Educators Peer Into A Future Built Around Technology

You’d swear they’d seen the future of higher education in a cathode ray tube.

And that they liked what they’d seen.

Some 170 university administrators and professors fairly glowed Wednesday as a battery of information technology experts looked to the Internet to help universities deal with the next crush of students.

Leading the charge was Mike Leavitt, governor of Utah and co-founder of Western Governors University, a consortium of 17 states using the Internet and other technology to reach students.

With a vocabulary rich in business metaphors, the former insurance executive talked of higher education as an industry and a new delivery system that could respond quickly to the demands of the marketplace. With the help of the Internet, he said, “The professor is being leveraged.”

To universities long used to thinking more of teaching and less of making ends meet, “this is threatening stuff,” he said.

But college budgets are tightening and the pool of college-aged students is growing, he said. Meanwhile, executives in the fast-moving Information Age need graduates with the “competencies” his program will measure as much as the name-brand prestige that traditional universities offer.

“I don’t think name-branding is going to go away,” he said, “but Harvard is going to get better as a result.”

He found few naysayers among those attending the day-long conference, “Lifelong Learning: Meeting New Needs in New Ways.” The Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities sponsored the conference.

“Higher education, as great as it is, as strong as it is, as wonderful as it is, has to adjust and take charge of change,” said C. Peter Magrath, president of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges. “If we don’t take charge of change, we will be swept along.”

Faculty in general are “somewhat reluctant” to embrace teaching outside the traditional classroom environment, said Muriel Oaks, director of WSU’s Extended University Services.

But the results of the six-year-old Extended Degree Program, which uses video, print, the telephone and the Internet, show students can fare well off campus, she said.

“The students in distance education get as good or better grades than their counterparts in more traditional courses,” she said. “They’re meeting our program objectives. They’re satisfied with the program. The faculty are satisfied with the program.”

She acknowledged that the students, who are older and have more work and family commitments, tend not to complete classes as frequently as traditional students.

, DataTimes