them, and the cooperative society of the Net all [improve] the creativity, productivity, quality, and quick responsiveness of professional work,'' he says.
Networked applications using NetWare are widespread in colleges and training
centers, says Janet Perry, manager of technology transfer partners for Novell. Among the benefits she cites are ease of distributing information and course materials and improved communications, especially between students and teachers.
At the University of Delaware in Newark, Solaris-based servers store scanned color images for art, history, and botany classes. Students say they prefer these to black-and-white reproductions in textbooks, and not only because of the better quality. They can view them at their leisure, without regard to hours, location, or other people using the slides.
When you layer collaborative software environments, such as Lotus Notes, on top of a network, whole new modes of communication are unleashed. Debora Cole, academic marketing manager for Lotus, says that Notes permits ``an extension of classroom learning, where you can make a contribution that others see and can respond to.'' It also offers rich media types, security, object-link maintenance, and other capabilities
not well supported on today's Internet.
One of the most promising uses of Notes is in curriculum development. ``Curriculum development is not an efficient process,'' Cole says. ``Using collaborative software lets you work with faculty members on your own campus and worldwide to design and develop [a] new curriculum.'' Notes is also widely used in help-desk and customer-support applications, which often feed directly into training courses for support personnel.
E-mail among students and teachers, free exchange of curricular tools and content, consultation with on-line experts, and access to remote resources are all hallmarks of what ubiquitous networking will deliver to education. Concludes Kearsley of GWU: ``The whole education community is ready to jump on the Internet full blast; Mosaic was the piece needed to make it work.''
I Want My MTV
Multimedia has captured the imagination of educators more than any other technology. ``It is really pumping adrenaline into t
he education market,'' observes Don Rawitsch, vice president of product development and support for software maker Jostens Learning (San Diego, CA).
Multimedia, as such, encompasses a range of data types, including analog and digital video, two-dimensional and 3-D animation, audio, and even hyperlinks and digital ink. It also includes delivery me-dia, such as CD-ROM discs and drives, graphics display hardware (e.g., compression/decompression, acceleration, and codec cards), and sound cards. Specialized hardware devices, such as DSPs (digital signal processors) for speech and signal processing, are starting to appear in desktop systems and will play an increasing role in learning systems.
According to QED, 25 percent of school software budgets in 1994 were allocated to multimedia titles. Given the enormous growth of CD-ROM-equipped PCs in homes, multimedia could soon become the key ``crossover'' application to link the home and school markets.
Proof of the effectiveness of multimedia isn't
yet conclusive, but early studies and many anecdotes suggest its great power as a learning aid. The SPA's 1994 report on technology effectiveness cites accounts of measurable improvements from the use of animation, video, laserdiscs, CD-ROM books, and hypermedia. ``Studies show that we obtain 80 percent of our knowledge visually but retain only about 11 percent of that,'' says Howard Wactlar, vice provost for research computing at Carnegie Mellon. ``We acquire a smaller percentage through hearing,'' he adds, but remember more of it. He says that a combination of the two is the most effective, boosting retention rates to 50 percent.
Applications for multimedia range from educational and entertainment titles, on disk or CD-ROM, from companies such as Broderbund (Novato, CA), Scholastic (New York, NY), and Davidson & Associates, to gigantic computational chemistry simulations that run on Onyx systems from Silicon Graphics (Mountain View, CA). ``Multimedia lets you create a living textbook, versus a flat
textbook,'' says Dr. Terry Crane, vice president and general manager of the education division at Apple.
One interesting multimedia application for the Mac, called CamMotion, is being developed by TERC, an R&D organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with funding from the National Science Foundation. It involves using visualization to learn about and analyze physical principles. A video camera lets kids capture and analyze motion on the computer. One group of students, for instance, used CamMotion to understand the difference in acceleration of a basketball when it was dropped and when it was dribbled. Textbook calculus would never have captured their interest in the same way.
Cutting Loose
Mobility is, in a certain sense, yet another outcome of networking, but it also comes about as a result of miniaturization. Schools and training centers all over the country are experimenting with giving students notebook computers to take home with them, setting up wireless LANs for i
nstant virtual workgroups, or establishing dial-in services that permit anytime/anywhere access to course materi-als and fellow students. With networks and mobile access, ``time and space dependencies are eliminated,'' says Steve Griffin, the director of technical services at the Institute for Academic Technology.
Distance learning, held out for years as a prime example of the potential of educational technology, benefits enormously from the combination of networking and mobile access. Instead of the conventional broadcast model of distance learning, which requires participating students to watch a live video transmission (via cable or satellite) or wait for days to receive a videotape in the mail, new schemes allow students to dial in at their convenience and participate in a class asynchronously. While it isn't in real time, the opportunity for feedback and participation is enhanced by rich two-way communications channels.
New York University's School of Continuing Education has pioneered a No
tes-based distance learning application (see ``Building the Virtual College''), and others are not far behind, including California Polytechnic and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Collin County Community College, of Plano, Texas, is exploring the idea of creating a virtual college at which its students could learn from graduate students at a university. The transport will likely be via E-mail messages over the Internet.
