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A Provost's vision: The electronic environment

By Stanley Chodorow

It is my hope that faculty and students will soon see an electronic environment as a "single system" of academic support services - the library, academic computing, and instructional technology. In this environment, information about the library's collections, computing resources on and off campus, and a variety of educational technologies would be accessible through a workstation, wherever it is located.

Even more important, the network would give members of the community access to one another. Electronic mail, the transferring and sharing of data files, and other tools of the network could constitute a new medium through which faculty and students interact in carrying out their academic functions.

A single system image

Today, the academic community lives in an environment made up of buildings, the utility system, walkways, and the open spaces of the campus. It is a physical complex where faculty and students accomplish their missions. In the future, this complex will be greater than its physical limits, enhanced by the installation of an electronic environment in which the network will become a medium of intellectual exchange and education within the campus and between it and the outside world.

To make this electronic environment effective for teaching and research, the individual systems within it must be highly flexible. The system should be an open medium of discourse among faculty, students, and academic staff. While the campus computing environment will consist of components - some developed by a computing center, others by departments and groups of faculty - it should appear as a single entity. Ideally, all parts of the computing system should be attached to the network to provide communication, the means for collaboration in research, and a flexible computing environment. The system should permit members of the campus community to take advantage of all available computing resources.

Access to educational technology

Instructional technology will be another part of the environment. The elemental forms of educational technology are language and pictures through which learners have acquired skills and knowledge since the beginning of human culture. The technologies of education, primitive or advanced, are useful because they enhance the fundamental medium of teaching and learning - discourse between teachers and students.

This point may seem self-evident, but it needs to be made because many people seem to think that new technologies will transform the educational process and change the nature of universities in fundamental ways. The fact is that technology contributes to teaching and learning by enhancing the effectiveness of verbal and pictorial communication between students and their teachers.

But the new educational technology could have a revolutionary effect if it is plugged into the electronic network. Once traditional and new technologies are available to faculty and students both in and out of class, faculty will be able to create new types of assignments, students will have new ways of completing them, and classroom demonstrations will become more flexible and powerful than they are now. This much is foreseeable; it is impossible to guess at the full range of creative uses to which faculty will put the network in constructing and teaching their courses.

Enhancing support

One further point needs to be made: The effective use of instructional technology and of the new environment in which it will exist will require the creation of a professional staff to help the faculty use and develop it. Faculty will bring to members of this staff a set of educational goals and ideas about how course materials should be organized. The professional staff will help them use technology, new and old, to achieve these goals and to present the materials in the most effective manner. The staff should therefore have a knowledge of effective techniques of teaching, of the technologies available for use with those techniques, and of the characteristics of the different academic disciplines. This staff will have a role similar to that now played by reference librarians, who help faculty and students use the increasingly complex information resources they need for their work. Many reference librarians have advanced training in the academic disciplines they serve, and I envision a computing staff with similar backgrounds. Of course, it is my duty as a provost - the keeper of the academic purse - to remind us that the creation of such a staff is a long-term goal, for it will require additional resources as well as reallocation of existing resources. But, after all, this is a vision.

Note: On the idea of a single system, see Robert Heterick, Jr., "A Single System Image: An Information Systems Strategy," Professional Paper Series, 1, CAUSE, The Professional Association for Computing and Information Technology in Higher Education, 1988.