• Introduction
• Teacher as Information Conveyor
• Teacher as Facilitator
• Blaming the Administrators
• Shifting Markets
• The New University
• The Professional Teacher
• References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 1998-99 by Peter J. Denning (pjd@gmu.edu)  The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

Section Four: Shifting Markets

Reviewing our roles as teachers is not simply an interesting philosophical question; it is an imperative thrust upon us by new realities in the world. In his best-selling book, School’s Out, Lewis Perelman depicted vividly how people will learn in a world dominated by information technologies, where work and learning are intimately connected. Many aspects of that vision -- certification, learning on demand, learning while working, self-pacing, access to recorded lectures, simulations, virtual realities, chat rooms, project groups, location-independent access, richly hyperlinked resources -- are already realities. For those who don’t want classrooms, a growing number of commercial "virtual universities" offer alternatives via Internet. For those who want their skills certified, numerous companies offer intensive training and certification programs. For those who want peerless presentations, there are companies that sell the recorded lectures of best teachers on audio and videotapes. Perelman believes that many universities lack the inclination or institutional ability to compete in the new markets for education. He says that the "virtual university" is like the "iron horse" -- not a new kind of university, but a replacement.

Jeanne Meister, President of the Corporate Universities Exchange, describes an enormous network of corporate universities in the United States -- some 1500 of them with combined annual budgets of $30 billion. Their number has quadrupled in the past decade. Most include specialties in information technology. By comparison, the number of departments granting IT degrees in universities is approximately 1000. You don’t have to hypothesize about a network of corporate universities offering alternative education to universities. That network already exists. A few universities are positioning themselves as partners and suppliers of the corporate university network. Most are ignoring it.

The customer base, mostly graduate students and adult students, are attracted to these alternatives. At many universities, large majorities of graduate students are employed and take classes part time. Significant minorities of undergraduates are also part-time and employed. These people welcome any technology that would ameliorate their commutes to campus and reduce time off work.

Management guru Peter Drucker recently predicted that today’s universities will be relics within 30 years.^* He based his claim on what he saw as a severe mismatch between universities as suppliers of education and the marketplace as buyers. He believes that universities have too much institutional inertia to respond in a timely way to the markets and consequently that private educational organizations will gain a foothold in the market and take the business away from universities.

Finally, there is growing evidence that the Internet is shattering the old notion that technology increases the control of the institution over the individual. More than a few historians and economists have wondered openly whether the nation-state and other institutions can survive in a world where information, money, and transactions can flow across boundaries almost without impediment. The Internet is weakening the power of large organizations and governments. The US federal government, wanting the Internet to be a "tax-free zone", finds itself pitted against the individual states. Law enforcers are stymied by crimes committed remotely from outside their jurisdictions. Individualism and entrepreneurship are on the rise in the US. Many futurists expect these trends to sweep the rest of the world in the backwash of the Internet. These trends also weaken the institutional authority of the university.

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