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Impediments To Adoption Of Web-Based Course Delivery Among University Faculty

by Sloan-C
AUTHORS:
David L. Passmore
The Pennsylvania State University
122S Computer Building
University Park, PA 16802 USA
E-mail: PassmoreTechClass@dharma.ed.psu.edu
Phone: 877/236-8826
FAX: 775/924-5928

I. INTRODUCTION

A wag once noted that the pace of innovation in the technology of instruction is measured best by the sad fact that it took 40 years to get overhead projectors out of bowling alleys and into classrooms. And, some might assert that educators still are more likely to use overhead projectors while bowling than during instruction.

Adoption of innovation in instructional technology does not merely lag. It often drags. However, recent technological and competitive pressures to innovate through distance education are changing the markets for producers and consumers of education. Remarkable, even revolutionary, change in the design, development, and delivery of instruction seems certain. Perhaps no sector of education is likely to experience this change sooner than higher education.

II. THE TECHNOLOGY, THE COMPETITION, THE PROBLEM

Distance education certainly is an arena for change in higher education. The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) [1] in the United States estimates that one-third of the approximately 5,000 two- and four-year postsecondary institutions offered distance education courses during the 1997-98 academic year and that another one-fifth planned to introduce distance education soon. Nearly 80% of public, four-year higher education institutions in the United States offered distance education courses.

Higher education institutions reported to the NCES that 1.7 million students enrolled in distance education during the 1997-98 academic year. The most popular delivery tools for education at a distance included asynchronous Internet instruction, two-way interactive video, and one-way prerecorded video, although many institutions revealed that they would concentrate in the future on design and development with Internet technologies and two-way interactive video.

The adoption of distance education is pacing even faster now than during the reference period for the NCES estimates. More compressed product cycles than ever possible are now available through frequent, regular advances in Internet technologies and in deployment of other computing resources. People talk of work occurring in "Internet time," which I understand to be approximately dog-years to the third power. What is young is old. What is bright is yellowed. What is fresh is fetid. And, transformation happens quickly. A week? No. A meeting. A zap of typed code. A flip of a bit. The person who reminds us that the only thing constant about change is change itself just is not saying it fast enough.

At the same time, the traditional educational institution, with its homey connotation as a staid public service, is evolving into a segment of the education industry, with the strong competitive and innovative instincts and features of a private venture. A Merrill Lynch in-depth investment report [2] runs a parallel between the current state of the education sector and the state of the health care industry in the United States before its reformation: The health care market formed 8% of the gross domestic product of the United States about 30 years ago. However, health care was a highly fragmented cottage industry with high costs, low technology, lack of professional management, and negligible market capitalization. Today, health care represents about 14% of gross domestic product, is highly segmented, is technologically advanced due to significant capital investment, and generally has implemented strong management controls and accountability.

Similarly, the education sector in the United States currently is large (second only to health care in contribution to gross domestic product), is highly fragmented, is inefficient, guided by limited professional management, and is characterized by relatively low use of technology. At a time when education is recognized increasingly as a linchpin of individual and economy-wide success, the education sector is ill equipped to meet challenges brought on by changing demographics, technology, globalization, branding, consolidation, and outsourcing. The result is a hint of the innovation and competition promising to transform education dramatically. The education sector is ripe for restructuring.

Consider that an institution such as the University of Phoenix, a subsidiary of the Apollo group, has become the largest private university in the United States, that charter schools, once dismissed as another fad of educational reform in the United States, are emerging as core innovative tools for parents and communities, that child care, once solely custodial, is now acclaimed as a critical foundation for learning, and that between 1994 and 1999 education and training companies in the United States raised more than $3.4 billion of equity capital through 38 public offerings and 30 follow-on offerings. Distributed learning, educational portals, and alternatives to traditional teacher training are among the challenges emerging to the traditional higher education sector.

