What's Wrong with Multimedia in Higher Education?

Abstract

Many people have complained that our higher education system moves too slowly. Richard Cyert, president of Carnegie Mellon University, complains that we teach classes today the same way as our ancestors, without innovation or change. Ken King, the previous president of EDUCOM, half-facetiously points out that it took ten years to get the overhead projector from the bowling alley to the classroom. It is true that the peace of change in higher education has been geologic is some ways. But perhaps that is one of the strengths that has made it the envy of the world--not jumping too fast to adopt fads and sticking to the basics have been good formulae for success. On the other hand, things are changing quickly today. To be successful in the future, organizations and institutions must either predict or invent the future. Higher education is doing neither. Just as IBM ignored the clear signals that the world was changing and got blindsided by its competition, higher education is equally vulnerable to experiencing the same disaster. It is obvious that higher education is pricing itself out of the market. But higher education's costs continue to mount. Just as IBM's bloated bureaucracy reduced its flexibility to make timely decisions and added layers of costs to its products, higher education likewise continues to cling to a collegial form of governance that may no longer serve its best interests. William Massy of Stanford University has observed that this governance system has shifted vast university resources from teaching to research.[1] This has resulted in teaching loads falling from about 12 contact hours per semester in the 1960s to about six hours in most universities today. At the same time that teaching loads are falling, higher education must spend huge amounts of money to deal with hundreds of compliance issues, an increasingly litigious society and work force, and massive amounts of reporting to satisfy accountability requests. Because of these factors plus inflation, the cost of higher education has been increasing at double the consumer price index. Just as IBM believed that the high quality of its product sufficiently differentiated it from its competitors, universities and research institutions also believe that their high quality will insulate them from less sophisticated competitors. However, when the cost differential becomes too great, customers shift suppliers, as IBM learned the hard way. When the students simply don't show up it will be too late to adapt gracefully to this new world. Consequently, many people within the higher education community have been busily developing creative multimedia courseware to try to change the paradigm. Is multimedia a way out? Maybe, maybe not. This paper explores the factors that have inhibited widespread use of multimedia instructional courseware in U.S. higher education as well as the factors that are necessary to allow multimedia to thrive. The Three Revolutions Higher education has witnessed three different revolutions over the past 20 years. The first was the advent of television; it was to change the very foundations of education by bringing the world to the classroom and providing more interesting and innovative material to the student. It didn't happen. Although higher education spent millions of dollars producing films and videotapes, there was never widespread adoption. Some say that the NIH syndrome (not invented here) was responsible. Nevertheless, we spent greast sums of money trying to change the teaching paradigm. It is ironic that television radically changed every facet of our society except education. Television has transposed forever our political system, our youngsters, our perceptions of the world around us and even the teaching of religion. Higher education alone escaped unscathed. The second revolution was the microcomputer; it was to change the very foundations of education by bringing the world to the classroom and providing more interesting and innovative material to the student. …