Presidents’ Forum of Excelsior College,
April 16, 2004
Keynote Address
Francis L. Lawrence
I address you today not as an expert – you are the experts in the intricacies of distributed
education and the sophisticated techniques of online learning. You are the professionals
who are creating strategies for delivering student services, developing the tools for
outcomes assessment, and addressing the issues of program quality and accreditation. I,
on the other hand, have just enough technological skill to use a cell phone for my calls
and a PC to send and receive the e-mails that are a ubiquitous feature of contemporary
communication.
Nevertheless, I am here as an enthusiast who admires the current accomplishments of
your field and believes in its almost limitless potential. As one of the 24 university
presidents and chancellors who served on the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State
and Land-Grant Universities, I drafted the Commission’s fourth report, A Learning
Society, issued in 1999, in which we called on state and federal governments to promote
lifelong learning by increasing investment in higher education. In particular, we
recommended that:
1. Public investment must increase to keep tuition affordable for all students,
including continuing-education students and those who study through distance
education.
2. Grants for research in effective learning methodologies, including methods used
in distance learning and technology-based learning must be offered.
3. Funds are needed for public institutions’ capital and operating expenses for
information technology.
4. Federal and state financial-aid policies must be revised to better meet the needs
of lifelong learners.
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So far as government support is concerned, I’m sure that you will agree that we were
idealists, and that our success to date has been limited. However other aspects of the
report were interesting and encouraging. For example the Rutgers Eagleton Institute
survey of more than 435 decision makers in K-12 and higher education found that
respondents strongly agreed that lifelong learning promotes individual well-being(99%),
benefits corporate productivity(99%), is important to the security of the nation(87%), is a
national priority(85%, and even that it promotes family preservation (85%).
Perhaps, in the last analysis, it is the emphasis on the need for collaboration among all
sectors of education that will be the report’s most productive recommendation. As we
urged then, “Our public universities, community colleges, and the K-12 systems must
find creative ways through teamwork to meet our growing lifelong learning needs.” And
since partnerships, like charity, should begin at home, we made partnerships with New
Jersey’s county colleges an essential part of the way Rutgers is meeting the needs of
diverse learners for higher education in New Jersey.
When I came to Rutgers in 1990, we were working on an articulation agreement with one
of New Jersey’s two-year state colleges. Within the next few years, we finalized
agreements with all 19 of New Jersey’s county colleges. And we went further in
encouraging county college students to come to their state university by offering a
number of competitive scholarships to applicants with outstanding records from their
county colleges. When nervous faculty members raised questions in the University
Senate about this rapid progress in improving articulation for community college
students, we did a statistical analysis of grade point averages comparing Rutgers juniors
and seniors who entered the university in their first year of college to those who came to
us from a county college background. We discovered that the difference between the
GPAs of our “native” Rutgers upperclass students and the GPAs that county college
transfers earned in their junior and senior years at Rutgers was one tenth of a point: one
small point for their GPAs, one giant step for articulation.
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That was far from the end of our collaborative efforts. Encouraged by our original
success, we brought to New Jersey the ARTSYS system developed in Maryland.
ARTSYS allows county college students to access on the Web all of the information they
need in order to know whether they are on track to transfer to Rutgers by their junior year
in the area of their choice. On the system, students can not only find out whether a given
community college course will transfer to Rutgers, but also if there is an equivalent
course or courses at Rutgers, whether the community college course satisfies any general
education requirements for a Rutgers college, and whether the course satisfies any
requirement for the major program the student wants to study at Rutgers. Of course the
system also offers the basic information about the recommended transfer program for
community college students, i.e. the list of courses that transfer students should complete
during their freshman and sophomore years for any undergraduate major at Rutgers.
Based on its success, ARTSYS has been adopted system-wide. It is now administered by
Burlington County College, which is headed by President Robert Messina, one of our
colleagues attending this forum.
The contact that I had with county college presidents through our articulation efforts was
increased through the New Jersey Council of Presidents, which was set up in the mid-90s,
when Governor Whitman abolished the Department of Higher Education. Our closer
contact resulted in even further collaboration, this time in a classic distributed education
pattern. First, Rutgers and Brookdale Community College established a partnership to
allow Monmouth residents the opportunity to earn their baccalaureates at the Western
Monmouth Higher Education Center, located on the community college’s Freehold
campus. Selected upper-division and graduate course offerings are provided by Rutgers.
As part of this program with Brookdale, Rutgers offers baccalaureate programs in labor
studies and employment relations, criminal justice, liberal studies, and nursing, as well as
a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in education, nursing, social work,
political science and other areas. This initiative is now in its fifth year and generates 600
enrollments a semester. .
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Building on that experience, Rutgers and Brookdale, in collaboration with six other New
Jersey colleges and universities, founded the New Jersey Coastal Communiversity in
order to offer selected associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees and graduate
certificates on the site of the former U.S. Army Camp Evans. This collaborative effort
involves two research universities, two community colleges, a private college, and three
state universities. To my knowledge, it’s a unique initiative in distributed education. It
offers increased access to higher education for the underserved south Jersey shore area.
The institutions allied in the Coastal Communiversity are:

