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Peter Drucker shocked many educators when, in the March 10, 1997,
issue of Forbes magazine, he described the end of the university
as we know it. "[This] is as large a change as when we first got
the printed book," he wrote. "It took more than 200 years for
the printed book to create the modern school. It won't nearly
take that long for the big change ... Already we are beginning
to deliver more lectures and classes off campus via satellite
or two-way video at a fraction of the cost ... Today's buildings
are hopelessly unsuited and totally unneeded."
I hope Drucker is wrong. I believe there is a role for a campus
experience in a young person's life. But universities -- like
schools -- need to reinvent themselves if they wish to remain
relevant and effective in the 21st century. If they don't, their
role will be quickly usurped by others. Privatization already
has claimed a place in K-12 education; now it's knocking at the
door of higher education.
Ultimately, almost all the pressures on today's universities,
and all teaching institutions in general, can be traced to the
influence of networked information technologies. But the most
powerful force of change might be the students who are in your
schools right now.
A new generation
The baby boom's echo is even louder than the original, totaling
80 million youngsters. It is the largest generation ever. The
youngest are just getting out of diapers, and the oldest are 22,
but most of these youngsters are in elementary and secondary schools
now. This population wave is placing great stress on the schools.
Between 1996 and 2006, public high school enrollment is expected
to increase by 15 percent; the number of high school graduates
will increase 17 percent; and college enrollment is projected
to rise by 14 percent.
But it is not their demographic muscle alone that makes these
youngsters an unprecedented force to change learning. Rather,
they are the first generation to grow up in the digital age. Computers
and networks are transforming business, entertainment, government,
and every institution around them. These kids are bathed in bits.
Unlike their boomer parents, they have no fear of the new technology
-- it is part of the existing landscape. For the first time, children
are authorities on a central innovation facing society. I call
them the Net Generation.
Many of these children do not yet have access to the Internet,
but most have some degree of fluency with digital media. Nearly
all of them have experience with video games, and the vast majority
report they know how to use a computer. Almost two-thirds say
they have used the net, which is coming into households as fast
as television did in the 1950s. According to Teenage Research
Unlimited, the percentage of teens who say it is "cool" to be
online has jumped from 50 percent in 1994 to 74 percent in 1996
to 88 percent in 1997. Being online is now on par with dating
and partying.
For most of the N-Gen, time on computers and the net is taken
away from time watching television. When they are online, these
kids are reading, analyzing, authenticating, contextualizing,
sorting the digital wheat from the chaff, composing their thoughts,
criticizing. My research indicates this is creating a generation
of smart, media savvy, innovative, collaborative youngsters who
learn though interacting. This generation is exceptionally curious,
self-reliant, contrarian, focused, able to adapt, globally oriented,
and high in self-esteem. They are intent on being active users
-- not just passive viewers or listeners.
These attributes, combined with N-Geners' ease with digital
tools, spell trouble for traditional educators. If college executives
frozen 300 years ago came alive today and looked at the professions
-- a physician in an operating theater, a pilot in a cockpit,
an engineer designing an automobile in cyberspace -- they would
marvel at how technologies had transformed work. But if they walked
into a university lecture hall, they would no doubt be comforted
that this arrangement had not changed.
Now it must change. Consider the impact when millions of bright,
energized youth -- fresh from high school, accustomed to learning
by interacting, and armed with the most powerful learning tools
in history -- hit the university. And consider, against this backdrop,
the other pressures being felt by universities today. Here are
three of them:
When I went to university, the stages of life seemed pretty
straightforward. First you learned, then you worked, then you
retired. You went to school and maybe a university and learned
a trade or profession, and for the rest of your life, your challenge
was simply to "keep up" with developments in your field.
But today the knowledge base of humanity is doubling annually,
and many boomers are being asked constantly to reinvent their
own knowledge base. Learning has become a continuous, lifelong
process. The Net Generation enters this world of lifelong learning
from Day One, and today's schools must anticipate this.
Richard Soderberg of the National Technological University puts
it well: "People mistakenly think that once they've graduated
from university they are good for the next decade -- when they're
really good for the next ten seconds."
