Finkelstein, M.J., Frances C., Jewett, F.I., Scholz, B.W. (2000). Dollars, Distance, and Online Education: The New Economics of College Teaching and Learning.

	Finkelstein, M.J., Frances C., Jewett, F.I., Scholz, B.W. (2000). Dollars, Distance, and Online Education: The New Economics of College Teaching and Learning. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press. Pp. 373 $42.95       ISBN 1-57356-395-1 Reviewed by Bryan R. Warnick University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign January 31, 2003 It is sometimes difficult to understand the pressure we seem to feel to incorporate the new information technologies (IT) into all areas of life. In the domain of higher education, in particular, some feel compelled to jump headfirst into the technological fray, desperately hoping not to be left behind a rapidly changing world. This impulse to incorporate technology into education, however, comes with costs. The information technologies can be quite expensive, after all, and in constant need of upgrades and the attention of a well-trained support staff. While this push to bring IT into higher education has not been cheap, in some areas of higher education, at least, it has proven to be a worthwhile investment. Registration, library work, and other forms of tedious record keeping and information management have surely been simplified, and thus have probably saved institutional resources. When the question of the costs and benefits of technology turn away from areas dealing with information management to areas of teaching and learning, the question of cost-effectiveness becomes murkier. So far, students have borne the cost of technology by paying increased tuition and by providing cheap labor, while faculty members have carried the cost by spending many unrequited hours developing teaching and learning technologies. As the editors of Dollars, Distance, and Online Education write, “Clearly, higher education has adapted to the budgetary demands of the new technologies by demanding more of their faculty with no concomitant increase in compensation or at least not increase commensurate with effort” (p. 317). Thus, both faculty and students have sacrificed time and money for the sake of incorporating IT into teaching and learning. All this effort raises important questions. Has it been worthwhile? Do the benefits justify the costs? Will it be cost-effective in the future to develop teaching and learning technologies? Up to this point, too little work has been done trying to think through the costs of online higher education. Indeed, the question of IT costs in higher education has proven to be an enormously difficult question to answer. The editors of the volume Dollars, Distance, and Online Education should be congratulated for putting together a collection of papers that attempts to “systematically analyze and assess the costs of information technology (IT) for teaching and learning in higher education” (2000, p. xiii). The goal of the book is discuss whether it is possible to maintain educational quality, while reducing costs though IT. The editor’s aim is that of “ensuring quality and, based on such measurements, maintaining or increasing quality, while substituting capital for labor and achieving economies of scale, is the goal” (p. 316). For this reason, the book should clearly be of interest to administrators of higher education who need to make budgetary decisions. I believe, however, the book also has a wider interest. Cost is one force, if not the major force, which eventually shapes and constrains the way technology is adopted in education. Examining the force of cost constraints can help us to predict how technology might be realistically adopted in educational institutions. If we have a more reasonable picture of how technology will actually be used, we are placed in a position to offer a more relevant analysis of the impact IT will actually have on education. Thus, it seems that this book will also be of interest to those interested in technology and higher education generally. The book is composed of 15 essays. Each essay attempts to address the problem of the cost of IT in a different way. Stephen Landry’s contribution analyzes the lessons learned from a single university, namely, Seton Hall University and its attempt to make computing “ubiquitous.” In contrast, Heather Eggins is much broader, and considers research studies done in a number of countries around the world. Apart from the geographical diversity shown by these two essays, the contributions to this volume also look at a wide variety topics. In one of Frank Jewett’s essays, he looks at how costs and benefits played out in California State University’s attempt to incorporate technology into remedial mathematics instruction. Judith Boettcher examines the different types of “web courses” (which she classifies as webcourses, webcentric courses, or web-enhanced courses), gives a brief explanation of how to move a traditional course to the web, and shows how costs and savings arise differently depending on the type of web-based course that is developed. James Caplan explores student satisfaction with online experiences as one way of thinking through the benefits and costs of IT in higher education. Christine Maitland, Rachel Hendrickson, and Leroy Dubeck offer an in-depth study of what IT means for higher education faculty. Other contributors describe of how money is spent on IT and of where the money comes from, as well as offering assessments of how IT may or may not work to save institutional dollars. The book contains a helpful “Resources” section, which lists many of the major studies in this literature, and offers a summary of each work. I found this to be an easy way to get up-to-date quickly on what is going on in the field of IT costs and higher education. The editors also supply a conclusion essay that highlights many of the major points raised in the book. I will turn to some of the major points now, and explore them in more detail. Each point that is raised in the conclusion of the books reveals a tension, I think, and even sometimes a paradox, between the attempts to