Portrayed on this canvas of higher education against a swirling backdrop of blurred technological change, embossed by the heavy brush strokes of competitive pressure, is a pale, harried-looking, and curiously crumbly figure -- the university faculty member. Traditionally the source, broker, and owner of content and the soul of creation in the university, the faculty member stands as the most promising potential resource for the university to meet the technological opportunities and competitive pressures it faces through distance education. The right stuff is all there: keen knowledge of what content is most important, certain wisdom about how learning occurs, and burnished legacy of experience for creating and nurturing formative experiences. However, my personal view is that university faculty members more often are perceived as bottlenecks in innovation in distance education, not as trusted and productive partners.

Curiously, despite opportunities and pressures for universities to innovate and extend their markets through education at a distance, many faculty members are not clamoring to participate. Rather, my distinct impression is that most seem wary. They question. They hold their positions. As a consequence, universities struggle to exploit technological opportunities offered by the Internet and other computing technologies and to compete against new, and sometimes more business-savvy, entrants into their traditional lines of business.

If universities are not careful, however, they might end up as little more than the detritus left over from a massive shake-up of the education sector by technological and market forces to which they weakly and slowly respond. Without a doubt, the stakes in this evolutionary process are high for universities.

The remainder of this paper analyzes some of the impediments that limit participation of university faculty in distance education. These impediments have been identified primarily through my almost decade-long experiences with delivery of instruction entirely over the Internet to over 1,000 students. A generous gift of a Web server and software from Apple Computer through my university's Center for Academic Computing put me directly and solely in charge of my fate and quality as an online instructional provider. Also, I have spent many hours discussing issues surrounding adoption of web-based training with interested students and technical personnel as well as with other faculty members weighing profoundly their own adoption decisions. Although these are exciting times for those stimulated by the promise of distance education, at no other time in my career have I met so many people as uncertain of the consequences of personal change entailed in the adoption of distance education coupled with the coming ubiquity of information technology.

The focus of this paper is on impediments to web-based course delivery as emblematic of problems, issues, and opportunities for adoption of more general distance education technologies. My perspective of these impediments as a university faculty member may differ from the viewpoints of other organizational viewers, and I am sure these other organizational viewpoints within higher education are also fruitful. In particular, I will identify and discuss three impediments to web-based course delivery that I believe are faced by university faculty members: (a) limited access to and experience with resources for web-based design, development, and delivery, (b) uncertainties about status of intellectual property created for web-based courses, and (c) lack of a reward system tied to innovation in instruction.

III. RESOURCES

Concern about the availability of all types of resources is one impediment faced by faculty members considering the adoption of web-based instruction. We must be honest and acknowledge that a first resource issue, one that is foremost for some, is personal: the lack of adaptability of some faculty members to the tools, language, and protocols associated with information technology.

Many faculty members fear to apply technology in instruction. They fear--not so much about using their own personal computers (most are over that hump), but about creating course materials that are eventually in the view of just about anyone. The process of applying web-based instructional technology exposes personal frailties, such as lack of familiarity and skill with technology and standards of the Web, the design and layout capabilities of nothing more than a dilettante, or even poor typing, spelling, and proofreading.

For many faculty members, starting to use web-based technology in instruction is a bit like the first time they ever wrote with chalk on a blackboard in front of a class -- a surprisingly difficult task, fraught with potential for error, for anyone who has not attempted it in front of 50 sets of critical eyes. Reynolds and Smith [3] dub these folks as the "techno-stressed." They are the frustrated, the confused, the fearful users of information technology. As you might expect, the degree of comfort with technology in general is related to the ease of adoption of Internet technologies [4].

Competence in the processes and technicalities of the Web often is low among novice instructional designers and developers [5]. A first-time instructor of a web-delivered or -supported course often experiences cognitive overload [6]. There are so many aspects of the web-based instructional act that require juggling. Many faculty feel that inadequate training keeps them from implementing web-based courses [7].

