Tuesday, March 12, 2002

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Diane Harley An Anthropologist Studies Universities' Approaches to Distance Education By ANDREA L. FOSTER Diane Harley is the director of the Higher Education in the Digital Age project at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley. For the past decade, she has been applying her background in anthropology to the study of instructional technology. Recently, she received a $50,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to lead a team that will compare models used by universities to create, finance, and disseminate online education. The title of the project is "University Teaching as E-Business: Research and Policy Agendas." Q. What motivated you to begin this project? A. The general consensus among scholars and practitioners is that the pace of change -- both with the technologies and university responses -- has been dizzying, to the point where it's been very difficult to sort of describe the landscape. ... And in the ongoing conversations that we've had, it was very clear that somebody needed to sit down and begin to have a conversation about how you categorize the activities. What kinds of university responses were occurring? Why were universities making the decisions that they were making? What were the internal pressures? What were the external pressures? Q. What is your theory about the evolution of online learning? A. No one person can come up -- I think -- with one theory. Over the course of the year-plus that we've been working on this project, it's pretty clear that to understand it, you have to disaggregate institutions. Different institutions are going to respond differently. I think also what we're seeing is that there are going to be mixed modes of delivery. There's going to be hybrid modes. There's not one perfect way to do this. And what an institution decides to do is really going to depend on its student body, what kinds of students it's teaching, what their needs are. Are they 18 to 22, or are they adult learners who have full-time jobs? Q. How do you want your research to be used? A. One finds that in many projects -- large-scale projects that have looked at this -- there tends to be an assumption that it's a very good thing, that anybody who objects to it is a Luddite. ... I would say, from our perspective, it's not trying to deny that it's happening -- it's, What are the costs and the benefits? And I think we'd like people to begin to think about this in a multidimensional way, and to acknowledge that some things are going to be lost as well as gained, and that academic environments are very unique. Academic culture is unique. I think there are a lot of us who are probably old-fashioned about academic environments, and value a lot of the things that happen here. Q. As a former practicing anthropologist, what do you bring to your research that technologists lack? A. I may be a little bit more willing to let the questions present themselves to us as we go along, and make decisions about what we decide to study based on what we're observing. Q. Is there one particular institution or educational company that you think is practicing online learning most effectively? A. There's no question that the University of Phoenix is doing a lot of stuff that's incredibly effective, and they seem to be doing it very well. I would say that two institutions stand out because of leadership. Well, and I would say three that come off the top of my head, and that doesn't mean there aren't others. I think Stanford has been very, very innovative. ... MIT is another one. They've been very, very successful at trying a lot of different things, at raising the money for it, and I think they have a lot of leadership in this area. I think Columbia's also been very creative. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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