maximize both cost savings and quality in online education. The first point that is highlighted in the conclusion relates to “economics of scale.” Since online course development has a higher upfront cost, and a higher cost to execute and maintain, an online class must generally enroll hundreds of students in order to save money when compared to traditional instruction. Once an online course is developed and functioning, it costs less to add students than it does in a traditional classroom. Only large-scale courses, which take advantage of the lower costs of adding students, will save money. As Finkelstein and Scholz write at the beginning of the volume: The primary effect of IT-enhanced teaching, whether in the traditional classroom or in distance education on a small scale, has been to increase the demand for faculty labor. It takes more faculty time . . . to prepare and deliver an IT enhanced course. It could not be a cost-saving strategy for a course designed by and only for the individual instructor to be put online or into some sort of IT-enhanced format. If it is worth doing, then it must be for other reasons, such as to make teaching and learning more effective. (pp. 20-21) At a certain level of course enrollment there is a “crossover point’ where the costs of the traditional course rise to equal those of the IT course. Once the crossover point has been traversed, online education becomes less expensive than traditional classroom instruction. In this sort of situation, and only in this sort of situation, does online education have a lower per-student cost than classroom instruction. If IT is to be cost effective, then, it has to be used with very large groups of students. Consider for a moment the practical conclusions that might stem from this. If we continue to push IT into higher education, and if our use of IT must eventually must make sense in terms of cost, then this will mean that more and more students will be learning from fewer and fewer teachers. Online education must be this way to be cost-effective. This reveals a tension, I think, between IT and education in a democratic society. More specifically, the tension is between a cost-effective IT enhanced education (i.e., many students, few teachers), and a healthy educational pluralism. In some sense, it would be useful in a democratic society for social discourse to proceed with a large group of citizens who share a common educational base – huge IT courses would certainly promote this common stock of knowledge. But surely we would not want everybody to learn, say, American history from only a few historians. A democracy would seem to be better served by an education that speaks with a multitude of voices, each offering an idiosyncratic vision of the subject matter. An educational pluralism seems better suited to creating a properly critical and creative citizenry, but cost-effective IT seems to work against this pluralism. This worry may be somewhat overblown, however. In some ways, the specter of costs itself works against this monotonous vision of IT dominated education. As the editors point out in their conclusion: [S]preading the higher initial capital costs of IT over time is often difficult because of the technological advances that require expensive upgrades and replacements of capacity. It is also difficult because the accessibility to new information created by IT results in much more rapid outdating of the educational content of many course that then require renewing much sooner. Thus, the potential economies of scales and lower costs of IT may often be more hoped for than actually realized. (p. 251) Thus, the large enrollments needed to justify the costs of course development and maintenance probably cannot come from simply “replaying” the same course for several years. Equipment and knowledge both rapidly become obsolete. This is the a paradox that arises when thinking about the costs of IT and education. The very thing that makes IT valuable, its technical complexity and its ability to spread information rapidly, makes its application to educational settings problematic when it comes down to issues of cost. Maitland, Hendrickson, and Dubeck argue that the limitations suggested by the economics of scale are even more stringent: For any course that can be held in one section, in-person instruction. . .will be less costly. Consider a 200-student course that is entirely lecture. The least expensive way to offer the course is that of one instructor in one classroom . . . . With just one instructor and no support costs . . . such a course is profitable in person and more profitable than it would be if given online. The in-person class will be less costly than the IT course of comparable enrollment because preparation time will be less for the in-person course and delivery of instruction will also take less time in-person than interacting individually with 200 students each week via-email. (pp. 290-1) Of course, sending one email to 200 students would be easy, but trying to communicate with students on a more personal basis does tend to take much longer on-line. The authors go on to write: Only large courses with more sections than one faculty member could teach at one time may offer savings when offered online. The Jewett example calculates a cross-over point of between 450-900 students enrolled in the course to make offering it via IT less costly than via traditional classrooms. However, relatively few courses in any university will satisfy this criterion. Hence, even in a major university setting, the possibility of cost-saving using IT applies only to a small number of multi-section courses. Furthermore, any saving an administration claims might occur via IT should be compared to those achieved by simply adding one or two students per section, thereby reducing the number of sections by 5 to 10 percent, and reducing the total cost of the course accordingly. (p. 291) Those who hoped that IT would be a way of making a high quality education widely available at low cost will probably be disappointed with such arguments. If further research bears out these ideas, then it may reinforce something that