To reduce the technical demands on design, development, and delivery of web-based instruction, a whole new segment of the education industry has sprouted to help professors migrate their courses onto the Web [8]. The help provided frequently is through the use of form-based templates into which faculty members pour their course information and content. Layout, resource, and delivery matters are decided for the faculty member. A number of private firms provide these services, although some universities have developed their own systems and procedures for promoting adoption of web-based support for courses. An example of university-based support for adoption of web-based instruction and support is the Web Instructional Service Headquarters created by Penn State University (available at http://cac.psu.edu/wish/).

Much current writing related to distance education is meant to reassure people who might be wary of online teaching (see, e.g., [9]). Personal case studies, often reading like testimonials, of adoption of web-based instruction are in vogue in professional literature to guide the wary (cf. [10] for an example in the field of geosciences). Indeed, as faculty gain experience with distance education, their attitudes toward distance education become more positive [11]. Positive attitudes of faculty members toward distance education promote positive student learning outcomes [12].

Time is a resource that students and instructors of distance education claim is too scarce. Students often are surprised that distance education often requires more interactivity than classroom-based instruction with which they have more experience. Demands also are high on students' time to maintain the hardware, software, and connectivity for their web-based courses. They might not have the maturity or skill to allocate their time productively to make progress in web-based distance education courses. Faculty members meet resistance from students to the increased time demands of distance education that is highly interactive, and they might not pursue an instructional modality that so displeases their customers [13]. Moreover, faculty often feel that distance education requires too much of their own time to develop and support [14]. They also worry that requirements to accommodate people with disabilities in web-based instruction will demand even greater time [15].

So much of the current emphasis in design, development, and delivery of web-based instruction focuses on technical issues. Unfortunately, according to Downs, Carlson, Repman, and Clark [16], "Instructional aspects of web-based learning are often viewed as secondary to the technical issues that require a new set of skills for most instructors." Another missing resource in web-based instruction is instructional systems design skill.

Few university faculty members possess formal instructional design skills. They acquire teaching skills on the job through observation, imitation, and trial-and-error. As highly educated and adaptive human beings, they tailor their approaches based upon the feedback -- sometimes subtle and nonverbal -- they receive. They question. They add examples. They draw parallels with their students' lives and experiences. They use analogies and metaphors. They capitalize on current events to reinforce points of discussion. They analyze microbursts of their students' performance and alter their approaches on the fly. However, when the time comes to take this wonderfully rich art to the Web, faculty members often are stymied.

So much of what stands for web-based instruction is little more than "shovelware," that is, a migration of a syllabus and old yellowed notes, along with a few visuals and URLs, onto a Web site. The result is a page-turner that students might read, but with which they do not interact. Lost is all of the instructional craft that is embodied in the faculty member's classroom-based teaching.

True, learners need information. However, they also need other instructional features. These include opportunities for reflection and varied practice to promote storage and retrieval of information from long-term memory, discussion with peers and the instructor to sharpen their understandings and to test ideas, frequent coaching and feedback on performance to correct their paths toward learning outcomes, case-based and project-based analysis of concepts, and brief periods of apprenticeship to apply concepts within close to real-life situations. Putting information on the Web might require technical skill, but it is insufficient usually for the promotion of learning. Developing instruction on the Web requires instructional design skills as well as technical skills.

Many studies of impediments to the adoption of web-based instruction by faculty members seem to uncover a common set of conclusions. For instance, Morse, Glover, and Travis [17] report that a sample of faculty members in information science departments cited lack of funding, equipment, and administrative and faculty support as some of the reasons why they did not develop web-based instruction. Daugherty and Funke [13] cite lack of technical and administrative support as barriers to development and delivery of web-based instruction. Gilbert [15] lists, among other obstacles, "Limited and uneven access to equipment, software, and support services....Underestimating the difficulty of faculty adoption of new combinations [of technology, and]....Lack of easily available information about 'good practices' " (pp. 11-12).

Lack of personal, institutional, and instructional resources seem to impede adoption of web-based course delivery among university faculty members. As the stock of human capital applicable to information technology builds among university faculty members and institutional capabilities become more mature, these resource limits might ease. Until then, adoption is at a sticking point.

