Brad Cahoon serves as coordinator for technology-based instruction at the Georgia Center. He also administers the Center's web site.

I've Been Thinking...

... about the World-Wide Web and its role in the future of adult and continuing education. By now, everybody who watches television or reads the newspapers has heard about the World-Wide Web, though only people who have used it are likely to understand the excitement it has generated. The Web is easier to experience than to explain. Attempts to define it tend to provoke vertigo-inducing Internet jargon, such as "open- standards-based, globally distributed, client/server hypermedia system," but this sort of description misses the real point of the Web -- its accessibility to people with no interest in the underlying wires and software.

No more compelling evidence of the Web's power is required than a few hours spent playing with Netscape, the popular Web browser program.

You're looking at a Web page on the screen of your computer, reading text, looking at pictures. Some words and pictures are marked as links. Click them, wait a moment, and you see new text and pictures, also marked with links. The first page may have come to you from a computer somewhere in France, the second from a machine in Japan, but from where you're sitting it's all one piece -- a Web of information spread across thousands of Internet-connected computers, presented for your exploration in one point-and-click window.

Higher Education and the WWW

The Web represents the Internet's transformation from the private playground of academics and researchers to a mass medium. Suddenly, anyone who can drive a mouse can see, touch, and learn from the Internet. According to the CommerceNet/Nielsen Internet Demographics Survey, released on October 31, 1995, "Approximately 8% (18 million) of total persons aged 16 and above in the U.S. and Canada have used the WWW in the past three months" (a summary of the survey's methodology and findings is available on the Web at http://www.commerce.net/information/surveys/execsum/exec_sum.html). Another study (http://www.netgen.com/info/growth.html) found 90,000 Web servers on-line in January, 1996, compared to 23,500 in June, 1995. All the available data show that both the number of Web users and the size of the Web itself are increasing at exponential rates, with little sign of slowing down.

The phenomenal growth of the Web has generated a media feeding-frenzy, paralleled by wild overvaluation of Web-related stocks. Surfing the Web and having a home page are now fashion statements. The only comparable technological craze is that which attended the advent of the personal computer 20 years ago, but the Web is bigger. For many people, it represents the first compelling reason to use a personal computer. At the same time, the Web is becoming a corporate standard. Transcending the religious warfare of Windows vs. Macintosh vs. UNIX, the Web is already seen by information system managers as a common denominator that can unite users of different computer platforms and provide alternatives to proprietary software.

Back in "net.antiquity" -- three or four years ago -- higher education ruled the Internet, and colleges and universities were almost the only places where anyone had even heard of the World-Wide Web, which was originally conceived as a means of disseminating research. Since then, however, responsibility for the technical development and administration of the Internet has shifted steadily from universities to private corporations, a process accelerated by the dismantling of National Science Foundation funding for the Internet backbone. Now most new content is produced by private businesses, media corporations, and individuals. After years of dominating the Internet, the academy seems to have surrendered both technical and cultural leadership. The landscape of the Internet is evolving so rapidly that higher education risks losing its way in what was once its personal domain. What is the place of adult and continuing education on this electronic frontier?

Marketing and Public Relations

Continuing educators are already on the Web, of course. A search for the phrase "continuing education" at Alta Vista (http://altavista.digital.com/) turns up more than 50,000 Web documents. The hundred or so pages that bubble to the top are mostly informational -- describing organizations, listing programs and services, and soliciting registrations--pages very much like the Georgia Center's (http://www.gactr.uga.edu/). These sites follow the same general public relations and marketing model that currently prevails elsewhere on the Web. Such sites are relatively simple and inexpensive to establish, particularly for institutions already connected to the Internet, but they are time-consuming to maintain.

Soon no educational organization will be able to afford not to provide some information on the Web. But right now, most Web sites are little more than brochures and catalogs transferred to the Internet. At best, they provide students with quick access to current information that will help them pursue their educational goals. At worst, they are poorly planned and lacking in organizational commitment, announced with much fanfare but quickly allowed to go out-of-date. The Internet is already littered with these "cobwebs." Adult and continuing education institutions that want to create a lasting Web presence need to focus less on the up-front costs and technical details and more on the long-range requirements, including skilled staff who can commit significant time to creating and maintaining Web documents.

On-Line Registration

Allowing Web users to read about upcoming conferences, short courses, and workshops raises the inevitable question of on-line registration. Such a registration process would offer many advantages over mail, FAX, or telephone. Using the Web's capability to present fill-in-the-blanks forms, prospective conference participants or students could enter their own data. While current registration procedures usually require data to be re-entered by the educational provider, Web-based registration would allow customers to submit information directly. Processing time and transcription errors could be reduced dramatically, and registrants could receive immediate confirmation in the form of a Web page announcing that their data had been recorded.