we perhaps always should have known: a quality education is not cheap, no matter how it’s done. The law of scale says that because the costs of IT remain relatively fixed, the cost savings must come through saving money on educational labor. What this will require, the contributors to the volume seem to agree, is a restructuring of the professional roles in the academe. Traditionally, the tasks of instruction have been bundled together, and accomplished by one individual instructor who does the course development, the delivery of the course, the student interaction, and the evaluation. This way of doing things, though, costs a great deal of money. Instead, the contributors seem to argue, these educational roles should be unbundled: To reduce costs, we will need to find ways to unbundle these functions so that we reduce duplication of effort, and thus reduce labor. Course preparation is probably the function that at once promotes the most “duplication” of faculty effort and can yield the most cost savings. . . . As with any restructuring . . . in any industry, enormous barriers must be overcome. Dissociating the components of the academic role that have crystallized over the past century in the American context is no mean challenge. (p. 315) What this seems to amount too, in some respects, is a deskilling of academic labor. Just as the master-craftsman was replaced by an assembly line of deskilled workers, so also might go the “unbundling” of the teaching role. The professor is needed only to supply the content of the course, and answer a few questions. Once the course has been designed and the content questions answered, the rest of the course can be turned over to educational technicians. In the long term, there are major implications for the definition of faculty work. To the extent that teaching roles are unbundled, there will be many more opportunities for “specialized” teaching roles (be they providing content, delivering content, or interacting with students and assessment), and that means many more opportunities for “partial” contributions to teaching (reinforcing the explosive growth of part-time faculty). (p. 317) To the extent that professors, then, want to retain the role of the craftsman—overseeing the whole of the educational product—this might not perhaps be a welcome development. For others who find the details of preparing and running a course to be tedious, this unbundling will no doubt be embraced. Clearly, though, if technology is to be more widely used in a cost effective way, then the days of professors having complete over their courses will be numbered (at least in some circumstances). This “unbundling” should also raise questions about the continuity of IT-based courses. Without one mind overseeing the development, implementation, and evaluation of a course, what measures will need to be in place to assure that there is coherence between the various unbundled aspects of a course? Another way IT cost considerations might loosen faculty control is over the issue of intellectual property. Many of the contributors to the volume acknowledge that, in order of IT to be cost-effective in higher education, institutions must retain control over the courses that faculty produce. It will take a lot of institutional money to develop a course; therefore, the institution must retain control of the course if a faculty member moves elsewhere. The contributors acknowledge that this issue will be the site of many future academic battles. There will be serious issues regarding the ownership of intellectual property; the resolution of these issues has the potential to fundamentally alter the relationship be faculty and their institutions. Thus, for example, to the extent that institutions become owners of intellectual property, some faculty will relinquish their claims to disciplinary expertise and probably lose the primary foundation for advancing their claims to a role institutional governance. To the extent that faculty themselves becomes the owners of intellectual property, they will take on the characteristics of entrepreneurial product developers rather than service providers. This may mean the loosening of institutional ties and the emergence of a transinstitutional class of academic entrepreneurs. (p. 317) Of course, disputes about intellectual property are not restricted to teaching with IT. However, it may turn out that this may be the defining issue IT the debate. This issue alone might redefine what it means to teach at the college level. Another important point the book emphasizes is that there is “no significant difference” between learning in traditional and online environments. Throughout the book, many of the contributors point to the large amount of research that tends to show “no-significant difference” between online and traditional methods of instruction. If there is no difference between the two methods, then, it seems that an academic administrator is justified in trying to decrease costs through IT. Or so goes the argument. James Caplan, however, argues that the “no significant difference” finding is not global. Indeed, there is a significant difference when one looks at levels of self-reported student satisfaction. Generally speaking, students tend to find online learning less satisfactory than tradition classroom instruction. No one is quite sure why this is so, or if it matters very much, but it does seem to recast the no significant difference arguments. Generally, the studies showing no significant difference have tended to simply compare objective learning outcomes between two learning environments—test scores, grades, or what not. Although these are certainly important outcomes to keep in mind, they do not constitute the whole of what could be different between the two learning environments. Caplan does the volume a great service by pointing this out. Caplansuggests that one possible reason for the lack of satisfaction may be that many students find it difficult to have satisfactory personal interactions in an online environment. He then offers several interesting research questions. His questions are: What is the role of student-teacher