Presidents’ Forum of ExcelsiorCollege,

April 16, 2004

Keynote Address

Francis L. Lawrence

I address you today not as an expert – you are the experts in the intricacies of distributed education and the sophisticated techniques of online learning. You are the professionals who are creating strategies for delivering student services, developing the tools for outcomes assessment, and addressing the issues of program quality and accreditation. I, on the other hand, have just enough technological skill to use a cell phone for my calls and a PC to send and receive the e-mails that are a ubiquitous feature of contemporary communication.

Nevertheless,I am here as an enthusiast who admires the current accomplishments of your field and believes in its almost limitless potential. As one of the 24 university presidents and chancellors who served on the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-GrantUniversities,I drafted the Commission’s fourth report, A Learning Society, issued in 1999, in which we called on state and federal governments to promote lifelong learning by increasing investment in higher education. In particular, we recommended that:

  1. Public investment must increase to keep tuition affordable for all students, including continuing-education students and those who study through distance education.
  2. Grants for research in effective learning methodologies, including methods used in distance learning and technology-based learning must be offered.
  3. Funds are needed for public institutions’ capital and operating expenses for information technology.
  4. Federal and state financial-aid policies must be revised to better meet the needs of lifelong learners.

So far as government support is concerned, I’m sure that you will agree that we were idealists, and that our success to date has been limited. However other aspects of the report were interesting and encouraging. For example the Rutgers Eagleton Institute survey of more than 435 decision makers in K-12 and higher education found that respondents strongly agreed that lifelong learning promotes individual well-being(99%), benefits corporate productivity(99%), is important to the security of the nation(87%), is a national priority(85%, and even that it promotes family preservation (85%).

Perhaps, in the last analysis, it is the emphasis on the need for collaboration among all sectors of education that will be the report’s most productive recommendation. As we urged then, “Our public universities, community colleges, and the K-12 systems must find creative ways through teamwork to meet our growing lifelong learning needs.” And since partnerships, like charity, should begin at home, we made partnerships with New Jersey’s county colleges anessential part of the way Rutgers is meeting the needs of diverse learners for higher education in New Jersey.

When I came to Rutgers in 1990, we were working on an articulation agreement with one of New Jersey’stwo-yearstate colleges. Within the next few years, we finalized agreements with all 19 of New Jersey’s county colleges. And we went further in encouraging county college students to come to their state university by offering a number of competitive scholarships to applicants with outstanding records from their county colleges. When nervous faculty members raised questions in the University Senate about this rapid progress in improving articulation for community college students, we did a statistical analysis of grade point averages comparing Rutgers juniors and seniors who entered the university in their first year of college to those who came to us from a county college background. We discovered that the difference between the GPAs of our “native” Rutgers upperclass students and the GPAs that county college transfers earned in their junior and senior years at Rutgers was one tenth of a point: one small point for their GPAs, one giant step for articulation.

That was far from the end of our collaborative efforts. Encouraged by our original success, we brought to New Jersey the ARTSYS system developed in Maryland. ARTSYS allows county college students to access on the Web all of the information they need in order to know whether they are on track to transfer to Rutgers by their junior year in the area of their choice. On the system, students can not only find out whether a given community college course will transfer to Rutgers, but also if there is an equivalent course or courses at Rutgers, whether the community college course satisfies any general education requirements for a Rutgers college, and whether the course satisfies any requirement for the major program the student wants to study at Rutgers. Of course the system also offers the basic information about the recommended transfer program for community college students, i.e. the list of courses that transfer students should complete during their freshman and sophomore years for any undergraduate major at Rutgers. Based on its success, ARTSYS has been adopted system-wide. It is now administered by BurlingtonCountyCollege, which is headed by President Robert Messina, one of our colleagues attending this forum.

The contact that I had with county college presidents through our articulation efforts was increased through the New Jersey Council of Presidents, which was set up in the mid-90s, when Governor Whitman abolished the Department of Higher Education. Our closer contact resulted in even further collaboration, this time in a classic distributed education pattern. First, Rutgers and BrookdaleCommunity College established a partnership to allow Monmouth residents the opportunity to earn their baccalaureates at the WesternMonmouthHigherEducationCenter, located on the community college’s Freehold campus. Selected upper-division and graduate course offerings are provided by Rutgers. As part of this program with Brookdale, Rutgers offers baccalaureate programs in labor studies and employment relations, criminal justice, liberal studies, and nursing, as well as a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in education, nursing, social work, political science and other areas. This initiative is now in its fifth year and generates 600 enrollments a semester. .

