Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [43]
As I look back, it is hard to believe that less than twenty years ago students at elite American colleges and leading European universities had never used e-mail. With the speed of technological change accelerating, the gap between the teachers and students has increased. Having never known a world without the Internet, today’s students take media and communications technologies so much for granted that they do not realize how their new goggles transform their view of the world. Many older faculty members resist learning about and using these technologies. Younger faculty members are more familiar with this new world, but many who would like to develop more experimental styles of teaching and publishing have told me that senior colleagues discourage them from doing so because they say it will take time away from writing scholarly articles and monographs and thus will hurt their chances for tenure. To me, this is folly. The challenge, rather, is to build on the strengths of traditional methods while at the same time exploiting the possibilities of new technologies.
My experience in the Helsinki seminar and the interest it generated led to two additional ventures that suggest intriguing possibilities that might be further explored. As I tried to fulfill my commitment to become a student of my students, I learned about many new possibilities for research and teaching. In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web had not yet been developed. There was, however, inexpensive software for creating multimedia works (i.e., works incorporating written text, images, video and sound), which was readily available and easy to use. Students taught me how to use this software. When the Web appeared and more graphic capabilities and browsers were introduced, we began creating work for the Web. Some interested colleagues asked how they could learn to use these technologies. One of the problems faculty members in the arts and humanities face is that there are almost no public or private agencies that offer grants to purchase the equipment needed to use new media. To address this need and meet these interests, I established a Center for Technology in the Arts and the Humanities at Williams. With the help of the college’s Office of Information Technology, we created a laboratory with state-of-the-art equipment for working in digital media. Following the lesson I had learned from my teaching, faculty were paired with students who taught them how to use the hardware and software and introduced them to the kinds of things they could do with these new media. As they experimented, faculty members began integrating the results of their work in their classes. One of the most successful projects developed in the media lab was a series of virtual renderings of medieval cathedrals done by a professor of art and architecture.
A second exciting development came out of the Helsinki seminar. At the suggestion of a student who had been in the seminar, I started distributing my courses at Williams on the Web in 1995. We began by transmitting online an audio and video version of my course on the psychology of religion. People in distant locations could take the class in real time or view it later. The first time I offered this course online over six hundred alumni took it. I then proposed that Williams start a cybercollege for alums, which would distribute at least two online courses every semester. The college was not interested, but an alumnus, Herbert Allen, who is a leading New York investment banker, thought the idea was worth pursuing and offered to back it financially. A few months later, in 1999, we founded Global Education Network (GEN), whose mission was to make high-quality online courses in the liberal arts, humanities and sciences available at a reasonable price to people of all ages anywhere in the world. Our plan was to enter into