Campuses Look to Digital Tools for Savings, and Reinvention

By Jeffrey R. Young

Randy Lyhus for The Chronicle

Call it the year of the mega-class. First a Stanford University professor opened his computer-science course to anyone who wanted to join in online last fall, and more than 160,000 people signed up. Soon some of the world’s best-known universities tried similar experiments with this new model of online learning, in which students watch short video lectures, take automatically graded quizzes, and use online communities to work through concepts they don’t understand. It’s a mix of self-service learning and crowdsourced teaching.

Proponents see the mega-classes as a sign that technology on campuses has reached a tipping point, a moment when the lecture model begins to fade in favor of new teaching methods: The hope is that professors will use technology to deliver basic concepts to students online before class, leaving more time in classrooms for face-to-face discussions and hands-on exercises.

The reality, though, is that professors have been slow to significantly reshape their teaching, despite hefty investments by colleges in “smart classrooms” and wireless Internet systems. Only a minority of professors use the latest technology very effectively in their teaching—about 22 percent for clickers, their students say. PowerPoint appears to remain the go-to tool.

Many students now say they want more tech in the classroom. After all, they arrive on campuses with an arsenal of gadgets that could be used in education. Eighty-seven percent now own laptops, and a majority—55 percent—have smartphones that provide access to the Internet as well as take calls. Tablet-computer ownership is also growing fast.

Seeing that interest, many colleges are re-evaluating their choice of learning-management systems—the software that supports teaching online. Blackboard has long been the leading provider of such software, and about half of colleges use its system. But a growing number of colleges have embraced open-source options, such as Moodle, which give programmers on campuses more power to make modifications.

An array of new technology companies has also sprung up to support what their founders see as a coming teaching revolution. Investments in education-technology companies nationwide tripled in the last decade. “The investing community believes that the Internet is hitting education, that education is having its Internet moment,” Jose Ferreira, founder of the interactive-learning company Knewton, told The Chronicle last winter. In 2011, Mr. Ferreira’s company scored a $33-million investment, in one of the biggest deals of the year.

Slow Move Toward E-Books

Textbook publishers say their industry is on the verge of a digital revolution as well. Though electronic textbooks now represent only 1 percent of course-materials sales by the Follett Higher Education Group, a major college-bookstore company, it expects that proportion to grow to more than 10 percent in the next five to seven years.

Some university administrators are hoping to speed up that change by essentially forcing students to buy digital textbooks, in the name of saving them money. In a nationwide pilot project, several colleges are requiring students in some courses to pay a course-materials fee to cover the cost of e-textbooks—meaning that the colleges buy the books rather than leaving the purchase to students. College leaders say they get a better deal by buying in bulk, and publishers sell more copies. “Universities are going to have to engage in saying, This is how we want e-textbook models to evolve that are advantageous to our students and our interests,” said Bradley C. Wheeler, chief information officer at Indiana University at Bloomington, shortly after he began to champion the approach two years ago.

Students aren’t the only ones reading on digital devices these days. More than 42 percent of college presidents say they own a tablet computer, for instance, and smartphones are the norm.

One of those leaders, Freeman Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, says his smartphone means he’s constantly tied to the campus, even as he travels. “I am connected to this device for communication in the same way that I am always connected to my mind,” he said. “I’m constantly expressing or receiving.”

All that demand comes at a time of serious budget challenges at many institutions, however. More than half of public universities faced cuts to their technology budgets in 2011.

That’s one reason experiments like mega-courses are so appealing: Finally, leaders see a way to save money with technology. Hybrid approaches that blend classroom time and online exercises could reduce use of physical facilities and instructors’ time, some believe.

Dawn of E-Advising

Experiments that take a so-called big-data approach also promise cost savings—and improvements in student retention. Tristan Denley, a math professor turned provost at Austin Peay State University, has borrowed a page from Netflix’s movie-recommendation service, creating a system that suggests courses to students based on how well past students performed. The software may soon even suggest what students should major in, based on information they’ve given the college and their academic performance. “If eHarmony works well, why not this?” said Mr. Denley, referring to the popular dating service.

Many college leaders also hope digital technology can bring down the rising costs of academic journals. But some publishers have been pushing back against policies that require results of federally supported research to be made publicly available free online. In Congress, for instance, debate flared over the Research Works Act, which would have forbidden federal agencies to do anything that would result in the sharing of privately published research—even if that research was done with the help of taxpayer dollars—unless the publisher of the work agreed first. The measure failed, but the issue is expected to remain under debate in coming months.

Journals aren’t the only place scholars share research these days, of course. As more professors upload research informally online, some of them are devising new ways to gauge scholarly influence to try to get credit for their virtual reach. An approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—aims to measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is blogged about, tweeted, or bookmarked. “There’s a gold mine of data that hasn’t been harnessed yet about impact outside the traditional citation-based impact,” Dario Taraborelli, a senior research analyst with the Strategy Team at the Wikimedia Foundation and a proponent of the idea, told The Chronicle early this year.

Across the campus, the mix of mobile Internet, social networking, and online video is allowing new services that raise fundamental questions about why colleges operate as they do. The year ahead promises to be a time of change, as well as a time of debate about how much rewiring higher education really needs.