The Training Imperative
But ``the fastest-growing segment of education is within industry,'' says Robert Sullivan, dean of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon. ``Industry is faced with the question of how to keep the work force up to speed.''
One answer, known as ``training on demand,'' involves bringing information to employees at their workstations. ``It's just not feasible to put employees in classrooms,'' says Learning Enterprise editor Manasco, who adds that classroom training is enormously expensive and notoriou
sly inefficient in terms of retention and recall.
Hewlett-Packard has harnessed one such solution to cut some of its sales-training costs from $2 million to $200,000 per year. Previously, the company brought a conventional dog-and-pony show to 12 different cities, which took four to five weeks per quarter. Now, through an interactive satellite network, training sessions require just two days, and nobody has to travel. Furthermore, the message and delivery are more consistent, and there's a much shorter lag time between distribution and utilization of information.
Through the use of advanced simulators, Burlington Northern Railroad, in Fort Worth, Texas, has boosted its training productivity by 15 percent per year and improved quality, according to Edward Butt, assistant vice president of technical training. In the past, new engineers had to spend most of their training time in locomotives, which presented logistical challenges and limited the range of experiences encountered during training. Now
, with images generated on Silicon Graphics workstations and a program from Hughes Electronics, engineers experience a full range of real-world scenarios, including emergencies and varying weather conditions.
Manasco, Schank, and Johansen all argue that the traditional training department is out of step with the times. ``The paradigm of training as a separate, centralized department is dead,'' Manasco says. ``The new model is learning while working. Businesses are moving to decentralize training services and make them distributable to the desktop,'' he adds.
Several factors are at work here. Training departments are often among the first victims of layoffs because they're seen as overhead. Yet, at the same time, the changing nature and growing diversity of the work force require new kinds of training in cultural sensitivity, communications skills, and remediation. Employees are more geographically dispersed than in the past, and turnover is higher because companies and employees are less loyal t
o each other. Technology is evolving so quickly that skills require frequent refreshing.
The result is that rather than teaching employees fundamental skills (especially since workers sometimes bolt to competitors), companies are instead trying to link learning to the job itself. This can take the form of expert systems integrated into the work area or even hand-held computers connected via wireless communications to a constantly updated infobase. Steve Linsk, former product marketing manager for multimedia tools at Asymetrix (Bellevue, WA), suggests another scenario: putting self-paced employee-orientation materials on a network server instead of printing up a book.
Professor Schank is the high priest of just-in-time learning. ``Anything not just-in-time is probably useless,'' he says. ``People learn [a skill] at the moment they need to know it. It's like learning to ride a bike; if you fall off, you don't need your parents to give you a lecture about the physics of motion and gravity. You need
instruction about righting yourself.''
A Matter of Timing
Why is a paradigm shift in education happening just now, and not earlier? ``I don't think education was really ready for this more than a year ago,'' concludes Donavan Merck, manager of the Educational Technology Office for the California State Department of Education. In the not-so-dis-tant past, he says, most of the pressure to implement computers in schools came from the district level, from technology specialists who tried to push technology into the classroom. Teachers ``looked at equipment such as videodiscs and software and felt that there wasn't enough there to justify the cost,'' Merck says.
Now, falling system prices and the wider use of networking are helping to make the shift more feasible. ``The better quality of learning materials available from companies is helping a lot,'' Merck says. ``Now it's the teachers who are going back to the district and saying they need this stuff.'' The shift from top-dow
n to bottom-up adoption is making a huge difference in how willing and eager instructors are to make the leap to educational technology.
Another major factor is the rapidly evolving computer environment outside the classroom. Many parents work in companies where computer technology is prevalent and sophisticated; they're starting to ask why schools lag behind, because they want their children to be trained in essential computer and information-gathering skills. Pressure from parents is starting to force school boards to spend more on technology.
Nonetheless, there are many problems still to be solved before learning technology can be successfully applied in schools and companies. Some skeptics point out that new learning models rely too much on the presumption that students are curious and have initiative, plus the social skills and attention span required for them to cooperate and work in teams. The behavioral problems many teachers witness today and the knowledge gaps many companies are being
forced to fill are evidence that more fundamental issues need to be addressed.
Schank criticizes organizations for investing too heavily in distance learning and collaboration, which he thinks miss the point of educational technology. ``It leaves out the core problem, which is that people need to be able to experiment without fear of embarrassment and with experts looking over their shoulders,'' he says.
Another problem is that technology can widen the socioeconomic gap between information haves and have-nots. A significant shortage of powerful, easy-to-use tools for creating curricula continues to suppress both the application of educational technology and its enormous potential for the future. To succeed in the market, educational technology requires the same sort of grass-roots army of do-it-yourself programmers that drove Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Visual Basic into corporations. Kearsley of GWU believes the breakthrough may be the WWW, which he likes to refer to as ``the network equivalent o
f HyperCard.''
According to Asymetrix's Linsk, 50 percent to 70 percent of people who buy multimedia authoring tools, such as ToolBook, use them to develop courseware of one sort or another. Unfortunately, the cost of doing so is significant: A 1994 study of computer-based training found that the mean number of hours required to create a single hour of courseware was 228, Linsk says. At a conservative rate of $100 per hour, that works out to more than $20,000 per hour of courseware.