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT)

Brookdale Community College

Ocean County College

Georgian Court College

Montclair State University

New Jersey City University and

Kean University.
Brookdale and Ocean County offer first and second year associate degree courses on-site
and via distance education. Each associate degree transfers to specific Communiversity
bachelor’s degree programs offered by the other Communiversity institutions. The third
and fourth year bachelor’s degree courses are offered on-site and through distance
education by the Communiversity member that grants the degree. Six degree tracks are
offered: Business Administration, Criminal Justice, Education, Information Technology,
Health Science and Liberal Arts. Master’s degrees are offered on site in Education and
Business Administration. Master’s degrees in Information Technology and Nursing can
be earned primarily through on line courses, with a few laboratory and clinical courses on
site.
I don’t want to pose as a completely successful enthusiast for lifelong learning that
involves distributed and on-line education. I have at least one war story that parallels
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. It was a long campaign that slowly built to a climax but,
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in the end, suffered defeat brought on by environmental conditions as severe and
predictable as a Russian winter. In 2001- 2002, we put in a year of hard work on the
structuring of a new School of Continuing Professional Development. Its mission was
defined as providing off-campus professional and applied programs for adults, primarily
college graduates, who are place-bound and cannot attend courses on campus but need
advanced education to meet new workforce demands. The gestation of this classic
distributed education school was a Herculean task that involved the administration in
long, earnest discussion and negotiation with the Faculty Senate, the Rutgers New
Brunswick Faculty Council, and an Advisory Committee that I appointed with the advice
of the Senate President, with a majority of tenured faculty representing all three Rutgers
campuses. The development of the proposal for the school involved more than a year’s
work, crafting and revising plans to satisfy doubts and meet objections.
We set ourselves the next-to-impossible feat of bringing into existence an entirely new
and different unit in a research university, a unit without an existing base within the
tenured faculty, its programs to be started and ended on the basis of the emerging
educational needs of adult students and its teachers to be primarily untenured faculty on
term appointments. In the context of a very traditional research university, it was a new
collection of concepts and operating rules that aroused understandable concerns and
fears. Worries about resources, about the duplication of existing programs offered by
liberal arts and professional schools and colleges, about academic freedom for the faculty
and about quality assurance for the programs were aired, debated, carefully negotiated,
and painstakingly resolved.
The traditional faculty needed reassurance. They received solemn promises that state
lines would not be devoted to the support of the new school and that the new school
would neither duplicate nor regulate the campus-based or off-campus programs of
existing schools. Flexibility was a fundamental need of the new school, but the
traditional faculty asked that it be balanced with the needs for academic freedom, for a
quality mechanism, and for the involvement of tenured faculty at some level. Questions
about academic freedom were met by the assurance that the new school’s faculty, though
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untenured, would be represented by the AAUP and thus afforded many of the same
protections against arbitrary and capricious action as tenure track faculty. Tenured
faculty members were ensured of involvement in the recruitment, appointment, and
promotion of the new school’s faculty, as well as membership on the school’s Executive
Committee. To meet the requirements for quality assurance, the school planned to follow
the same processes as those used by on-campus units, i.e. formal certification through
accreditation where appropriate, continuous monitoring of course and instructor quality
by faculty peer review, and student evaluation. The new school also planned to use
market research to ensure that its investment in programs was timely, on-target, and costeffective.
With all our bases covered and the Senate Governance Committee on record as accepting
most of the proposed changes – in fact, while the last revisions were in progress, in
January of 2002 - we learned from the state that there would be no additional funding
from which we could draw the set-up costs for the new school. On the contrary, higher
education budgets were being reduced to help meet the state’s current fiscal crisis. The
proposal could not be considered for implementation. It was withdrawn from
consideration as the university plunged into undertaking the necessary cost-cutting steps.
Of course even the longest, hardest campaign has its survivors. Though the grand
scheme of the new school faded away, the division of Continuous Education and
Outreach remained, still managing the innovative partnerships I talked about earlier. It
also supplies support for 30 departments that offer continuing professional education,
much of it through distance learning technology, and it continues to operate a University
Inn and Conference Center with professional development programs.
So we have learned from experience that distance learning is still, to a great extent, a
stepchild regarded with wary eyes and kept in its place at a safe distance from
encroachment on the hallowed halls of traditional academe. However, as often happens,
massive changes in the culture that may not be welcomed with open arms at the front
door cannot be prevented from flowing through the cracks in some form, as pervasive as
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the air we breath. I did all that I could to equip Rutgers to take advantage of those
changes. The greatest single infrastructure investment that we made during my tenure as
president was not a building constructed of bricks and mortar but RUNet, a $100-milliondollar-plus project that wired all three Rutgers campuses for voice, video and data and
connected them, from Newark in the north, through New Brunswick in central Jersey, to
Camden in south Jersey. All this was inspired by the two-year process of strategic
planning that we did in the mid-1990s, when unit after unit made it clear that greatly
expanded broadband capacity was a sine qua non in order to advance to the highest level
of excellence in research, teaching and service. So, while before RUNet, easy instant
access to the full resources of the internet was unevenly distributed, now it is ubiquitous,
available throughout the offices of faculty and residence halls of students. And, as you
are very much aware, students now come to college with a sophisticated understanding of
web technology and its uses.
Naturally, we did more than just wiring the campuses. As the project neared completion,
we proclaimed a Year of the Network and offered funding to departments to create
interactive teaching tools. Twelve departments used the funds to create tools that are not
only in heavy use but are continuously being expanded. For example, a home-grown
web-based teaching platform named Digiclass was built by two undergraduates to assist
French language students in mastering both pronunciation and grammar. It is now used in
all language departments in New Brunswick as well as ROTC and the School of
Management and Labor Relations. I understand that its use grows every year. There are
also a number of commercially developed web programs in use. WebCt is used in more
than 500 courses, permitting posting of material, online quizzes, internal email and
bulletin boards and various means of student-to-student and student-to-instructor
communication. Blackboard, very similar to WebCt, is widely used by the School of
Business and is being considered for adoption by the entire Newark campus. ECollege is
used for all of the online courses supported by the division of Continuous Education and
Outreach. ECompanion, a similar course platform with 24/7 technical support is now
available for on-campus courses. Like most course platforms, ECompanion allows:
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
online presentation of course material to supplement the traditional
classroom;