IV. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Uncertainty makes investors cautious to enter markets. Not knowing the probabilities of outcomes of investments makes forecasting returns on investments difficult. The status of web-based courses as intellectual property currently is the subject of much debate among university administrators and faculty members and their representatives. Widely varied policies are under consideration or engaged in by universities, with varied consequences for faculty members who might develop or deliver web-based instruction. As a result, an uncertainty about the direction that intellectual property policy and practice will take becomes an impediment to adoption of web-based courses by university faculty members.

Who owns and controls the processes and products of web-based instruction in the university? The answers offered to this question will dictate the nature of the partnership between faculty members and their institutions for design and delivery of web-based instruction. Universities perceive this question and the answers to it as vital to their financial health and their status as leaders in innovation. In fact, some analysts have asserted that universities are prone to view distance education as a financial strategy primarily for reducing costs while increasing enrollments, with distance education as an instructional tool creating only secondary interest [18]. Differential pricing of online courses already is occurring [19], revealing unprecedented market pressures that are affecting university instruction.

Article 1 of the Constitution of the United State of America indicates that "The Congress shall have the Power....To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writing and Discoveries." The identification of author and inventor, though, has provoked many disputes and is a central issue for faculty deciding whether to adopt web-based courses. The public entrusts the university with the mission to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge through teaching and research. In this way, universities and their faculties are bound by a fiduciary responsibility to society.

A faculty member's "act of expressing an idea in a concrete or 'fixed' fashion transforms thought into intellectual property" [20, p. 1]. Of course, intellectual property can take many forms, but certainly tangible courseware for the Web fulfills the definition of intellectual property. Traditionally, the university faculty member has owned rights to course materials, although Kenneth Crews, director of the copyright management center at Indiana University asserts that, "The law is utterly unclear on the answer of who owns traditional and scholarly materials at the university" [21]. However, recent developments challenge sole ownership of these traditional rights applied to web-based course materials:

1. Although traditional course development and delivery mostly are managed entirely by a single faculty member, web-based courses usually are a resource-consuming initiative. Such courses often are produced jointly by faculty members with teams of specialists in applications of the Internet and instructional design using significant resources of the university. Or, faculty members produce web-based courses "for hire." That is, they work more like independent contractors to the university than as internal partners. In the cases of joint production and work for hire, faculty members would share, or perhaps even forego, their rights to the final work. I often hear faculty members naively express shock and surprise that these rights are divided based upon division of work expended in creation and delivery of the instructional product. Caveat creator! This working relationship is new for most university faculty members.

2. The potential market for web-based courses is much wider than the traditional market for resident instruction. After all, the Web is accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime. As a result, Web courseware developed by a faculty member for use in one institution could have a market worldwide. Few technical barriers inhibit transfer of web-based courses from the institutions where they were developed originally to other institutions. Individual faculty entrepreneurs could appropriate the benefits of web-based course design, even though they have not borne the full costs of creation. If this happens, universities lose revenue, fail to recover costs of development, and aid their competitors. The value added by the university to the web-based course project is lost.

Perhaps the most notorious dispute about rights of faculty members to their course products involves Harvard Law School professor, Arthur R. Miller. He sold videotapes of his law lectures to Concordia University School of Law, which is owned by a Washington Post subsidiary, Kaplan Educational Centers, and allows students to earn law degrees online. The dispute arose because:

Harvard policy forbids a professor to teach at another university during the academic year without permission from his or her dean. But Mr. Miller said... that he wasn't teaching anything. He does not interact with Concordia students in person or on line - not even via a friendly e-mail message. They simply watch his videotaped lectures on line, and Concordia arranges a course around that, he said. Providing the lectures to Concordia, Mr. Miller said, was no different from giving a lecture on television or in public. But Robert C. Clark, dean of the law school at Harvard, said that this situation was different because Mr. Miller was providing material to a competing law school. No matter what medium was used, Mr. Clark said, the problem was that Mr. Miller had supplied course content to another academic institution without permission [22].

