Online Education Policy and Practice

The Past, Present, and Future of the Digital University

Anthony G. Picciano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317372813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Online Education Policy and Practice examines the past, present, and future of networked learning environments and the changing role of faculty within them. As digital technologies in higher education increasingly enable blended classrooms, collaborative assignments, and wider student access, an understanding of the creation and ongoing developments of these platforms is needed more than ever. By investigating the history of online education, the rise and critique of MOOCs, the mainstreaming of social media, mobile devices, gaming in instruction, and more, this expansive book outlines a variety of potential scenarios likely to become realities in higher education over the next decade.

Section II
Online Education

5
The First Wave

Beginnings (1993–1999)

The evolution of online learning technology can be viewed as five waves starting in 1993 and continuing through the 2020s. The metaphor of waves representing evolutionary stages is not new. A number of authors, including Alvin Toffler (1970, 1984, 1991), have used waves to designate or demark periods of time. Toffler is an apt comparison in that he deals with information technology. His waves, however, occur over millennia and encompass mega issues associated with the evolution of man as well as information technology. The use of the wave metaphor in this book, although apt, is far more modest than Toffler’s.

The focus of this chapter is the first wave of online education, which began in the early 1990s with the advent of the ubiquitous Internet. While the Internet touched practically every field of human endeavor, its relationship to higher education is unique. First, universities were integral to the development of digital technology, including data communications systems. Many of the major breakthroughs were as a result of collaborations among faculty who had a vision of what technology could do for humankind. Second, before the Internet existed, there was a well-established distance education community in colleges and universities that used mostly passive technologies such as television, radio, and course packs. This community immediately saw the benefits of an interactive technology like the Internet. J.C. Taylor (2001) referred to online education as the new generation of distance education. Third, American higher education had already established closed online education networks (i.e., PLATO) and had some expertise and experiences in delivering online learning. The Internet provided the facility to open up these education networks to the masses.

The Internet

The Idea for an Internet

Joseph C.R. Licklider, the only son of a Baptist minister, came from modest beginnings in a small, rural Missouri town. He was a bright child and enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis and graduated with a BA degree majoring in physics, mathematics, and psychology in 1937. He received a master’s degree in psychology in 1938 from Washington University. In 1942, he completed a PhD in psychoacoustics from the University of Rochester. He held teaching positions at Harvard University and MIT until 1957, when he became a vice president at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, Inc.

In the 1950s, Licklider became convinced that the future of computing technology would center on a digital time-sharing network that would be user friendly and capable of storing large amounts of information in an online environment. Licklider envisioned small personal computers that would link up to the larger computers that were typical of the era to share information. In 1960, he wrote an article titled Man-Machine Symbiosis, which has been described as “one of the most influential papers in the history of postwar technology” (Isaacson, 2014, p. 226). In this article, he described a real-time computer network where people could make inquiries and access large databases for information and assistance in solving problems.

It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a ‘thinking center’ that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval.

The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.

(Licklider, 1960, p. 7)

In October 1962, Licklider was appointed head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at DARPA, then called ARPA, the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In that same year, he delivered a paper with W.E. Clark titled On-Line Man-Computer Communication, wherein he elaborated on his thoughts on people working online on small computers linked to a larger network. In 1963, he sent a memorandum to his colleagues at ARPA titled, “Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network.” In this memorandum, he further explored the early challenges associated with establishing a time-sharing network of computers, given the software of the era. Licklider’s vision would lead to development of ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet in use today.

In 1999, Robert Taylor, who succeeded Licklider at ARPA, received the National Medal of Technology for his more than thirty years of service and “for visionary leadership in the development of modern computing technology, including initiating the ARPAnet project—forerunner of today’s Internet—and advancing groundbreaking achievements in the development of the personal computer and computer networks” (Softky, 2000). Yet, if you asked Taylor about ARPANET and the Internet, he would say that Licklider “was really the father of it all” (Isaacson, 2014).

The Roots of the Internet (1960s–70s)

It has been well documented that the roots of the Internet can be traced to the U.S. Department of Defense in the 1960s. Concerned about establishing and maintaining a worldwide communications system in the event of a major disaster such as nuclear war, the department engaged engineers and scientists from Rand, UCLA, and MIT to design a data communications system that would be decentralized and capable of functioning regardless of whether any single node or point in the network was no longer available. This design was a departure from the common centralized data communications systems that required a hub or center point to control the entire network. Dozens of technology and communications specialists, researchers, and faculty were involved with the design and implementation, which took twenty years to finalize before the Internet as we know it evolved. Key organizations involved with its development included the U.S. Department of Defense, the Rand Corporation, Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), MIT, and UCLA. Paul Baran, a key figure at Rand Corporation in the1960s who conceived of packet switching, was quoted as stating: “the Internet is really the work of a thousand people” (Isaacson, 2014, p. 245). Some of the important milestones in its development were as follows.

In 1969, the Pentagon’s Advanced Research and Projects Agency established the first node of this new network—called Advanced Research and Projects Agency Network (ARPANET)—at UCLA. Throughout the 1970s, the ARPANET grew but was used essentially by government officials, engineers, and scientists connected with research for the U.S. Department of Defense. The major applications were email, file transfer, and discussion groups such as USENET. The underlying key feature of the Internet was the concept of packet switching, which took messages and broke them down into small chunks or packets. This was a major change from previous message switching technology, which essentially transmitted entire messages regardless of length. The packet switching technique was much faster and reduced queuing problems that might result with long messages. In addition, the paths for individual packets, even though they might have the same origin, did not have to go through the same routes of the network but could use different routes as long as they all got to their destination in the proper sequence. The protocol made for a highly efficient and fast distribution of messages that took full advantage of the available network resources.