posting grades, notes, presentations, articles, and handouts online;

inserting text, tables, graphics, and links easily, without HTML;

linking students to Internet resources;

access to an integrated online calendar;

facilitating class discussion and group work outside the classroom with
integrated e-mail, chat, and threaded discussion tools;

online testing; and

online course rosters to which all students with Rutgers email addresses are
automatically added from the Rutgers registrar’s office database.
If we can’t yet say that boundary between online courses and traditional courses has
become completely blurred, we must observe that online interactive tools and even the
passive tools that feature posting instructional materials are making the entire concept of
online learning much less foreign to faculty and students alike. In addition to the course
platforms, many faculty use listserv and online discussions through various sources. The
newest innovation used in Rutgers New Brunswick classes with support from the
Teaching Excellence Center is a wikki, an interactive online text service. An instructor
can post a document such as a student’s essay on a web page and everyone in the class
can visit the site and make notations and comments on the text. This tool was first used
successfully in the English department in the past fall term. Another tool, the web log or
blog is also available. As you know, this is an online running diary. As a teaching tool,
classes can use it to facilitate discussion or have students make comments over the term
and track their own development, with members of the class and the instructor able to
view the document at any time.
None of this is news to you, but in traditional classrooms, it is beginning to transform
instruction at Rutgers, especially in the introductory classes, where, as I mentioned,
twelve departments are using interactive web tools that were developed with the support
of internal grants from the office of my Vice President for Academic Affairs. Those first
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year students are going on with the expectation that similar web-based tools will be
available in advanced instruction—and their instructors are feeling the pressure to
provide that online support.
As you know, online education is frequently presented with demands to prove itself
through outcomes assessment in ways not often required of institutions that rely on the
traditional classroom environment. These demands may actually an advantage in the
continuing effort to provide answers to the concerns of the public and of academe itself
concerning how much trust students, teachers, and employers can have in credits, degrees
and other credentials earned through distance education. Rutgers has made what we
think will be welcomed as a significant contribution to supplying some solid answers
supported by research. We were fortunate at Rutgers to have been awarded a Mellon
Foundation grant to examine cost effective uses of technology in teaching. Professor
Angela O’Donnell of the Graduate School of Education was the principal investigator on
the grant. She has two books forthcoming on the results. One is an edited volume,
Instructional Technology in Higher Education: What Are Students Learning? which is
coming out from Stylus Publishers. The other is The Contribution of Technology to
Learning and Instruction in Higher Education, to be published in England by Kogan Page
Publisher.
The twelve instructional technology initiatives funded by the central administration and
evaluated with the help of the Mellon grant included departments in the humanities,
social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering. Together, the courses involved some
10,000 students. These initiatives were unique in their broad scope and in the systematic
evaluation of student outcomes from the changes in the courses. Experts in learning and
measurement collaborated with experts in the various departments in designing and
implementing the research. The investigators adjusted their evaluation strategies to
differences across departments. At the same time they focused on addressing the central
question: what did the introduction of technology contribute to student learning? The
projects varied in their purposes. To cite just a few examples, the project directors for
Communication and Educational Psychology were especially interested in increasing
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student participation; directors for Music, Biology, and Spanish wanted to provide
practice in skills; directors for Mechanical Engineering, and Genetics were aiming for the
development of new skills; and directors for all of the projects were interested in
increased access to the content of the courses. The researchers also collected information
about a common set of categories:

changes in course delivery,

student use,

students’ attitudes toward technology and the courses,

students’ learning of course content, and

evidence of co-curricular knowledge
Some of the strategies they used for assessment were:

Controlled experiments comparing sections of courses that had access to the new
product with those that did not;

Comparisons to past iterations of the course;

Equating tests from different years;

Withdrawal designs in which the technology was introduced and removed; and

Replication studies.
I won’t put you to sleep by reiterating the results of all twelve projects, but three
examples are especially interesting and encouraging. One acid test of the effectiveness of
web-based learning was a virtual laboratory developed by the Department of Cell
Biology and Neuroscience, which enrolls 1200 first-year students. The use of virtual labs
was voluntary. They demonstrated complex processes with video clips, simulations and
interactive exercises. Processes that take hours in actual labs were presented as quicktime movies. In actual labs, students may be able to conduct an experiment once and
share slides with other group members; in the virtual labs, students had individual,
repeated access. Using the virtual labs was clearly advantageous to students. In
comparison to non-users, virtual lab users improved their performance in the course,
especially the lab practical exam. In fact, virtual lab users improved their performance
not only on items related to its content but other content as well.
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The Instructional Technology Initiative in Genetics is notable for its results in both high
tech and high touch. Two hundred twelve students enrolled in two course sections were
required to complete a research project using online biology tools and software. A
control group of 85 students did not do the research project. A common question was
included in the final exam for both groups of students in order to compare the depth of
their understanding of genetics. There was a significant difference between the two
groups, with 44% of the students in the experimental group scoring full points compared
to only 32%of students in the control group. The personal contact with the teaching
assistant on email was highly valued by the students. In the second semester, an attempt
was made to capitalize on this by making available an automated help system that used
the questions and answers generated in the previous semester.
In the Department of Mathematics, a limited trial of WeBWorK , first developed at the
University of Rochester, showed positive results, in particular for the women in the
course, despite some initial problems in adapting the program to the larger scale of
Rutgers. Women valued the web-based assignment of practice problems and reported
significantly higher confidence than men in their ability to take future math courses. The
department was impressed with the results and has since made WeBWork available to
more than 1000 students. The major problem most often noted in implementation of some
web-enriched courses, including this one, was the high overhead in terms of faculty time
and effort in responding to student contributions. That seems to indicate that high tech
teaching is often, almost inevitably, also high touch, given the ease of asynchronous
communication.
The overwhelming message that can be drawn from my experience as an enthusiastic
advocate of distributed and online learning at the head of a very traditional research
university is, I think, that this Presidents’ Forum organized by Excelsior College is taking
us in precisely the right direction. Its purpose is “to provide both traditional and nontraditional institutions the opportunity to exchange knowledge and perceptions of current
models and tools for successful adaptation to change resulting in the formation of new
partnerships and learning networks.” There has never been a greater need for such
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cooperation among traditional and non-traditional institutions, never a greater role for
both to play in improving teaching methods, meeting the needs of lifelong learners, and
addressing the issues of assessment and quality assurance at the heart of the transfer of
learning. As we draw closer together in our methods of communicating with students
and serving them, we need to learn from one another, sharing our triumphs and our
mistakes. We must build the foundation of mutual trust that is essential as we strive to
change higher education, so that together we can meet the challenges of the diverse, webconnected, technology-rich lifelong learning society of our time.
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