Some universities have responded to these challenges by claiming that all course materials and subsequent revenue generated are property of the institution For instance, Kathleen Davey, dean of instructional technology at Florida Gulf Coast University, contends that as long as professors are creating courses that universities are paying them to create, the "first rights belong to the university" [21]. Others merely have defined more carefully the conditions of ownership of course materials. For instance, an Interim Report of the Task force on Intellectual Property Policies and Procedures prepared by Penn State University [23] defines intellectual property in light of new technologies and cites lines of demarcation in ownership. Penn State president, Graham Spanier, has said that "To have no policy will likely cause major dysfunction in the years ahead" [21].

The situation might tempt the observer to conclude that these disputes are about money alone. Control is at stake, too. For instance, the decision to require all courses to use Web resources at UCLA has generated debate about faculty members' loss of academic freedom to determine what and how to teach [24]. Also, what about subsidiary rights? If you create a web-based course, can your university dis-integrate it and resell it to, say, Public Broadcasting Service for online distribution of portions of your work without your involvement (or, perhaps, with involvement you had not planned)? Can you share course materials with colleagues? If you don't "own" a course, can you even update it? Is your use of copyrighted materials in courses now a matter only of concern to your university? Once you develop a web-based course, will you find yourself replaced by lower-paid helpers who manage the course? Will you become separated from students because you are too expensive?

Before all this is turmoil is over, intellectual property rights for web-based courses might be debated, might cause public concern, and even might be the object of litigation. However, the current environment is uncertain for faculty members. It encourages them to watch and wait, not to participate. Do not expect to see university faculty members soon joining enthusiastically into partnerships that they fear might lead eventually to their exclusion. Make no mistake, however--university faculty members need to be drawn in as partners if universities are to respond to the new technological opportunities and competitive pressures accompanying the Internet and web-based instruction. Failure to develop intellectual property policies and practices emphasizing "faculty friendliness" is a mistake universities cannot afford to make.

V. REWARDS

OK, let's ask a serious question: who is crazy enough to get involved in design and delivery of web-based courses? The effort takes time. Believe me, I know. I often have had to spend entire summers and holidays designing and developing web-based courses, and, then, I was faced with devoting over 40 hours per week during the first and second implementations to make refinements based on what I was learning on the fly as I taught students. Maybe I was inefficient, but I think I was learning.

To be sure, I found this entire web-based course process to be stimulating and exciting. I was communicating with students in quite meaningful ways daily. I was gaining a certain reputation as an instructional innovator. I was asked to speak frequently to faculty and administrative groups about my course designs. However, it almost busted my career as a university professor.

In spite of all of the pious statements made by universities about the value of teaching, research production (read that as grants, contracts, and refereed publications) is almost all that counts in a modern research university. In fact, my department applies a major faculty evaluation criterion of "supplementing university salary with grant buyout" that is coequal with the traditional tridactyl of research, teaching, and service. I call the newest dimension of performance the "pay your rent" criterion.

But, gosh, if I wanted to be a green grocer, I would have opened a nice little shop and taken a few small business courses to get going. Instead, I hung out in libraries and in front of computer monitors. As measured by one of those batteries of career exploration questionnaires I completed while in secondary school, my need to be creative is higher than my need to achieve.

Now, I had produced enough traditional faculty output to become tenured and promoted to full professor (I will let you judge by examining my credentials through my home page at http://train.ed.psu.edu). But, I had become so mesmerized by the opportunity to excel in web-based teaching that I lost sight of the real values of the university. My error was that I substituted significant doses of teaching time for research time.

Although I felt on the cutting edge of teaching with technology, my research output began to suffer so much that my department head started to mutter warnings that I would be a prime candidate for termination if "post tenure review" ever took hold. True, I am a university faculty member, and I can seem as disconnected and other worldly as a cloistered monk. But, even I got the message.