On the other hand, that's significantly less expensive than transporting employees to a central location, putting them up in hotels, and forfeiting their lost productivity--all to stuff their heads with information they'll largely forget. ``If you distribute the material, students can learn it themselves,'' Linsk says. ``There's a measurable ROI in dollars saved, increased retention, and decreasing learning time.''
Linsk and others contend that the quality of development tools has greatly improved, such that t
eachers with no programming knowledge can now create their own courseware. But this raises a question: Just because teachers of the previous generation knew how to write didn't mean they created all their own textbooks, so why are we to assume they will develop hypermedia software?
A report by IBM Academic Computing confirms this problem and highlights how little incentive teachers are offered for making the extra effort. Among the 1000 colleges and universities surveyed in 1993 by the University of Southern California, 86 percent had no policy of rewarding faculty for developing courseware or any royalty-sharing program for faculty-developed courseware. Sixty-five percent had no formal projects for developing instructional software at all.
Sane Solutions
The solutions to these problems will come from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. The ISTE, for instance, has developed a set of proposed standards for institutions seeking accreditation to teach educational tech
nology. Now approved by the National Center for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the standards dictate minimum equipment and course offerings. Executive officer Dave Moursund says that the ISTE is also working on a set of guidelines for the use of technology in K-12 education, including basic skills, use of technology within a subject matter, baseline equipment standards, and evaluation and assessment methods. Pilot studies are under way, although a draft of these specifications may not be ready for several years.
In the public sphere, legislation and changes in regulations will be needed to boost educational technology. Educom is spearheading an effort called the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative--a conscious play on the official name of the data highway, the National Information Infrastructure. The former aims to ensure that the latter includes a significant major educational component.
To penetrate all schools--not just the ones with technology champions--technology vendors need
changes to be made in state purchase policies so no one has to sneak in software under textbook budgets. And somebody, probably the federal government, needs to pick up the tab for the estimated $8 billion to $9 billion cost to connect every school in America to the data highway.
Dr. Linda Roberts, special advisor to the U.S. secretary of education and director of the Office of Educational Technology, points out that she is the first such advisor the Department of Education has ever had. The department is pursuing a variety of programs, including challenge grants for developing compelling educational technology and direct grants to the states for technology planning. The good news, she points out, is that even with today's minuscule technology budgets, there's enough revenue potential to support good products from private industry.
``The bad news is that education as a share of the whole market is still pretty small,'' she adds. ``So, we need some stimulus from the public sector to push for the
advances that can make a real difference.'' One such program, which is a classic case of innovative public/private partnership, is Vital Links, a joint development of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, Davidson & Associates, and publisher Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA). The package will consist of a year-long U.S. history course for children who have limited proficiency in English.
To help defray costs and ensure a market for the product, the state education departments of California, Florida, and Texas are each kicking in $400,000 of development funding in exchange for a royalty stake. California has also funded several development projects by San Ramon-based educational software supplier Decision Development.
The ultimate boost for educational technology may come from the data highway. ``Everybody is excited by the idea of kids using the same materials at home and at school,'' notes Don Rawitsch of Jostens Learning. He speculates that Jostens ``might team up with somebody like a cable [
company] or a telco'' to deliver educational materials directly into the home.
Enthusiasm for educational technology, always high, has reached new levels because of the growing use of home and business multimedia, the high profile of the Internet and data superhighway, and the continuing pressure to work and learn more efficiently. Nirvana isn't here yet, and substantial hurdles remain, but there is a growing commitment from teachers, trainers, managers, and vendors to make better use of the technology that's already here. ``We don't know yet whether everybody learns better with this stuff,'' says Dr. Miriam Masullo, a researcher with IBM in Hawthorne, New York. ``But,'' she adds emphatically, ``we can't find out until we try it.''
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Additional reporting was provided by BYTE chief of correspondents Dennis Barker, senior editors Ed DeJesus and Tom R. Halfhill, and news editor Salvatore Salamone.
SUMMARY
In the information economy, knowledg
e is power. However, traditional teaching is expensive and slow. New technologies make learning more productive.
-- In companies, centralized training is now giving way to distributed, ``just-in-time'' learning. The result is increased flexibility, better retention, and lowered costs.
-- In schools and colleges, students surf the Internet, use Lotus Notes, exchange E-mail, peruse multimedia CD-ROMs, and perform simulations. These techniques break down barriers, customize instruction, and make education more cost-effective.
OLD MODEL NEW MODEL TECHNOLOGY IMPLICATIONS
Classroom lectures Individual exploration Networked PCs with
access to information
Passive absorption Apprenticeship Requires skills development
and simulations
Individual work Team learning
Benefits from collaborative
tools and E-mail
Omniscient teacher Teacher as guide Relies on access to experts
over network
Stable content Fast-changing content Requires networks and
publishing tools
Homogeneity Diversity Requires a variety of access
tools and methods
Andy Reinhardt is BYTE's West Coast bureau chief. You can reach him on the Internet or BIX at
areinhardt@bix.com
.
New Ways to Learn