Unfortunately, achieving this goal will be far from trivial. Creating and processing Web forms requires custom programming, and linking a Web server to an organization's databases requires more. The security and confidentiality of personal data must be ensured. And none of this effort will be worthwhile until fee transactions can be processed with equal ease. The technology to support secure monetary transactions across the Web is still in its early days, and few educators are likely to explore this possibility until it has been thoroughly tested in the private sector. Thus widespread use of on-line registration systems in adult and continuing education is still several years in the future.

Distance Learning

Promoting our organizations and collecting registration fees are important activities, but they are business as usual. The Web offers more profound possibilities. In fact, the mere existence of the Web should lead us to reflect on our perceptions of the goals, constraints, and formats of instruction. The barriers of time and space that prevent many adults from participating in educational activities no longer look as formidable when viewed against the background of the Web. Everyone seems to agree that the Web should be used for teaching and learning, and there are many educators who are doing exactly that, but there is little consensus about who will participate in Web-based distance learning and how the Web will affect existing educational institutions.

Even if the Nielsen estimate of 18 million Web users is accurate -- and there is some debate about the methodology underlying this estimate -- this figure represents only a small percentage of the adult population. Course developers may shy away from targeting what appears to be a smaller potential audience than those who can be reached through print or broadcast media. The difficulty of connecting to the Web from home and the expense of personal computers and modems can always be invoked as rationales for sticking with familiar instructional formats.

However, advocates of the Web can point to many advantages over traditional media:

Development costs
After the initial expense of establishing a Web server, the costs of developing course materials are lower than costs for developing and reproducing books or tapes. The ability to link to other Web sites and search engines makes it possible to provide student access to a wealth of supplementary information at no additional cost.

Distribution
The Web does away with the problem of excess inventory and with most of the traditional costs of distribution. Since all users retrieve the course material from a master copy on the provider's Web server, it can be updated continuously without the tedious cycle of reprinting, shipping, and disposing of obsolete products. Password-based user authentication can ensure that only registered students access materials -- even if registrations are processed by traditional means for the next few years.

Open learning
A course designed for the Web can support open learning by allowing participants to register at any time and to work wherever and whenever they choose. Since the Web works the same on any computer, students are not bound to a single location. Unlike many video-based distance learning methods, the student can access materials at any time of the day or night.

Interactivity
Most Web pages now are simple mixtures of text, images, and links to other pages, through which a user browses freely but passively. However, interactive Web pages are becoming increasingly common. The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) defines a simple standard that allows Web users to send data back to Web servers; forms linked to databases are the most common example. A wide range of free and commercial products now support on-line conferencing through the Web (for more information, see http://thinkofit.com/webconf/). The close integration of Web products like Netscape with e-mail and Usenet news point toward many possibilities for allowing distance learners to communicate with their teachers and with each other.

Making It Happen

Creating distance learning courses on the Web does not necessarily imply a leap into an unknown world or the abandonment of tried-and-true methods. A more judicious approach will be to look for ways in which the Web can supplement or complement existing delivery systems. Print-based independent study courses might benefit from the creation of supporting Web sites, particularly if these incorporate conferencing features that allow students to share their knowledge and questions. A public television program can use a Web site to build viewer support and share links to related information (as does the Georgia Center's program about blacksmiths, "Forge & Anvil," http://www.gactr.uga.edu/tv/forge/).

Or the traditional handouts for a workshop might be replaced with Web pages, allowing the participants access to continuous revisions. I used this approach for a short course on "Exploring the World-Wide Web" and decided the resulting materials might as well be made freely available on the Internet (http://www.gactr.uga.edu/Exploring/index.html). Over the last six months, this tutorial has been accessed more than 15,000 times by users all over world. These numbers are trivially small compared to corporate Web pages that get a million hits a day, but they represent a much larger audience than is usually able to use the resources of the Georgia Center.

The people who are rushing to explore the World-Wide Web are eager to learn and hungry for knowledge on every imaginable topic -- in short, a perfect audience for adult and continuing education. If colleges and universities are unable to respond to the needs of this market, there is no shortage of private-sector competitors who are ready to do so. It would be an unhappy irony of history if higher education were to have built the Internet ... only to lose touch with it at the moment of its greatest success.

Table of Contents

Web administrator:  webmaster@gactr.uga.edu

All contents copyright (C) 1996.
University of Georgia Center for Continuing Education
All rights reserved.

Last revised: 4/2/96; 4:08:12 PM

URL: http://www.gactr.uga.edu/GCQ/GCQspr96/ibt.html