Building on that experience, Rutgers and Brookdale, in collaboration with six other New Jersey colleges and universities, founded the New Jersey Coastal Communiversity in order to offer selected associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees and graduate certificates on the site of the former U.S. Army Camp Evans. This collaborative effort involves two research universities, two community colleges, a private college, and three state universities. To my knowledge, it’s a unique initiative in distributed education. It offers increased access to higher education for the underserved south Jersey shore area. The institutions allied in the Coastal Communiversity are:

  • Rutgers, The StateUniversity of New Jersey
  • New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT)
  • BrookdaleCommunity College
  • OceanCountyCollege
  • GeorgianCourtCollege
  • MontclairStateUniversity
  • New JerseyCityUniversity and
  • KeanUniversity.

Brookdale and OceanCounty offer first and second year associate degree courses on-site and via distance education. Each associate degree transfers to specific Communiversity bachelor’s degree programs offered by the other Communiversity institutions. The third and fourth year bachelor’s degree courses are offered on-site and through distance education by the Communiversity member that grants the degree. Six degree tracks are offered: Business Administration, Criminal Justice, Education, Information Technology, Health Science and Liberal Arts. Master’s degrees are offered on site in Education andBusiness Administration. Master’s degrees in Information Technology and Nursing can be earned primarily through on line courses, with a few laboratory and clinical courses on site.

I don’t want to pose as a completely successful enthusiast for lifelong learning that involves distributed and on-line education. I have at least one war story that parallels Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. It was a long campaign that slowly built to a climax but, in the end, suffered defeat brought on by environmental conditions as severe and predictable as a Russian winter. In 2001- 2002, we put in a year of hard work on the structuring of a new School of Continuing Professional Development. Its mission was defined as providing off-campus professional and applied programs for adults, primarily college graduates,who are place-bound and cannot attend courses on campus but need advanced education to meet new workforce demands. The gestation of this classic distributed education school was a Herculean task that involved the administration in long, earnest discussion and negotiation with the Faculty Senate, the Rutgers New Brunswick Faculty Council, and an Advisory Committee that I appointed with the advice of the Senate President, with a majority of tenured faculty representing all three Rutgers campuses. The development of the proposal for the school involved more than a year’s work, crafting andrevisingplans to satisfy doubts and meet objections.

We set ourselves the next-to-impossible feat of bringing into existence an entirely new and different unit in a research university, a unit without an existing base within the tenured faculty, its programs to be started and ended on the basis of the emerging educational needs of adult students and its teachers to be primarily untenured facultyon term appointments. In the context of a very traditional research university, it was a new collection of concepts and operating rules that aroused understandable concerns and fears. Worries about resources, about the duplication of existing programs offered by liberal arts and professional schools and colleges, about academic freedom for the faculty and about quality assurance for the programs were aired, debated, carefully negotiated, and painstakingly resolved.

The traditional faculty needed reassurance. They received solemn promises that state lines would not be devoted to the support of the new school and that the new school would neither duplicate nor regulate the campus-based or off-campus programs of existing schools. Flexibility was a fundamental need of the new school, but the traditional faculty asked that it be balanced with the needs for academic freedom, for a quality mechanism, and for the involvement of tenured faculty at some level. Questions about academic freedom were met by the assurance that the new school’s faculty, though untenured, would be represented by the AAUP and thus afforded many of the same protections against arbitrary and capricious action as tenure track faculty. Tenured faculty memberswere ensured of involvement in the recruitment, appointment, and promotion of the new school’s faculty, as well as membership on the school’s Executive Committee. To meet the requirements for quality assurance, the school planned to follow the same processes as those used by on-campus units, i.e. formal certification through accreditation where appropriate, continuous monitoring of course and instructor quality by faculty peer review, and student evaluation. The new school also planned to use market research to ensure that its investment in programs was timely, on-target, and cost-effective.

With all our bases covered and the Senate Governance Committee on record as accepting most of the proposed changes – in fact, while the last revisions were in progress, in January of 2002 - we learned from the state that there would be no additional funding from which we could draw the set-up costs for the new school. On the contrary, higher education budgets were being reduced to help meet the state’s current fiscal crisis.The proposal could not be considered for implementation. It was withdrawn from consideration as the university plunged into undertaking the necessary cost-cutting steps.

