Essay Question: The Web is Transforming the University. How and Why? (Please Use Examples.)
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By Paul Keegan, December 2000 Issue
While Sperling's school has a frugality enforced by Wall Street's expectations, UNext is still privately held and is spending enormous sums developing its curriculum -- as much as $1 million per course. And while UOP is proudly low-tech, saying it focuses on pedagogy over technology, UNext is trying to exploit all the Internet's multimedia bells and whistles by hiring leading cognitive scientists and scholars to create its online classes. Cardean's course in assessing profitability, for example, starts with a scenario that feels like a video game for business professionals: You work for the fictitious Turing Computer company, which is losing market share to Compaq, Dell, and Gateway. A cartoon appears showing your "dynamic new CEO," Cathy McIntyre, anxiously tossing in her sleep. She wants to buy Psion, the handheld computer firm, and your job is to figure out whether this is a good idea. Can you save the company? "You have to explore and be frustrated, reach a point of confusion -- but not so much that you'll give up," says Donald Norman, president of UNext.com Learning Systems, a former chairman of the psychology and cognitive science departments at the University of California at San Diego, and a former Apple Computer design guru. "We thrust you into a problem before you know how to solve it." (By contrast, UOP Online's technology is strictly text-based -- lots of newsgroups and no fancy multimedia until bandwidth increases.)
By turning up his nose at Sperling's clientele, Rosenfield, 47, is merely playing for the biggest prize in Net education -- status. But for all his money and contacts, Rosenfield still has a big marketing problem: He can't sell a degree from Stanford or Columbia, only from someplace called Cardean University that nobody's ever heard of and that doesn't physically exist. That's because his elite partners would be crazy to let him mass-market their degrees over the Internet -- the value of a diploma from Chicago or the London School of Economics would sink like a rock.
"Cardean is going to be an off-brand degree," says Sperling, returning Rosenfield's favor of trashing the competition. "It's gonna be like a discount mall. You don't get a Stanford, you get a Cardean. Well, what the hell is a Cardean?"
Another problem is that, unlike Sperling's UOP, Cardean is not accredited by the North Central Association, the traditional peer-review regional accrediting body, which will make it hard for Cardean to be taken seriously as a degree-granting institution. (It is accredited by the non-peer-reviewed U.S. Department of Education's Distance Education and Training Council and is licensed to grant degrees by the state of Illinois.) Rosenfield contends that most online students don't want a degree, just a course or two that will give them a particular bit of knowledge or skill they need to keep up with a fast-changing world. He also acknowledges that, in some ways, Sperling is right: Getting an online degree can't compare with the experience of living at a prestigious campus.
"We'll never compete with that," he says. "That's not our goal. But that doesn't mean there aren't 20 million people kicking around India and China who would be thrilled to have the experience we can provide."
Landing Columbia gave UNext the cachet to pursue other elite schools, providing Rosenfield with a distinct advantage over the hundreds of Internet education companies that have sprouted up in recent years. Even with clever names like NotHarvard.com, the startups all found consumers hesitant to pay for an online education when there are still so many physical schools to choose from. Dotcoms like Hungry Minds offered courses through established universities like the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland, but the Nasdaq's dive has hit hard: Hungry Minds, which started with about $11 million in venture funding, ran out of money and was sold in August at a fire-sale price to IDG Books Worldwide, publisher of the For Dummies manuals. Michael Saylor, the brash 35-year-old chief executive of the Virginia technology company MicroStrategy, boasted last March that he would be spending $100 million to offer "free education for everyone on earth, forever" -- spinning rapturous dreams of Bill Clinton teaching politics, Warren Buffett teaching investing, and Steven Spielberg teaching filmmaking. Then his stock tanked when his company restated earnings to comply with new SEC accounting rules. Saylor hasn't been talking much about his Virtual U since
Rosenfield believes his partnerships with famous schools are critical to succeeding where others have failed. How big could Cardean get? "Gigantic," he says. "How big did the printing press make literature?"
This is Rosenfield's main pitch -- what was once available to just 1 percent of the population can now reach the other 99 percent. But, he is asked, isn't that trying to have it both ways? How can Cardean be mass-market and elite at the same time? Even if you hire a few chefs from Le Cirque, if you're selling a million hamburgers, doesn't that still make you McDonald's?
"Well, wait," he says, clearly displeased with the comparison. "I mean, you can make things in very high quality that are widely available. Take opera. Go back to the Medicis. You had to be very wealthy to hear Verdi or Mozart, not a regular guy. But the scalability of media -- opera on videodiscs, CD-ROM, CD -- made something of extremely high quality more broadly available. So our view is you can take a first-class education and make it widely available. It's the same as the printing press. That hasn't debased literature."
Perhaps not, but you can make a lot more money selling Limp Bizkit or Danielle Steel to the masses these days than Verdi or James Joyce. And just as the music and publishing industries inevitably reflect the sensibilities of their audiences, why shouldn't the American university? As Sperling has proven over the last two decades, higher education can be an extremely profitable consumer business. And UNext's deals have shown that stuffy academia is becoming aggressively entrepreneurial. Now that virtual universities can offer courses to a potential market of millions, it raises many vexing questions, not the least of which is: What happens to a college education when it's transformed into a commodity that is increasingly being delivered not in person on a campus but online?
Roger Schank thinks he knows the answer: It gets better. "I'm a revolutionary," he declares. "I am interested in overthrowing the system. The system is broken. This is our one chance: the computer. It's a new entry into the system, so we can change everything."
Schank is 54 years old, burly and bald, with a thinning white beard. In 1995, he founded Cognitive Arts, a privately held company based in New York with 200 employees and $10 million in annual revenue. It is working with Harvard Business School to develop remedial business software designed to help incoming students before school starts. Schank is also creating virtual business courses for Columbia.
These and other projects are Schank's chance to prove his radical theories about education, which made him something of an enfant terrible when he came bursting into academia decades ago. Schank holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas and was on the faculties at Stanford and Yale before moving on to Northwestern University, where he now holds three emeritus appointments -- in computer science, education, and psychology. But he has little patience for the traditional notion of a college campus as a chrysalis for self-discovery and intellectual growth.
"People love this fantasy about college life, but it's available to 10 percent of the population, if that," Schank says. Undergraduate college, especially the first two years, is "a joke" -- hundreds of students jammed into lecture halls being droned at by professors who don't even like to teach and would rather be off doing research. "Universities are, in many ways, fraudulent," he says
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