Monday, April 3, 2000

A For-Profit Web Venture Seeks to Replicate the University Experience Online By VINCENT KIERNAN Columbia University and five other educational and cultural institutions were expected to announce today that they are collaborating on the development of a for-profit Web site that will deliver online courses and other scholarly content. Organizers say the site, http://www.fathom.com, will transplant into cyberspace the intellectual milieu of academe -- going beyond course offerings to include museum exhibitions, scholarly lectures, artistic performances, and the like. "What Fathom is trying to do is to recreate in virtual space the kind of possibilities that one can usually get only from being at a great university or a great museum," said Jonathan R. Cole, Columbia's provost and dean of faculties. "Learning takes place outside of the classroom in addition to inside the classroom," said Ann G. Kirschner, president and chief executive officer of Fathom. Fathom will seek to provide access to those learning experiences that occur outside the classroom, she said. However, critics of online education are likely to take umbrage at the suggestion that the intellectual impact of university life can be replicated online in Fathom. "Its 'interactive knowledge marketplace' is just that -- a marketplace that turns both students and knowledge into commodities for profit," said Teresa Ebert, an associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany, and Mas'ud Zararzadeh, a professor of English at Syracuse University, in a joint e-mail response to an inquiry from The Chronicle. "It promises 'knowledge without boundaries,' but knowledge is not the delivery and consumption of pre-packaged content, no matter how global the dissemination," the two scholars said. "Rather, knowledge is the product of intense questioning of dominant assumptions and practices, and education is the dynamic process of critique and active give-and-take between teachers and students, beyond commodification and the isolated signs on the screen." The other participants in Fathom are the British Library, Cambridge University Press, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the New York Public Library, and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. Both Mr. Cole and Ms. Kirschner said that other participants may be added in coming weeks. Ms. Kirschner declined to say when Fathom's Web site would be unveiled. But Peter Hirst, chief executive officer of Enterprise L.S.E. -- the London school's for-profit subsidiary -- said he expected that the site would start operation this year. Fees will be charged for courses and some other content on Fathom, but much of the site will be accessible at no charge. "What we are interested in is bringing information to people largely for free," said Mr. Cole. Ms. Kirschner said that Fathom was being created as a for-profit company so that it would be "a nimble, entrepreneurial organization" that would be able to survive in the highly competitive world of online services. "To put this business on a solid footing is going to be costly," she said. As a for-profit company, Fathom will be able to attract outside investment that will be required to produce a high-quality site, she said. Mr. Cole and Ms. Kirschner declined to say how much money Columbia was investing in the venture or how much was being spent by other partners. Ms. Kirschner said that Columbia had committed "quite extraordinary resources" to Fathom, including hiring a staff of 28. Mr. Hirst, of Enterprise L.S.E., declined to provide a figure for his institution's investment in Fathom, but he said that its one-time investment was about two to three times what the London school had been planning to spend annually on development of its own for-profit Web site focusing on social sciences alone. The London school decided to participate in Fathom because the content from its participating organizations can "replicate the feeling of walking around a campus," Mr. Hirst said. "We think that the consortial approach with Columbia is much more powerful than the unilateral approach we were taking," he said. Ms. Kirschner suggested that Fathom may operate in the red for some time. "This business is not going to turn a profit overnight," she said. "Like all other dot-coms, this is a future play." But Mr. Hirst sounded more optimistic. "We hope that in its second or third year, it will start being complete and self sufficient," he said, adding that he was not speaking on behalf of Fathom. Mr. Cole, Columbia's provost, said that Fathom eventually could develop into an important income source for the university, much as has happened with patent royalties. But he said that the financial prospects were murky at best. "I don't know precisely where Fathom will go," he said. Columbia stands to benefit from Fathom in ways other than financially, he said, such as by burnishing Columbia's reputation as a center of scholarly excellence. "It will project the greatness of Columbia to interested audiences we want to reach around the world." "We are committed to extending Columbia's reach onto the Internet though Fathom in a way that would make any student, faculty member, or alum proud," said Ms. Kirschner. Before the Internet, a scholar in the humanities might have claimed success by selling 800 copies of a monograph, Mr. Cole said. Through Fathom, "that same humanist may be able to reach tens of thousands of people through the new medium, and that is tremendously satisfying," he said. Mr. Hirst, of Enterprise L.S.E., said that scholars who are not "superstars" are the ones who are most likely to benefit from this expanded access to potential students. A hallmark of Fathom will be that all its content will be "authenticated" as valid, by passing a peer-review process or by some other means, Mr. Cole said. All content will be labeled with the name of the educational or cultural institution that produced it, he said. Those steps will confront a common complaint about Web-based information -- the difficulty a reader has in ascertaining whether the information is accurate and current, or as Ms. Kirschner put it: "Where's the good stuff?" Mr. Cole said the authentication process would not seek to favor one scholarly viewpoint over another. Rather, he said he hoped that Fathom would present sharp scholarly controversies. Arthur Levine, the president of Teachers College of Columbia University, welcomed Fathom. "I think it's very wonderful," he said. "It's really exciting." He particularly welcomed the inclusion of a library and a museum in the project. "We're seeing a convergence of every knowledge organization in society," he said. Universities often compete for donations with other cultural institutions such as libraries and museums, but such competition would be counterproductive in the online era, he said. "If we're going to serve the public and the knowledge community, it makes sense to have integration rather than have organizations compete," Mr. Levine said. Fathom's for-profit status does not trouble him. The participating institutions will still provide public services free as they always have, he said. "It's not going to diminish the service of what happens at the library," Mr. Levine said. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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