Stuart Glogoff's notes from:

The Third Richard A. Harvill Conference on Higher Education
January 24-26, 2002

Conference Web site

From January 24-26, 2002, the U of A hosted the 2002 Richard A. Harvill Conference on Higher Education. Harvill Conferences are held irregularly; I believe that this was the third Harvill conference since 1993. The theme for this year's conference was "Developing a Sense of Place for Distance Education" and it brought us four excellent general session speakers who shared their ideas on the Conference's theme. Participants from the USA came from as far away as Pennsylvania and Alaska; from outside of the USA, attendees joined us from Canada and Mexico.

Howard Rheingold was the opening speaker on Thursday the 24th. His talk was entitled "Virtual Communities and the Future of Distance Education." Rheingold has authored numerous books and articles over the past dozen years about technology and the topic of community on the Internet. A Microsoft Word copy of "Face-to-Face with Virtual Communities," is linked to the Place Web site. The article originally appeared in the July 2001 issue of Syllabus, and a newly revised chapter from his book The Virtual Community, "Rethinking Virtual Communities" is available as a PDF file via a link on the Place Web site. Among his popular books are: The Virtual Community: Homesteading On the Electronic Frontier (1993) and Virtual Reality (1991). Search SABIO for books by Howard Rheingold

The points I captured from Rheingold's presentation follow:

• Effective online communication is a literacy: part of it is the ABCs of doing it and part is the social aspect
• Persistent structured asynchronous conversations grow from technical, social and pedagogical interpretations
• Ask yourself "What are peoples' social expectations?" "How are disputes adjudicated on the Net?"
• Each media has a place: chat, email, listservs, weblogs, messaging
• Conversations are not documentation - they are conversations
• Always start with your mission
• What is the amount of face-to-face? (it can make a difference)
• Undergrads are learning social life along with studies
• Agree to experiment, evaluate, redesign, and always check back with your mission; enlist your learners to help you evaluate
• Elements of online space include
  • written language is exceptionally important in creating mental models of online space
  • fundamental elements of online place are boundaries, containers and tempo
  • instructors should move from being the "sage on the stage" to being the "guide on the side"
• Boundaries help to create space
  • Between teacher and student -- establish schedules and expectations
  • Establish social rules
  • Make entrance and exit clear -- "where am I?" -- demarcate it!
• Containers structure discourse
  • Names denote expectations
  • Conversations are flows, not sets of documents
  • Structure of forums and threads sets the stage -- analogous to walking into a room and assessing how the furniture is laid out
• Design structures for appropriate contexts
  • Persistent conversations expand social networks of learners through time

Comment: blend asynchronous and face-to-face

The afternoon general session speaker was Laura Palmer Noone, President of the University of Phoenix. Her presentation was entitled: "The New Educational Playing Field." Dr. Noone recently co-authored an article with Craig Swenson that was published in the November/December 2001 Educause Review entitled "Five Dirty Little Secrets of Higher Education." Among her many points were:

• Geography is not the key reason that people participate in distance learning courses. 90% of all Americans live within driving distance of a college campus
• Average class size is ten for the University of Phoenix Online due to the high level of interaction needed (instead of the 15 students for physical classroom)
• Faculty must go from lecturer to facilitator
• Archive your work
• Faculty should engage in knowledge sharing
• One-to-one feedback -- meet students' needs; UPhoenix offers eResources® for software tutorials, links for research, professional organizations; can download materials on different topics in PowerPoint format
• A new option combines classroom and online -- meet for the first and last day of the class, while the rest of the class is virtual
• E-fluentials and their role for alerting others by "virtual word of mouth" were reported by cyberatlas.com "So-called 'e-fluentials', a group that represents approximately 10 percent (11.1 million) of the U.S. adult online population, influence an estimated 14 people each, for a total of 155 million. Reaching them is crucial for companies that want to create a buzz."
• Putting a class online is the easy part; the hard part is all the services
• UPhoenix charges more per credit for courses in its online university $425
• Referred us to the indicators looking at an online university published in a government report on the 25 indicators

Friday's first general session was given by Stan Davis whose presentation was entitled "Past, Present and Future in Distance Education." Stan Davis writes and speaks frequently on technology and the future of education and training. His books include Lessons From the Future: New and Selected Essays On the Past, Present and Future (2001); co-author (with Jim Botkin) of The Monster Under the Bed (1994) and 1998's Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy (with Christopher Meyer). Stan Davis' personal Web site. Davis' points included:

