In March, Michael J. Saylor, the chief executive officer of the software company MicroStrategy, announced that he was giving $100-million of his own money to develop a university that offers an online, Ivy League-quality education free of charge. Whether or not Saylor is able to turn his vision into reality, online education will eventually be free. It is only a matter of time.
Administrators at educational institutions have tended to think of technology as a benign force for organizational enhancement -- not something that could effectively end their way of life. That attitude reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the World Wide Web. If administrators -- along with entrepreneurial faculty members -- expect a financial windfall from offering distance education, they are in for a rude awakening.
As Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian have argued in Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Harvard Business School Press, 1999), the Internet has changed the fundamentals of the economics of information. Although information is still costly to produce, the Web has revolutionized the way we reproduce it, lowering the cost of additional copies to nearly zero. The forces of competition will drive the price of information down to roughly the cost of its reproduction.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that successful online degree programs require the existence of a synchronous virtual classroom -- that is, the professor will deliver live, interactive lectures to students. That would help overcome the isolation and loneliness associated with an anytime/anywhere format.
Let’s further assume that most students will be able to secure broadband access to the Web in their homes, through a cable modem or a digital subscriber line -- which seems likely to happen within five years. Such access will make it possible to create a virtual classroom that could accommodate 700 to 1,200 students -- all of whom could see and hear the instructor; view PowerPoint slides; respond to survey questions posed by the instructor, and see the results of each poll immediately on their computer screens; and send questions to a help desk, where experts in the content of the lecture would answer them.
Most of those features are already built into standard virtual-classroom packages like LearningSpace Live from Lotus and I.B.M., or Conference Center 2000 from PlaceWare. Consequently, the broadband virtual classroom with 1,000 students could be considerably more interactive than a traditional lecture with just 200 students.
In addition, students who needed to review a specific point of the lecture would be able to do so by means of a playback feature. A team of teaching assistants could handle all of the discussion sections and grading for the class. It would be difficult to argue on pedagogical grounds for the superiority of the traditional lecture hall over the broadband virtual classroom.
Continuing the argument, let’s pick an arbitrary tuition figure -- say $100 per course, a figure recommended by William A. Draves, president of the Learning Resources Network. At that price, a course that had 1,000 students would generate $100,000 in revenue.
Let’s give $20,000 of that to the lecturing professor. In the great academic tradition of undercompensating adjuncts, we’re not going to be as generous with the content experts at the help desk. Assuming a ratio of one expert for every 100 students, we will need 10 content experts. If we pay each of them $2,000 per course, they could make a decent income by working on 12 courses each term, or 36 hours per week -- and they would cost us only $20,000 for our course. We also need 40 teaching assistants, using a ratio of one T.A. for every 25 students. Because that work could be done at any time, anywhere, it is likely that graduate students and working professionals would agree to serve as T.A.'s for as little as $1,000 per course.
We have $20,000 left over for incidentals and overhead. If we increased tuition slightly, to $125 per course, we could raise that contribution to overhead to $45,000.
No one would balk at paying $100 or $125 per course, but in fact there is every reason to believe that tuition will eventually be free. Why? In a word, e-commerce. An alliance between an educational institution and several e-commerce companies could easily offer a tuition-free college degree based on mass-produced distance education. Students could choose to pay $100 per course to sit in a virtual lecture hall without the distraction of commercial advertisements, or to pay nothing and view some advertisements during a classroom break or, more controversially, during the lecture itself. It would be difficult to imagine a better situation from the standpoint of advertisers, given the fact that the students would be a captive audience for a considerable amount of time.
Many faculty members might object to such commercialization, but the phenomenon of multitasking may soften their criticism. Multitasking means doing several things at once. Place anyone before a computer screen, ask that person to concentrate on a canned presentation, and before long he or she is viewing the presentation while having another window open to play solitaire or check out a Web site.
Multitasking is irrepressible, and young people are especially proficient at it. It is not unthinkable that a student could take in a lecture while browsing through advertisements for the latest in video games, fashions, or automobiles. And although professors may find it hard to swallow, students in an engaging and multitasked virtual classroom might well be more attentive to the lecture than are students who daydream or read material for other courses in a large lecture hall.
The real money for e-commerce companies will not come from advertisements that students may view during a lecture, but from what happens in the few minutes before and after the lecture. That is a great opportunity to establish shopping portals on the Web that would be tailored to the interests of each student. Such portals are profitable because of revenue-sharing agreements, whereby commercial sites agree to share a percentage of their sales with the educational site that provided the links to them.
Some people have speculated that the generous offers of Ford Motor Company and Delta Air Lines to provide their employees with computers, printers, and access to the Web for $5 to $12 a month is ultimately motivated by a desire to create shopping portals. The companies’ combined work force of 422,000 represents billions of dollars in buying power.
If you still think the prospect of free online education is ridiculous, please direct your Web browserto www.britannica .com and ask yourself whether just five years ago you would have dreamed of having the entire resources of the Encyclopaedia Britannica at your fingertips -- completely free. A few years ago, you would have had to buy the 32-volume hardback version of the encyclopedia -- still available today, with a few additional materials, for $1,250. Now anyone with access to the Web can use a fully searchable version of Britannica, along with related articles from more than 70 magazines and links to over 125,000 Web sites. In a review of the site in PC Magazine earlier this year, Don Willmott wrote that “it’s probably worth the cost of a computer” to get access to such a valuable resource.
The most important question facing many colleges and universities is not how to milk their own distance-education programs for profits, but how to survive when others offer free online education -- particularly if an institution’s current annual tuition is $15,380 (the 1999 average for private four-year institutions). The advantages associated with name recognition, a picturesque campus, and geographic proximity to students’ homes will carry much less weight when the alternative is a degree at no charge.
Colleges and universities face two crucial tasks. First, they must reverse the trend of the commodification of instruction, characterized by large lecture classes and the growing use of adjuncts. Second, they need to increase the value of what they can offer their students, perhaps by developing hybrid models that combine the best features of the brick-and-mortar campus and e-learning. Otherwise, they will be in for a rough ride.
Van B. Weigel is a professor of ethics and economic development at Eastern College, in Pennsylvania.
http://chronicle.com Section: Opinion & Arts Page: B8