After nearly a decade of what I believe to be success as a designer and developer of web-based courses and as a facilitator of those courses for almost 1,000 students, I stopped. Lesson learned. Senses gained.

Conventional wisdom among the worldly, discerning, and untenured is that teaching can help little in career advancement in the university. I have served on many promotion and tenure committees at various universities, and I can assure you that quality teaching is difficult to identify--and, virtually inconsequential. About 20 years ago in my pre-tenure days I saw the person who received a University-wide teaching award one week, denied tenure during the next week.

Conventional wisdom among faculty also holds that recognition of teaching can do little but harm. In fact, teaching rarely is recognized unless there are complaints. According to Gilbert [15], the faculty reward system is not structured to identify excellence in applications of information technology to instruction:

Most of the administrators and faculty committees responsible...have little understanding of how to evaluate faculty work that makes use of information technology for instruction, or how to evaluate the development of new educational applications of the technology. There is no peer review process for the development or use of educational applications of information technology (p. 12).

A 1997 National Survey of Information Technology in Higher Education found that only one-eighth of higher education institutions recognized applications of information technology on the career paths of their faculty. Houseman [25] told the bold truth when he wrote:

Acknowledgment of teaching in academic advancement remains a poor cousin to research. Simply said, there is no incentive for faculty members to change the way they teach. When a faculty member has adequate, or better than adequate, teaching evaluations and is faced with stiff competition for ever-dwindling grants for research, the staple of academic advancement, it is clear where time is better spent (p. 17).

This statement holds true at my own institution. For years, practically the only faculty members delivering instruction using the Internet were tenured full professors--that is, those with seemingly the least to lose if they shifted interest to teaching from other activity. Even now, this is largely true, although a cadre of fixed term specialists are receiving targeted appointments to develop web-based courses.

The relatively low status of teaching in research universities always will create an impediment against adoption of web-based course delivery among faculty. When teaching is seen as worthy activity, professors will take teaching, including web-based instruction, seriously. Otherwise, can you blame professors for responding to the incentives placed in front of them?

VI. CONCLUDING REMARKS

Web-based course delivery is the stuff of the future. The question is, will universities be involved in that future? I believe that university faculty members are crucial resources for the success of university efforts to mount quality and competitive distance education on the Web. In this paper, I have identified and discussed three impediments to adoption of web-based course delivery: constraints on resources, uncertainties about intellectual property policy, and inadequacy of faculty reward systems. The first two impediments probably will melt away as university experience with web-based course delivery increases. But will the thaw be quick enough to meet strong competition? Removing the last impediment requires nothing less than a cleansing of the soul of the university. I, for one, always have wanted to witness a genuine religious conversion. Show me a miracle.

