Unbundling the campus; this month's contributor sees big changes in the way we educate and in the survival of the campus.

All college graduates have a mental image of the college campus. If they resided in dorms when they were in college, they may have memories of a refuge; a place removed from the hurly-burly of commercial life. In fact, in literature and in the media, the campus has been both praised and maligned for its ingrown, closed-community lifestyle. It is this image of a self-contained ivory tower that still dominates the public consciousness.

Yet it is in this prevailing paradigm that we call the "campus," that the entire educational enterprise occurs. Students come to the campus to register, take courses, obtain advice on academic matters and financial aid; they come to eat, sleep, and be housed; to interact with other students and a resident faculty; to become educated and cultured. All of the functions of the campus are provided by employees of the institution--by a faculty, administrators, and support staff answerable to a campus administrative hierarchy, resident in one place, and interacting with one another on a daily basis. The campus is a social and cultural community, as well as an educational institution.

CAMPUS DIS-INTEGRATION IS HERE

Since the Internet became a public commodity in the late 1980s and early 1990s (only a decade ago), a number of changes have taken place, initiating the "dis-integration" of the campus. That is to say, the functions that go to make up the campus no longer need to be geographically concentrated or contiguous. They can be separate, independent activities brought together only by coordinating management. As a result, the integrated community that has been the typical college of university is being atomized into separate units, many of which do not interact with other parts or divisions of the campus, but exist only in a commercial relationship to the college or university. This is not an isolated, particularistic development, but is a long-term, general trend that will gradually affect all higher education institutions.

With the popularization of online education in the 1990s, increasing numbers of students began receiving their instruction off-campus. Over 4 million students now take advantage of distance education, and so higher education institutions have been required to develop ways to provide support services online to these students. The student support services most commonly extended first have been library resources and student advising, because these are necessary components of the instructional process.

As institutions become more committed to distance education and as more functions are provided in digital format, the campus is gradually deconstructed. The transformation occurs as it becomes clear that traditional students also welcome the convenience of services such as online registration, digital Library resources, and online academic advising. What's more, traditional, campus-based students take courses online, too. In the extreme expression of this transformation, all that will be left on the campus is the central administrative management function, the business office, and the essential function of quality control.

DIS-INTEGRATING ONLINE ED

The campus as a whole is not the only target of dis-integration; online education is primed for dis-integration, as well. Most frequently, campuses enter the field of distance education with a traditional mindset. They try to "go it alone." The faculty will develop the courses; the library will develop an electronic catalog; the registrar will try to develop of purchase an online admissions process. Not surprisingly, no matter how online support services are supplied, the initial development and implementation are extremely expensive. In many instances, in fact, institutional faculty and administrators are developing systems that have never existed before. It's no wonder, then, that there frequently are false starts and expensive dead ends.

Yet, sooner or later, each institution of higher education will reach a crossroads. The institution will have to choose between limiting its activity in online instruction, or adopting management approaches that reduce the cost of online instruction and permit the development of a quality educational product through new strategies such as team course development, consortial sharing of expenses, outsourcing, etc.

Traditionally, instruction has been an integrated activity. It has been the domain of one faculty member who has been responsible for the course (the indivisible unit of the curriculum) he or she teaches. Of course, there have been departmental courses developed collegially and imposed especially on part-time instructors, but, traditionally, courses have been integrated through one intellect.

Yet, in the online arena, the integrated model is neither the most efficient nor the most desirable way to create and deliver an online course of high quality. In fact, to use the integrated model would deprive the institution of some of the most beneficial aspects of digital courses, such as: a) a high-quality technical product with the most advanced graphics, and b) the ability to offer an online course an unlimited number of times, at any time, free of the limitations of staffing or facility availability.

In spite of the loss of these benefits, most institutions initially attempt to use the integrated model for the creation of online courses. A major institutional effort is made to train each and every faculty member to create technology-mediated courses. If any courses are to be developed, the onus is on individual faculty members to do so during released time, or over the summer. Additionally, the assumption is that individual faculty members will continue to be the authors and presenters of their own courses.

However, from a technical and management viewpoint, another model of course development--the team approach--is more appropriate to online education. The team is built by unbundling the course development process into its constituent activities, with one specialist responsible for each activity. The team usually consists of at least four individuals: a content expert, an instructional designer, a graphics designer, and a technical support expert.

The course development team is assembled by the institution to create a specific course that the college or university has determined is needed. The product of the team belongs to the institution, not to the faculty member/content expert. And the team may be dissolved after the course has been created. New teams can be assembled as needed.

The delivery of the course is also dis-integrated in the online arena. Since the course materials exist in digital form and the institution owns the course, it is a very easy matter to hire more specialists to deliver the course and provide support services. The roles and functions that have been unified in the past can be "unbundled" and performed by different individuals or even different organizations.

In spite of the costs involved in the team approach, institutions for which distance Learning is their core concern--such as the University of Maryland University College, the University of Phoenix, and the British Open University--do not leave the creation of new online courses in the hands of individual faculty members. They insist on the team approach.

The technology-based deconstruction of courses is being facilitated by the appearance of learning object databases. The largest of these databases is maintained by MERLOT, the Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching project. The peer-reviewed Learning objects that MERLOT makes available to faculty and to participating institutions are digital exercises and resources that might be used in courses where appropriate. For example, a bit of video and text on the impact of poverty on crime rates might be used by faculty members across the nation teaching sociology, political science of economics. A number of states--Maryland, Georgia, Kentucky, and Ohio--have developed similar databases.

The deconstruction of the course moves it further away from being the product of one intellect, one faculty member. It is possible that a course development team building a new course in anthropology might construct a course of Learning objects obtained from MERLOT, from other colleges, and/or purchased from commercial vendors.

UNBUNDLED CAMPUS + DECONSTRUCTED LEARNING = CONSORTIA

Given the expense of unbundling the institutional functions related to administration and institutional support services, plus the pressures to deconstruct the functions related to instruction it becomes clear that not every college and university can afford to create or develop these services on their own. Enter the vendors, and state and national consortia. A number of vendors a now offering commercial products to perform all of the online services required for course development and delivery. State-based consortia--such as virtual universities and digital library consortia--provide online student services for member campuses.

But here's the rub: With the utilization of vendors for essential administrative and even instructional services, the use of consortia to provide student services, and the use of contracted faculty (scattered across the globe) to develop and teach online course, the "campus" loses the characteristics of a social and cultural community and acquires those of a large entrepreneurial corporation.

In Looking at the future of the campus, one is reminded of the question that Scrooge asked of the Spirit of Christmas Future, "Are these the things that must be, or are they only the things that might be?" And, like Scrooge, we have it in our power to shape our own future, white recognizing there are certain aspects of the unbundling of the campus that cannot be reversed. The genie of technology cannot be put back in the bottle.

David E. Sumler is director of Academic Affairs, Planning an Policy, Maryland Higher Education Commission.