interaction in making the learning process more satisfying? Could a trained proctor or teaching assistant perform the same role? What is the role of student-student interaction? Should structured methods of creating discussion groups of study groups be considered? How effective would peer mentors be to deal with questions and problems outside the formal classroom? Can instructors be better trained to better use technology to overcome some of the problems. (p. 150) Caplan, it seems, is straining to find ways to increase the quality of interaction in an IT environment without using expert faculty. Hiring more expert faculty would be costly, after all, and thus this strategy cannot be used on top of the already substantial IT costs. Caplan is searching for another way to maintain student satisfaction without simply hiring more teachers. Maintaining satisfaction while reducing costs might be a formidable task. After all, it may be that students are satisfied only when they have free and open interaction with an expert teacher. In order for students to have meaningful interaction with an expert teacher in an online environment, there must be expert teachers around. It doesn’t seem as if expert interaction can be automated very well. Even the most advanced AI-type, “expert systems” technology can only handle a number of preset questions and responses from students, thus diminishing the free and open engagement with an expert. Nor can expert interaction always come from people who are simply not experts. Other students and peer mentors might not be able to engage in discussion from an expert standpoint. Thus, if it is true that students are satisfied when they have rich interaction with expert teachers, then this would seem to demand a small army of quality human instructors, and this is not cheap. Those who hope to find a place for cost-effective place for IT in education, a place that maintains student satisfaction, should probably hope that student satisfaction is not linked to expert interaction in this way. Finally, something should perhaps be said about the metaphors that pervade the work. If research in cognitive science is to be believed, it seems that metaphors are not merely devices for linguistic ornamentation; rather, they make an important difference in how we understand the world around us a (e.g., see Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, and Lakoff 1994). We often think in terms of metaphors, even when we think we are thinking literally. This is important because metaphors always highlight and hide certain aspects of the things that they are representing. The most prominent metaphors in Dollars, Distance, and Online education are the “knowledge is a commodity” metaphor, the “university is business” metaphor, and the “students are consumers” metaphor. The top universities sell the “brand name” products (p. 300). The job of the university is to sell knowledge to student consumers in a competitive, higher education marketplace. Higher education does often feel as if it works this way: consumer-like students pay fees to competing universities in hopes that the university will meet their needs. And, in some ways, this is a good educational metaphor. Browne, Hiers, and Quinn (1995), in a paper dealing with the consumer metaphor in education, admit that, under this metaphor, “power flows from the student” (p. 202) – the student is active in choosing an educational plan. At the same time, however, the model hides the fact that students stand in a different relationship to the tastes that drive choices than does a consumer. A consumer enters the marketplace with his or her tastes as a given. A student, however, is supposed to be developing taste. A student cannot be expected to choose in the same way a consumer chooses a product. In addition, Browne, Hiers, and Quinn write that the sovereignty of the consumer is limited to taking or leaving what is on offer: there is no presumption in the sphere of commodity exchange that the consumer should have the right to “participate in the design of the product or to determine how it is marketed” [quoting Anderson, 1993, p. 146}. To employ a familiar distinction, the freedom of consumers is a negative freedom to walk away from any transaction they have a problem with, not the positive freedom to deliberate with the producer and other consumers in the interest of reforming or redesigning what is on offer. (p. 203) While both this conception of “consumer” is certainly debatable (consumers do sometimes participate in product develop), if this is even a possibility, then it would certainly be wise to pay more attention to the implications of the consumer metaphors that are used in discussion. Dollars, Distance, and Online Education raises a host of interesting issues. Although most of the contributors seem to be advocates of using IT to some degree in higher education, they take care to acknowledge the complexity of implementing IT in a way that retains educational quality. Although I believe there are still more tensions in these issues than the authors bring out, their careful consideration of many of these issues is noteworthy. In its own way, this book is a fine introduction to the ways in which financial considerations may shape the face of educational technology and higher education. References Browne, M.N., Hiers, W. J., and Quinn J. K. (1995) . Transcending the Limited Educational Vision Implied by the Consumer Metaphor. Journal of General Education 44 (4): 201-221. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980) . Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. (1993). Contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (2nd ed., pp. 202-251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bryan R. Warnick is a doctoral student in Philosophy of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include Philosophy of Technology, Ethics, and Philosophy of Mind as these disciplines relate to educational theory and practice. He holds a B.S. degree in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Utah, and an M.A. in Philosophy of Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.