Steve Reilly, professor of biological sciences, is calling for Ohio University to increase its full-time faculty to match enrollments. Given how universities have long delivered education, his call is not unreasonable. However, it may be time for OU, and all universities for that matter, to rethink their model of delivery when it comes to undergraduate education in particular. A recent book titled What Would Google Do? suggests that the answer to that question may not be long in coming.
The reality is that knowledge as we know it and as it is taught in many classrooms, especially at the freshmen and sophomore levels, is basically a commodity. That in and of itself would not necessarily be a problem if it were not so readily available from a variety of sources including many university Web sites largely free of charge.
It may be time for OU to recognize that mere transmission of knowledge (information) from a sender (faculty member) to a receiver (student) can possibly be accomplished with more consistency and at a considerably lower cost through multimedia. Then face to face meetings between faculty and students could be redesigned to add real value to the education process. Faculty as a resource could then be far more productive in terms of student credit hours. Their experience with students could be far more rewarding than simply largely standing in a classroom and lecturing.
Professor Reilly correctly sees that the number of faculty constitutes a constraint given our present model. The key is finding a way to increase our throughput (total number of students) without proportionately increasing the totality of our resources to service them. A judicious use of technology can do that while at the same time possibly adding considerably to the quality of our outcomes.
We have witnessed how advances in IT and communication technology have disrupted entire industries, not the least of which have been the newspaper and magazine industries. It may be time to think of using faculty-students engagements in terms of knowledge application and creation and to leave simple knowledge transmission to technology.
John Keifer is the director of OU's Center For Business Education & Development.
4 Opinion
Letter to the Editor