VII. REFERENCES

  1. National Center for Educational Statistics. Distance Education at Postsecondary Institutions: 1997-89 [NCES 2000-013]. Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1999.
  2. Moe, M. T., Bailey, K., and Lau, R. The Book of Knowledge: Investing in the Growing Education and Training Industry. New York, NY: Merill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, &, Smith, Global Securities Research & Economics Group, Global Fundamental Equity Research Department, April 9, 1999.
  3. Reynolds, L. J. and Smith, A. E. Treating the Techno-Stressed: Results from Using Networked Learning Environments for Distance Learning in Library and Information Science. Proceedings of the National On-Line Meeting, Vol. 20, pp. 379-385, 1999.
  4. Lach, J. Diversity in a Virtual World. American Demographics, Vol. 21, No. 7, pp. 17-18 1999.
  5. Gray, S. Maintaining Integrity in Web-Based Instruction. Educational Media International, 35, No. 3, pp. 186-188 1998.
  6. Atavia, M., Yoo, Y., and Vogel, D. Using Information Technology to Add Value to Management Education. Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 40, No.6, pp. 1310-1333, 1997.
  7. Shotsberger, P. G. Emerging Roles for Instructors and Learners in Web-Based Instruction Classroom. In: B. H. Kahn [Ed.], Web-Based Instruction, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications, pp. 101-107, 1997.
  8. McCollum, K. A New Industry Sprouts to Help Professors Put Courses on Line. The Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. A33-A34 October 31, 1997.
  9. Young, J. R. Monograph Reassures Scholars Wary of On-Line Teaching. The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A51. January 14, 2000.
  10. Butler, J. C. Web-Based Instruction: A Personal View. Computers and Geosciences, Vol. 25, No. 6, pp. 709-710, 1999.
  11. Dillion, C. L. and Walsh, S. M. Faculty: The Neglected Resource in Distance Education. American Journal of Distance Education, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 5-21, 1992.
  12. Webster, J. and Hackerly, P. Teaching Effectiveness in Technology Dedicated Distance Learning. Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 40, No. 6, pp. 1282-1309, 1997.
  13. Daugherty, M. and Funke, B. L. University Faculty and Student Perceptions of Web-Based Instruction. Journal of Distance Education, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 21-39 1998.
  14. Metcalf, T. Distance Education: The Issue of Faculty Time. In: 5th Annual Distance Education Conference: 1997 Conference Proceedings. Texas A&M, Center for Distance Education Research, 1997.
  15. Gilbert, S.W. Making the Most of a Slow Revolution. Change, Vol. 28, pp. 10-23, 1996.
  16. Downs, E., Carlson, R. D., Repman, J., and Clark, K. Web-Based Instruction: Focus on Learning. Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education, San Antonio, TX, 1999. [ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 432 254]
  17. Morse, G. E., Glover, H., and Travis, J. Survey of Distance Education Utilization in Information Systems Departments. Proceedings of the International Academy for Information Management Annual Conference, Atlanta, GA 1997. [ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 422 917]
  18. Moore, M. G. Technology Driven Change: Where Does It Leave the Faculty? American Journal of Distance Education, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 1-6, 2000.
  19. Salzer, J. Online College Classes to Cost $300 per Course. The Atlanta Constitution, p. B1, May 10, 2000.
  20. Consortium for Educational Technology for University Systems. Ownership of New Works at the University: Unbundling of Rights and the Pursuit of Higher Learning. Seal Beach, CA: The Trustees of The California State University, 1997.
  21. Guernsey, L. and Young, J. R. Professors and Universities Anticipate Disputes Over the Earnings from Distance Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 44, No. 39, June 5, 1997. Available online to subscribers: http://chronicle.com/che-data/articles.dir/art-44.dir/issue-39.dir/39a00101.htm
  22. Harvard Tussles with Law Professor Over Use of Course Content. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 46, No. 15, December 3, 1999. Available online to subscribers: http://www.chronicle.com/weekly/v46/i15/15a04302.htm
  23. Interim Report of the Task Force on Intellectual Property Policies and Procedures. University Park, PA: Penn State University, March 31, 2000.
  24. Knowlton, S. At UCLA, a Mixed Reaction to Web-Based Courses. New York Times, p. A8, September 3, 1997.
  25. Houseman, J. G. Infusion, Not Diffusion, a Strategy For Incorporating Information Technology Into Higher Education. Journal of Distance Education, Vol. 12, Nos. 1-2, pp. 15-28.

VIII. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David L. Passmore is Professor-in-Charge of the Workforce Education and Development program at The Pennsylvania State University, where he is Professor of Education, Professor of Operations Research, and Professor of Mineral Engineering Management. He also is a Senior Scientist in Penn State's Institute for Policy Research and Evaluation. Passmore recently was appointed Faculty Fellow of Penn State's Center for Academic Computing, where he is Director of the Multimedia Technology Classrooms Group.

This paper was presented at EdTech 2000, the First Annual Irish Educational Technology Users' Conference sponsored by the Institute of Technology in Sligo, Ireland, on 19 May 2000. Available: http://www.itsligo.ie/staff/bmulligan/web/EdTech2000.htm.