The Internet Takes Shape (1980s)

In 1983, the military segment of ARPANET developed a separate network called MILNET, and access to ARPANET was expanded to include other computer networks worldwide that used its protocol or method of transferring data. By 1985, there were over 5,000 host computers on ARPANET. In the 1980s, other international networks were being established in the higher education, government, and research communities. Because It’s Time Network (BITNET) was established by the City University of New York, Yale University, and IBM to link university mainframe computers. Computer Science Network (CSNET) was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide data communications facilities for industry, government, and university groups engaged in computer science research. Later, several U.S. agencies—namely, the NSF, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), and the U.S. Department of Energy—funded and established networking facilities that eventually would be used to enhance the aging ARPANET system. By the late 1980s, all of these major networks were communicating with one another, either using or converting to the standard protocol (Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) established on ARPANET: hence the birth of the Internet as we know it today. A protocol in data communications is the way one computer node greets and alerts another node about the message that is being delivered. The construction of the Internet’s TCP/IP is a datagram that has two components: a header and a payload. The IP header is tagged with the source (sending node) IP address, the destination (receiving node) IP address, and other meta-data needed to route and deliver the datagram. The payload is the data message itself that is being transported.

By 1990, there were over 300,000 host computers, and the ARPANET ceased to exist, having fully evolved into what became known as the Internet. In 1991, Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the University of Minnesota developed the first user-friendly, menu-driven interface for the Internet and named it “gopher.” It was entirely text-based but made sending and receiving files and messages much simpler than the previous command-driven method. The next major breakthrough for the Internet would come later in the same year with the development of the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web (1990s)

While the Internet resulted from a large-scale collaboration of American government, private industry, and higher education, the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) was a European creation of the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), established in Geneva, Switzerland. As mentioned in Chapter Three, in the 1950s, I.I. Rabi of Columbia University has been credited with giving the European physicist community the idea for establishing a European-wide laboratory or center patterned after similar facilities established in the United States. Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, who were researchers at CERN, are the two individuals most associated with developing the WWW. Berners-Lee and Cailliau built all the software tools necessary to allow the Internet to use hypermedia, including the HyperText Transfer Protocol (http), the Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML), and the first Web browser (named World Wide Web). Fundamental to the WWW is its hypermedia capability, which allows the transfer and display of various media (text, images, video) that are processed via the HTML coding language. The first browser developed by Berners-Lee and Cailliau was text-based. In 1993, Mosaic, the first graphic interface for the WWW, was developed at the University of Illinois and made available to the public. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, graduate students working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, were the developers of Mosaic, which became a global success and was credited with making the Internet available to the masses. In 1993, there were 2 million Internet hosts. By 1997, there were 19.5 million.

The Internet Today—Expansion and Concerns

The Internet is the most impressive medium ever developed. It provides fast multimedia communications worldwide, and it is free. Users have to pay Internet service providers a fee to make the connection, but the Internet itself is a free resource. It was estimated that the Internet reached its first billion users worldwide in 2005, the second billion in 2010, the third billion in 2014. In the United States, it was estimated that in 2015, almost 280 million people, or 87 percent of the population, had access to the Internet (Internet Live Stats (2015). Such a medium cannot be ignored. To the contrary, it has been embraced by all segments of the world population including higher education, which played a vital role in its development. However, concerns exist about how the Internet has changed many aspects of the human condition, especially its psychological, social, and cultural dimensions.

Nicholas Carr, the New York Times best-selling author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, acknowledges that the Internet may be the “single most powerful mind-altering technology” that has ever come into general use. He also cautions that it is an environment that promotes “cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning” (Carr, 2014, p. 116). Carr also refers to the work of Antonio Damasio, who expresses concern that the immediate access to information provided by the Internet can damage our ability to deal with deep psychological and social situations. Carr suggests that the Internet is “rerouting our vital paths and diminishes our capacity for contemplation and is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts” (Carr, 2014, p. 221). He concludes that we are becoming too dependent upon the Internet for our memory and that our culture needs to be sustained by our collective memories. To remain vital, “culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory and culture withers” (Carr, 2014, p. 196). Andrew Keen, author of The Internet is Not the Answer, goes further than Carr in his criticism:

The more we use the contemporary digital network [Internet], the less economic value it is bringing to us. Rather than promoting economic fairness, it is a central reason for the growing gulf between rich and poor and the hollowing out of the middle class. Rather than generating more jobs, this digital disruption is a principal cause of our structural unemployment crisis…. Rather than making us happy, it is compounding our rage.

(Keen, 2015, p. iv)

Without a doubt the Internet has its issues, and there are justifiable concerns. Nevertheless, it remains the most significant communications invention of humankind to date and has become indispensable to many of our endeavors.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Anytime, Anyplace Learning

Colleges and universities serve as effective incubators of ideas. However, in order to translate the ideas of faculty and researchers into reality (products and services), resources, especially funding, are typically needed from external sources. The same is tru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• SECTION I The Higher Education Landscape
• SECTION II Online Education
• Epilogue
• About the Author
• Index