The ASHE-ERIC Reports have a well-deserved reputation for succinct reviews and analyses of important issues in higher education. Van Dusen's book continues this tradition, surveying a broad spectrum of trends in the use of technology on our campuses--how it will affect teaching, learning, research, quality management, governance, and finance. As the subtitle of the book indicates, Van Dusen is interested in exploring the potential of technology to reform higher education. He follows this theme in each chapter, looking for evidence that technology has already begun to alter important aspects of higher education and extrapolating from current events to predict future changes. The book provides a useful and comprehensive survey of developments in the field of higher education, but I feel that its pro-technology bias in many sections makes is less useful than it might have been.
Van Dusen's bias is especially apparent in the first two chapters on teaching and learning, which I would like to discuss in some detail. In "Teaching on the Virtual Campus: New Roles, New Responsibilities" he begins with a description and history of the "Instruction Paradigm," which is the traditional teacher-centered, passive model of instruction. He contrasts the traditional model with the emerging "Learning Paradigm," a student-centered, interactive mode of teaching. Those of us in faculty development have been aware of this shift for some time--indeed, we have promoted it on our campuses for years--but Van Dusen seems to think that only technology will make it possible for us to make the change to the new paradigm: "Clearly, before a true paradigmatic shift is likely to occur, technology leaders within and outside the academy will have to grapple with a number of crucial issues . . . " (p. 15)
He continues in this vein, describing "how the new technologies assist institutions in fulfilling their unique missions" and examines the possibilities for liberal arts colleges, research universities, comprehensive universities, and community colleges. Van Dusen sees the widest possibilities for exploitation of technology in the community colleges because of their traditional emphasis on serving a broad range of students and their sensitivity to the job training market. (He doesn't even mention undergraduate teaching in his discussion of research universities.) Much of the material in this section comes from publications sponsored by CAUSE and Educom (now combined as Educause) and hews to the party line about a "new learning infrastructure" that will "offer instruction in a flexible, modular form."
Van Dusen also addresses faculty development in this chapter, proposing a "new agenda" for professional development, consisting of five elements: (1) learning styles of students, (2) distance learning theory, (3) instructional design processes, (4) adult learning theory, and (5) active and cooperative learning. As a faculty developer, I found his "new agenda" surprising, since (aside from "distance learning theory") these are exactly the issues that faculty development professionals have been addressing for years. He apparently has had little contact with faculty developers and he relies on one source, Collaborative Peer Review (Keig and Waggoner, 1994), for his information about faculty development. Unfortunately, the Keig and Waggoner book is strongly biased against professional faculty developers, so Van Dusen concludes that the best way to improve college teaching is by faculty helping faculty. However, he doesn't tell us how this might be accomplished and he seems to associate teaching improvement with the adoption of technology. Along these lines, his discussion of active and cooperative learning contains several characteristics leap of logic:
Active and cooperative learning, two established classroom techniques designed for virtually any kind of classroom environment, are especially well suited to the demands of the virtual classroom. (pp. 28-29).
Designed originally for traditional classroom settings, cooperative learning techniques can be adapted to an electronic environment via the interactive capabilities of two-way video and computer-mediated communications. (p. 29)
These statements are unsubstantiated by any of his quoted sources, which deal exclusively with active and cooperative learning in traditional classrooms. He apparently fails to understand that the social interactions that are at the core of cooperative learning are extremely difficult to replicate in a virtual environment.
The second chapter, "Classroom Learning: Interaction and Interface," is much better, although it still suffers from an uncritical view of technology. Van Dusen starts by pointing out, quite rightly, that the traditional lecture method does not teach higher-order thinking skills and that "in the traditional classroom, lecture can be enhanced and discussion stimulated by the use of new computer-based technologies" (p. 35). He describes (briefly) how presentation software, computer simulations, and conferencing software might enhance the classroom learning experience for students. At this point, Van Dusen shifts to the consideration of "the virtual classroom" and distance learning, beginning with a description of the "new" constructivist educational theory. Constructivism is not "new," nor is it a single theory, and it has its roots in the work of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner, Ulric Neisser, and Nelson Goodman. It has, however, been recently rediscovery by distance learning enthusiasts as the centerpiece of their argument for distance learning. It is telling that the two sources Van Dusen uses in this section are articles from The Journal of Computing in Education and Syllabus rather than books or articles on educational theory. If he had explored other sources, he would have found that constructivism is far more complex and difficult than the simplistic concept reflected in the technological literature.
Certainly, it is theoretically possible to use distance learning technologies as vehicles for constructivist learning, but it requires a far deeper understanding of the mechanism of learning than most faculty currently have. I have worked with a number of teachers to help them design and teaching Web-based courses, and they have found that college students are not "natural" constructivists, but need adequate preparation and guidance to embark on this kind of learning.
In the remainder of this chapter, Van Dusen provides a nice review of the chief applications for various forms of technology in instruction, although I had to wince at his persistent use of "interface" to describe "interaction."
Chapter three, "Research and the New Scholarly Agenda," is essentially an argument in favor of a redefinition of scholarship along the lines of Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered (1990). Many academics agree that the time has come to expand the notion of scholarship and to include "the scholarship of teaching" in that broader conception. Van Dusen's review of the subject is excellent, but his argument that the World Wide Web will somehow play a major role in the redefinition of scholarship is murky at best, and seems to rest solely on the premise that technology improves and speeds up scholarly communication.
In chapter four, "Creating a Culture of Quality," Van Dusen reviews the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement in higher education, characterizing it as a way to change the hierarchical, bureaucratic structures of our campuses. Technology, in the form of Information Resource Management, can promote TQM by facilitating admissions processing, registration, financial aid and loan processing, and billing. This process "decentralizes" and "democratizes" the access information that has traditionally been centralized and studded with bureaucratic barriers. Van Dusen also points out that this "reengineering student administrative support services" can yield considerable savings for an institution. He is less sanguine about the future of TQM in the academic (teaching) sphere, reviewing the reasons why faculty members resist the idea and admitting that, since faculty members control the classroom, assessment and quality control are difficult to accomplish. He holds out the hope that "virtual classrooms" of the future will provide "more scrutable environments for objective, automated assessment than traditional physical classrooms." Also, since "virtual universities" (such as Western Governors University) propose to test student competencies rather than reward students for "seat time," this development may influence traditional schools to adopt outcomes assessment and thereby establish an "academic TQM" system.
The chapter on governance and finance is probably the strongest section of this book, since Van Dusen does not flinch from enumerating some very thorny practical issues that stand in the way of any institution's efforts to deal with technology. However, he offers little practical advice for dealing with these issues and one is left with the feeling that there are many more problems than there are solutions.
If I had just read Van Dusen's last chapter, "Conclusions and Recommendations," instead of reading rest of the book, I would have a completely different impression of his analysis of the role of technology in higher education. His recommendations focus more on the structure and function of higher education and less on technology per se, and he sounds more cautious and even-handed than he does in his detailed treatments of the topics in the book proper. My recommendation to readers would be to read the last chapter first, keeping in mind that his conclusions are less biased than his analyses might suggest.
Ed Neal
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Boyer, Ernest. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, NJ: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Keig, L. & Waggoner, M. D. (1994). Collaborative peer review: The role of faculty in improving college teaching. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 2. Washington, DC: The George Washington University, School of Education and Human Development.