April 14, 1993
Highly paid "lecturers" will be reduced to a few very highly paid media stars - the "recognized best" in their field whether as lecturer or researcher. What makes one lecturer better than another? Reputation? Demand? It doesn't matter. With modern recording, the best are available worldwide - on demand. The Smithsonian is recording them now and building curricula for a $3,000.00, three week graduate fellowship.It all translates into a new, fast growing, highly competitive business to provide educational services which traditional institutions were never designed to deliver. Moreover, our institutions are having difficulty identifying and taking advantage of these new educational services.Large lecture halls may become obsolete. With the best lectures available on demand through electronic media and with electronic conferencing, large lecture halls may not be needed.
Group discussions will be immediate and networked. Networking will replace many classrooms. For only $6,000.00, a technically inclined student can earn a certificate as a Certified Netware Engineer (Novell tm) from MWI of Hunt Valley, Maryland - in nineteen days; starting annual salary $35,000 to $42,000. Supply cannot currently meet demand. If "The media is the message.", we are on the cusp of worldwide networking of massive proportions. Data. Bilateral messages. Conferences. Bulletin boards. E-mail. Interactive courseware. Theater. Music. Want to discuss Euripides with a pro? Check the roster and sign-on.
Information will be packaged and disseminated electronically. Interactive multimedia courseware, now available from ITC of Herndon, Virginia, has been proven to advance deficient secondary school students two grade levels in mathematics in one year - with minimal supervision. There is no reason why this type of courseware cannot be developed to replace or support most information only or skills development courses. This will include a large part of our current curriculum. It also follows that the business of developing courseware will replace most text book publishing and educational documentary film production. In 1992, our nation spent $432 billion on primary, secondary and postsecondary education. It is impossible to believe that our business community will not soon saturate the educational marketplace with new effective high tech courseware.
Time/value competition will increase the demand and value of on-demand short course knowledge and skill mastery at the expense of a traditional institution degree. Measures of time are being reduced from years and months to days, hours, minutes and seconds. Material delivery and handling time for production is being compressed through just-in-time techniques to less than a day. Business takes its concentrated education in one to three day doses. Movies are considered long if they exceed two hours, popular records if they exceed two minutes. Television advertisers educate consumers in ten, twenty and thirty second segments. On the other end of the time scale, bachelor degree students who were expected to graduate in four years a decade ago, are now taking over five years to complete a similar program. Furthermore, as noted above, certain short course learned skills are in high demand at high salaries, while students with liberal arts degrees are having difficulty finding entry level jobs.
Mastery level will replace grade level and grades and will be seen as process without time constraints. Just as Karate recognizes 10 levels of excellence to achieve mastery, with unlimited times of entry and mastery level completion, education will be measured by knowledge and skill level. As schools look to develop outcomes as a measure of success, they will be asked to define them and break them into mastery levels. Progression will be by level, and since, as noted above, the most desirable breakdowns will have shorter and shorter time frames, the number and variation of mastery levels will continually increase. Standard institutional and classroom hierarchy based on fixed curricula, grades and degrees can only act as impediments to learners seeking mastery.
Fewer employees will provide more service in a less structured environment. Geographic, departmental, functional, administrative, authoritarian, hierarchical barriers will dissolve leaving educational institutions with fewer employees providing more services. Businesses are finding that with fewer layers of management and fewer staff they make decisions more quickly and can more easily respond to threats and opportunities. This has left many senior managers and staff without jobs. As education requires increased efficiency and greater responsiveness to market pressures, the demands that changed business will change education. Responsibilities for administrative functions will be consolidated. Departmental barriers will be eliminated.
Governments will return the cost of higher education to the customer. President Clinton has proposed a plan to fund students through a lifetime loan, with repayment from future income. This will relieve the government and middle-class parents. And it answers the means by which our society will support continual re-education and compete as the rate of change accelerates and worldwide competition escalates. If this happens, the states may reduce their subsidies to higher education even more than they have.
Students will look for educational relevance, which generally translates into being able to use it to get a job. Of our students, most say they came to the university so they can get a better job when they get out. Some of the reasons students give for coming to GMU are because of the close proximity to Washington, D.C., it was the best school for their major, and because GMU is close to home. According to many faculty, many students appear to be uninterested in scholarship in the classic sense. They see little relevance between general education and their daily lives.
The demand for educational services will increase. The "business" of the future is education. We have seen education level translated into higher incomes. We have seen an increasing number of secondary school graduates continue their education. We see increasing numbers of people returning to schools for retraining and new knowledge. We see an increasing rate of change in all things scientific and technical. We see increasing competition on a global basis for new ideas and skilled practitioners of all types.
We can accommodate the future or be destroyed by it. We will accommodate by creating a value added university.
First, we will respect the student and the employee by treating stakeholders with dignity. We will do all we can to be responsive to the students, faculty and administrators. Service providers to students and faculty will create personal vision statements, identify and clearly understand the suppliers and customers' needs and agree to work on a team that will perform transactions that best serve customers.
Second, we will provide a value added education. We will explore every opportunity to provide the most cost effective means to give the student what the student requires. We will install the networks, buy and build desired courseware, provide the best on line support services for student-to-student and faculty-to-student assistance. We will build courses that will evaluate levels of mastery, but not through traditional grading systems. A student may need good grades to be accepted into graduate school, but he or she needs skills and experience to secure a decent job. We will encourage cooperative learning - not competition. We will not grade on the curve. We will evaluate the effectiveness of our work by the progress of the pupil. We will strive to be paperless and lecture hall-less. We will provide the most immediate, efficient (also meaning low-cost) and trouble free administrative services to students and faculty.
Third, we will create a value added community. We will take every opportunity to become a learning community. We will incorporate the knowledge of faculty from multiple disciplines into the experiences of the learner. Faculty and student support staff will help students tie their work and daily living experiences to the knowledge they have gained. Students will show what they've learned in the classroom by designing special projects and participating in meaningful community service activities.
Fourth, we must encourage scholarship, judged on new criteria. Let us tie research to teaching. New ways of thinking, new products and a better understanding of our community and our world must be brought to the classroom. Faculty teams in the classroom of tomorrow must determine the relevance of an ever growing and changing body of available information, organize it, find ways to build educational experiences around it and match it to the level of their students. This requires faculty to be on the "cutting edge" of bodies of knowledge. Faculty and staff teams will be more than lecturers, they will be responsible for the process of learning. As coaches, advisors or mentors in the classroom, they will find new means to build their students' skills in communication, analysis, synthesis, critical thinking, and evaluation of information. We will create learning teams that will reinvent scholarship---and reinvent it again.
Last, George Mason University must be seamless. Students, faculty, custodians, et al. must respect each other, contribute to one another, create a value added community and serve a new form of scholarship that worships at the common altar of knowledge, experiential and lifelong learning. What better way to think together than for faculty and students to view the same information and collectively build new constructs. The community of learners includes students, faculty and staff. We are all student scholars.
Now it is your turn. Write model 2 and let's talk.
| Modification date: March 07, 2004 | © Copyright 2004 by Brad Cox |