The Future of Higher (Lifelong) Education

Retired Professor Parker Rossman is exploring online in a draft textbook, free to the world, how to use the Internet to provide learning for all. The freely accessible online work-in-progress is "a call for larger and more sustained conversation - globally - on what the future of global education ought to be". To that end, the online project is headlined by a note asking readers to contact the author if they notice errors, or if they can contribute website URLs or other information that is pertinent to the material; all chapters are being revised in response to readers' contributions. As of December 12 2003, this online book had been used by 18,777 people in over 30 countries; as of March 2005, it was in the process of being translated into Chinese.

The 3-volume work is, thus, a collaborative endeavour "to examine the ways a global virtual education system can come into existence, and to raise questions about needed research and more comprehensive planning on learning, teaching, and overcoming the problems (such as hunger, bad health, war, and revolution) that stand in the way of providing education for everyone in the world."

Rossman's conception of "education for all" centres on the notion of learning as a life-long process. Although he stresses that higher education "will be a crucial locus of educational vision and the gathering place of scholars and educators", Rossman's vision of education is not focused solely on the university context. He suggests, rather, that it must include "programs for pre-kindergarten children, for primary and secondary school age learners, and for college students. It must also include continuing educational programs that foster job skills, career planning, and hobbies, as well as special interest programs for senior citizens."

To Rossman, the key to universalising educational access is distance learning, using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support the creation of "a global virtual education system". As mirrored by the participatory nature of the online draft publication itself, Rossman anticipates that this global system will be marked by broad-scale public involvement. He articulates several assumptions that will undergird this process, including:

1. Online mailing lists on various aspects of education need to be coordinated, and integrated into a global planning process, to support larger-scale online discussions that enable and invite the participation of anyone in the world.
2. "[W]ithin two decades we will have powerful new technologies that will make it possible for us to do things never before possible."
3. "The Internet, Web, and their successors can bring essential education to nearly everyone in the world, when and where it is needed, across an individual's lifetime."
4. Because much of education can be automated, at a low cost, "[t]he poor will be able to obtain basic education, literacy (including multimedia literacy), political savvy, entrepreneurial skills, and agricultural skills; those with ability will be able to move on to advanced education online."

Notably, while Rossman's vision depends on technology, this is not his starting point: "It is...a mistake to begin with the technology. We first need to decide how lifelong learning can and should be restructured - or begin anew - in order to meet the needs of six to ten billion learners in an increasingly global society; and then develop the technology that best serves those ends." Among the commitments that Rossman brings to his understanding of the education process are that it must be:

• tailored and responsive to the individual - designed to suit each learner's evolving talents and gifts, opportunities and needs, and handicaps or limitations
• holistic - focused on developing intelligence, creativity, and imagination
• participatory - characterised by "teamwork" between the learner and teacher; peer processes are incorporated.

The strategy for lifetime education for all, around which technology must be shaped and built, could be characterised as "bottom-up". It might involve something like a neighbourhood-empowering school as the local centre for lifetime education, connected to needed resources and operated by a community education cooperative. Along those lines, Rossman also envisions a global "cooperative" distribution network that would provide second-hand (used) learning materials free of charge, once a for-sale upgraded version has been produced.

Rossman is clearly aware of the limitations of technology for the learning process (e.g., lack of eye contact between learners and teachers), but proposes several strategies for getting around such potentially dehumanising features of ICTs. For example, he points to Jaron Lanier (2001)'s description of something called "tele-immersion" that might be used in classrooms at both resident and virtual universities. In Rossman's words, this new medium "creates the illusion that a learner is in the same physical space as other people, even though the others might in fact be continents away." Quoting Lanier: "It combines the display and interaction techniques of virtual reality with new vision technologies that transcend the traditional limitations of a camera". Rossman notes that it would thus be possible to view distant participants from more than one vantage point, such that participants would be conveyed as "'moving sculptures,' without favoring a single point of view. 'The result is that all the participants, however distant, can share and explore a life-size space.'"br>

In an interview that accompanies the three volumes, Rossman discusses his vision of how such a system could ultimately play itself out if implemented around the world. In his words, "the G8 and other political leaders would establish a global network (and, perhaps, designate a satellite) devoted exclusively to education that would contain all essential programs, resources, texts, media, and so forth to meet the needs of 'education for all.' In time it would become a semantic network, which among other things would cross-index everything for instant retrieval. It also would contain many textbooks (including mine) (a) that would be in all languages; (b) that would allow users to click on any word for a definition or a translation; (c) that would likewise allow users to click on any idea or concept and jump to an encyclopedia article on that topic; (d) that would incorporate links to related sections of the text, so that one could click on any author's name and go to an annotated bibliography that would contain other links; and (e) that would provide simpler explanations or multimedia illustrations for concepts that a youngster or a person with limited education would not otherwise understand. Thus the network textbook would exist in the context of a 'cosmopedia' (i.e., an encyclopedia that links everything...)"