The notion of a university as a place of learning for a small,
fixed period of one's life no longer works. This helps explain
the surge in part-time education. While many students need to
work so they can afford to attend the university, many more in
the workforce are registering in university courses as part of
the trend in lifelong learning. According to the National Center
for Education Statistics, part-time students are now "the new
majority." And those with more education are more likely to take
additional courses: Compared to those who have not attended college,
college graduates are nearly twice as likely to sign up for adult
education courses.
Carol Twigg, formerly of the Washington, D.C.-based university
consortium EDUCAUSE, notes how that knowledge explosion has an
impact on higher education. We can no longer prepare students
to live in a world of rapid change by "shoveling" knowledge at
them, she says. "No one has yet come to grips with this whole
concept of learning how to learn. No one is doing that in a full
curricular sense."
Of course, teaching someone how to learn for life now eclipses
in importance all the other skills that can be taught.
For the youngster entering the workforce, work equals learning
equals work. Because the new economy is knowledge-based and learning
is now an integral part of day-to-day economic activity and life,
the firm that hopes to compete must also become a learning institution.
An excellent discussion of this issue may be found in the little
known but stimulating 1994 book The Monster Under the Bed,
by Stan Davis and Jim Botkin. The book argues that education,
once the province of the church, then the government, is increasingly
falling to business, as it is business that ends up having to
train knowledge workers. "With the move from an agrarian to an
industrial economy," Davis and Botkin write, "the small rural
schoolhouse was supplanted by the big brick urban schoolhouse.
Four decades ago we began to move to another economy, but we have
yet to develop a new educational paradigm, let alone create the
'schoolhouse' of the future, which may be neither school nor house."
Many large companies, such as Xerox, Andersen Worldwide, and
IBM, operate huge university-like campuses. Motorola U., for example,
offers formally accredited courses for employees. And at McDonald's
Hamburger U., students don't learn to flip burgers; they learn
how to manage a restaurant, deal with customers, handle employee
problems, do accounting, and perform other day-to-day challenges.
Davis and Botkin present data to show that the growth in these
private courses exceeds the enrollment growth in all the new conventional
college campuses built in the United States between 1960 and 1990.
"Employee education is not growing 100 percent faster than academia,"
they say, "but 100 times -- or 10,000 percent faster."
And for Carol Twigg, this is just the beginning. "Once the business
community takes the step to integrate themselves with education,"
she says, "there will be an explosion in learning products. They're
all still trying to sell to the higher education buyers instead
of the end consumer. Once they get that piece, then I think we
will see a real change."
The concept of the university as a place is being challenged
by networks and a new generation that wants to network to learn.
In the mid 1970s, when I was doing graduate work in educational
psychology at the University of Alberta, I took one of the first
online courses. Our class learned multivariate analysis using
a CAI (Computer Aided Instruction) package called Plato. This
course was set up by a visionary in computer-mediated education
named Steve Hunka. We students sat down in front of a computer
terminal that was connected to a computer-controlled slide display,
all connected to a mini computer. (This was before PCs.) The course
was fabulous. It took me step-by-step through the material, but
unlike traditional courses, it allowed me to stop and review something
I didn't understand or to fast-forward through material I felt
I grasped. I could test myself at various points, and the system
kept a record for me of how I was doing. Eventually, when I was
ready, the system gave me a final exam, which was also conducted
on the computer. The upshot of this technology was that the professor
was freed up to spend more time in face-to-face interaction with
students.
These CAI systems didn't really take off, however, because of
the cost of the systems, the effort required to create the "courseware,"
the considerable expertise required to implement the courses,
and the huge change in teaching they required.
Today the situation has changed dramatically. New tools, including
the net itself, are creating a new paradigm in instruction. A
good example is a hypermedia course for prospective teachers developed
by Ron Owston, professor of education at York University. The
course includes two dozen modules, each of which has a topic
description and suggested readings with corresponding hot links
to the original source. Electronic seminars are available to each
student, in which the professor participates more as a peer than
as the authority who owns all knowledge. Outside experts and facilitators
are invited to participate (I was one). The course includes various
assignments, which students submit online, and research tools
to help students conduct in-depth investigations of topics and
data.