Of course even the longest, hardest campaign has its survivors. Though thegrand scheme of the new school faded away,the division of Continuous Education and Outreach remained, still managing the innovative partnerships I talked about earlier. It alsosupplies support for 30 departments that offer continuing professional education, much of it through distance learning technology, and it continues to operate a University Inn and ConferenceCenter with professional development programs.

So we have learned from experience that distance learning is still, to a great extent, a stepchild regarded with wary eyes and kept in its place at a safe distance from encroachment on the hallowed halls of traditional academe. However, as often happens, massive changes in the culture that may not be welcomed with open arms at the front door cannot be prevented from flowing through the cracks in some form, as pervasive as the air we breath. I did all that I could to equip Rutgers to take advantage of those changes. The greatest single infrastructure investment that we made during my tenure as president was not a building constructed of bricks and mortar but RUNet, a $100-million-dollar-plus project that wiredall three Rutgers campuses for voice, video and data and connected them, from Newark in the north,through New Brunswick in central Jersey, to Camden in south Jersey. All this was inspired by the two-year process of strategic planning that we did in the mid-1990s, when unit after unit made it clear that greatly expanded broadband capacity was a sine qua non in order to advance to the highest level of excellence in research, teaching and service. So, while before RUNet, easy instant access to the full resources of the internet was unevenly distributed, now it is ubiquitous, available throughout the offices of faculty and residence halls of students. And, as you are very much aware, students now come to college with a sophisticated understanding of web technology and its uses.

Naturally, we did more than just wiring the campuses. As the project neared completion, we proclaimed a Year of the Network and offered funding to departments to create interactiveteaching tools. Twelve departments used the funds to create tools that are not only in heavy use but are continuously being expanded. For example, a home-grown web-based teaching platform named Digiclass was built by two undergraduates to assist French language students in mastering both pronunciation and grammar. It is now used in all language departments in New Brunswick as well as ROTC and the School of Management and Labor Relations. I understand that its use grows every year. There are also a number of commercially developed web programs in use. WebCt is used in more than 500 courses, permitting posting of material, online quizzes, internal email and bulletin boards and various means of student-to-student and student-to-instructor communication. Blackboard, very similar to WebCt, is widely used by the School of Business and is being considered for adoption by the entire Newark campus. ECollege is used for all of the online courses supported by the division of Continuous Education and Outreach. ECompanion, a similar course platform with 24/7 technical support is now available for on-campus courses. Like most course platforms, ECompanion allows:

  • online presentation of course material to supplement the traditional classroom;
  • posting grades, notes, presentations, articles, and handouts online;
  • inserting text, tables, graphics, and links easily, without HTML;
  • linking students to Internet resources;
  • access to an integrated online calendar;
  • facilitating class discussion and group work outside the classroom with integrated e-mail, chat, and threaded discussion tools;
  • online testing; and
  • online course rosters to which all students with Rutgers email addresses are automatically added from the Rutgers registrar’s office database.

If we can’t yet say that boundary between online courses and traditional courses has become completely blurred, we must observe that online interactive tools and even the passive tools that feature posting instructional materials are making the entire concept of online learning much less foreign to faculty and students alike. In addition to the course platforms, many faculty use listserv and online discussions through various sources. The newest innovation used in Rutgers New Brunswick classes with support from the TeachingExcellenceCenter is a wikki, an interactive online text service. An instructor can post a document such as a student’s essay on a web page and everyone in the class can visit the site and make notations and comments on the text. This tool was first used successfully in the English department in the past fall term. Another tool, the web log or blog is also available. As you know, this is an online running diary. As a teaching tool, classes can use it to facilitate discussion or have students make comments over the term and track their own development, with members of the class and the instructor able to view the document at any time.

None of this is news to you, but in traditional classrooms, it is beginning to transform instruction at Rutgers, especially in the introductory classes, where, as I mentioned, twelve departments are using interactive web tools that were developed with the support of internal grants from the office of my Vice President for Academic Affairs. Those first year students are going on with the expectation that similar web-based tools will be available in advanced instruction—and their instructors are feeling the pressure to provide that online support.