• Economies have life cycles and we know they are getting shorter
• Information economies are half finished! We are well into the third quarter now; by 2020 we should be in a new economy, which has actually already started in the areas of materials science and biotechnologies
• Think of the transition with the current information economy as having moved us "from crunching to connecting" and "from MIPS to bandwidth"
• There are four forms that information comes in. The first two forms are the forms of the first part of the Information Age 1) numbers and 2) words; 3) sound and 4) images will have the biggest impact on distance education and we have entered the time when these last two forms are emerging
• Distance will not replace physical learning. There were fears about the new forms supplanting existing forms -- when radio broadcasts of baseball games began, the owners worried that people would not come to the ballparks anymore, but radio made baseball the national pastime and TV exponentially made it more popular.
• We are doing distance learning largely text-based, as text-based communications are still driving the business world. However, it is sound and images that will drive it in the near future. In the private sector, you can realize real-time adjustments and the time continuum is accelerated. Think of "space" in the sense of soda machines throughout Japan that are linked (calls this chip crunching); they can indicate full/empty and it has an impact up and down the supply chain -- up to the manufacturer; tells what is selling; could make it price-based if, for instance, you consider the weather is cold, you lower the price; if it's hot you up the price
• During the Agrarian Age education was driven by the Church and by family; during the Industrial Age education became driven by government; K-12 was the growth sector of post WWII America and the time when adult education comes onto the scene
• We have learned that you can't "front-load" education and then work for 40 years with the same knowledge -- led to continuing education
• We are now about a third of the way into a shift from government driving to education to it being driven by the private sector; K-12 is not a growth sector anymore; education is second only to the health care industry in the USA as our greatest industry
• Niche markets: they develop a sense of place more than larger, undifferentiated non-niche markets
• Homogeneity of niche markets let them develop
• How to experience place?
  • Push and embrace technology
  • Enter niche markets
  • Watch kids "If you really want to learn about a sense of place in distance learning, watch kids"

Q: distance market is still adults, like us. How do you bring them in?
A: Front-end it as cyber-community; participants can chat about who they are

Ronald Bleed, Vice-Chancellor for Information Technology at the Maricopa Community College, was the final general session speaker. Dr. Bleed wrote "A Hybrid Campus for the New Millennium" in the January/February 2001 issue of Educause Review. His entertaining talk began with the recommendation that we should not always look forward, but instead remember to look around. Among his many fine points to consider when considering the role of place in distance learning were:

• 13% of all US college students are residential -- 87% commute.
• We need to re-design our buildings for future students and build into them a "sense of community" this means considering food, conference rooms, and Internet access. To see a successful model of building a "sense of place" consider what Starbucks has accomplished
• Syncretism: when two cultures come together and create a whole new culture
• At Maricopa, they are engaging in the Ocotillo Technology Visioning Forum to investigate hybrid learning; February 26-27, 2002
• Use cohorts and targets to create a sense of place
• Shift view from context to communication and collaboration
• There is a May course in Hawaii on "hybridity" and he referred to Duke's Fuqua Business grad school for developing "sense of place" among its distance learners

Following each general session were two concurrent breakout sessions. Consult the agenda on the conference Web site for details. One breakout session that I enjoyed was "A Student's Perspective on Distance Education" moderated by Bill Neumann from the Eller College of Business. Dr. Neumann directed a question to each of the panelists. Here is a summary on their replies.

Q: Why did you choose to take an online course?

• Because of work -- the course I wanted to take as a physical class was not offered at a time I was available.
• (High School Chemistry Teacher) was looking for administrative credentials; found a wide variety of courses online; teaches high school and her preference was taking it outside of a physical environment; taking it on her own time was attractive to her
• working full-time and not being able to cut back on work for physical class time; found a Tri-University program attractive for its content, availability and outcomes
• Was short of an AA degree from going to a community college in California twenty years ago; is an IT professional and currently teaching IT courses for a small AA degree granting institution; the college administration feels that he ought to have a BS for credentials; classes he could have taken in a physical setting were given at the same time he was teaching and so he chose UPhoenix

Q: Has there been an instructor involved?

• Had to participate online at set times when the instructor would be online
• She found that her instructors were responsive; constant interactions
• Could record satellite broadcasts for later; reported on a chat session where instructors pose questions as a teaching forum; there was easy access to online material too
• Liked not having to stand up in class for public presentations
• acknowleged that she did miss out on some of the oral communication skills one develops in physical meetings
• Felt that the instructor's presence is less intimidating online

Q: How do you find support resources?
A: A student in the Tri-U program uses NAU's online library resources and finds that she "has all resources at her fingertips."

Curt Madison led a breakout session called "Stand Face-to-Face And Not See Eye-to-Eye." He made several good points including giving up the idea that distance education is a replication of the classroom and that we use capabilities in new and creative ways.

http://www.elearn.Arizona.edu/stuartg/harvillnotes.doc