The new media can help create a culture for learning in which
the learner enjoys enhanced interactivity and connections with
others. Rather than broadcasting facts and theories, the professor
becomes a participant in learning. Professor and students learn
from each other, constructing narratives that make sense out of
their own experiences. Various digital forums enable brainstorming,
debate, and the influencing of each other -- in other words, social
learning.
This kind of constructivist approach has gained ground in elementary
and secondary schools; now it is taking place on college campuses
as well. And the results of the shift are positive. "Compared
with students enrolled in conventionally taught courses, students
who use well-crafted computer-mediated instruction ... generally
achieve higher scores on summary examinations, learn their lessons
in less time, like their classes more, and develop more positive
attitudes towards the subject matter they're learning," say Warren
Baker, Thomas Hale, and Bernard Gifford in the September/October
1997 issue of Educom Review. "These results hold for a broad range
of students stretching from elementary to college students, studying
across a broad range of disciplines, from mathematics to the social
sciences to the humanities."
The new university
The threat to the engineering school at CalTech is not MIT.
Rather, it is the hundreds of private companies that will soon
offer inexpensive, fully accredited, high-quality courses on the
net -- self-paced learning available anyplace, anytime. The role
of a university as the repository of knowledge is changing, as
companies and other employers develop elaborate knowledge-management
programs that enable them to be effective. The role of the university
librarian is not so much to manage the storage of information
but rather to be consultant and knowledge navigator -- roles that
exist in the private sector. Even the university's role as a center
of specialized research is in question, unless it can forge effective
partnerships with private firms.
As universities change, so does learning. Universities are beginning
to catch up with elementary and secondary schools in adopting
a new model of learning that is based on discovery rather than
instruction. As Seymour Papert says in his 1996 book The Connected
Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap, "The scandal
of education is that every time you teach something, you [deny]
the pleasure and benefit of discovery."
At the risk of sounding equally heretical, there is a shift
away from pedagogy -- the art, science, and profession of teaching
-- to the creation of learning partnerships and learning cultures.
Colleges are becoming places to learn, rather than places to teach.
"Pedagogy had to do with optimizing the transmission of the information,"
says John Seely Brown of Xerox Palo Alto Center. "What we now
find is that kids don't want optimized, pre-digested information.
They want to learn by doing -- where they synthesize their own
understanding -- usually based on trying things out."
Learning environments and curricula will still be designed,
but they can be designed in partnership with the learners or by
the learners themselves. This new model shifts from teacher-centered
to learner-centered education, focusing the learning experience
on the individual rather than on the transmitter. In the past,
education has tended to focus on the teacher -- especially in
postsecondary education, where the interests and background of
the teacher strongly influence course content. Learner-centered
education, in contrast, begins with an evaluation of students'
abilities, learning styles, and social context and other important
factors that affect learning. It makes extensive use of software
programs that can structure and tailor the learning experience.
It is more active, with students discussing, debating, researching,
and collaborating on projects.
The new model is also highly customized. Digital media enable
students to be treated as individuals -- to have highly customized
learning experiences based on their background, individual talents,
age level, cognitive style, interpersonal preferences, and so-on.
As Papert puts it: "What I see as the real contribution of digital
media to education is a flexibility that could allow every individual
to discover their own personal paths to learning. This will make
it possible for the dream of every progressive educator to come
true: In the learning environment of the future, every learner
will be 'special.'"
Peter Drucker's prediction need not come true if colleges and
universities find the leadership and the capacity to learn as
organizations about what can be. Their first step: Listen to the
students.
Don Tapscott is chairman of the Alliance
for Converging Technologies , a Toronto-based think tank that
is investigating the impact of digital media on business and the
economy. He is the author of six books, including Paradigm Shift
and The Digital Economy. His latest book is Growing Up Digital:
The Rise of the Net Generation (McGraw Hill, 1998). An earlier
version of this article is also available online.
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