Pandora visits the classroom

By Kenneth C. Green

You don't have to be a literature major to appreciate the value of great myths as good metaphors. Indeed, many in the campus community--be they faculty, campus administrators or tech personnel--who are involved with information technology initiatives understand the real value of myth as metaphor.

For example, there is Sisyphus. For many of us, his rock is now digital. We share his burden and feel the pain of his daily efforts to push the boulder up the hill, hoping to make forward progress.

Icarus, of course can be interpreted as a cautionary tale about a system meltdown, the consequence of living on the leading/bleeding edge of technology.

And regardless of one's political or economic persuasions, many in the campus community may think of "Greeks bearing gifts" when they consider the efforts of tech-industry executives to promote the use of information technology across all facets of campus operations and activities.

I'll confess that I am a bit taken with Pandora these days. In the traditional telling, Pandora opens a box that unleashes all the ills of mankind; the saving grace is that the box also contains hope.

My candidate for the Pandora's box in the classroom is course management software (CMS), sometimes called learning management software (LMS). Companies that provide these products to the campus community include Blackboard, eCollege, Prometheus (recently acquired by Blackboard), and WebCT, among others. Tinker with the traditional story line a bit, and the Pandora theme may apply to the growing presence of CMS products in the classroom.

For example, data from 2001 The Campus Computing Survey (www.campuscomputing.net) indicate, that perhaps one-fifth to one-fourth of college classes currently use a CMS as an instructional/learning resource. The survey also reveals that, by sector, roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of campuses across the country have established a single product standard for a course management system.

My slight tinkering with the Pandora story for CMS involves the following change: Rather than unleashing lots of evil and the prospect of hope, I see CMS as offering lots of benefits; however, I also see a few major problems.

As promoted by advocates, a CMS can provide a viable bridge from classroom to Web, facilitating faculty efforts to extend and to integrate the classroom experience with resources from cyberspace. CMS products also claim they are "easy to use," compared to the effort involved using HTML (a Web programming language) to achieve the same outcome.

Then there are the problems, potentially major problems. First, although CMS products may provide a comparatively easy way to get course resources onto the Web, they still require user support, sometimes significant user support. We learned this lesson with the arrival of "user friendly DOS" on the first IBM PCs two decades ago.

Second, once you use a CMS, it is all too easy to become dependent on it. Much like e-mail and word processing, the CMS is slowly becoming the third "core application" for many faculty and students. Once you use it, you may never go back to working the "other way."

Finally, CMS products cost money. To date, the licensing costs have been comparatively modest. But the licensing agreements are changing. As documented in the Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere, both Blackboard and WebCT, the current market leaders, have recently released enhanced products that involve significantly increased licensing fees.

So while CMS products may offer great benefits, they also involve hidden as well as rising costs.

Technology advocates and antagonists offer dramatically different perspectives on these products. The advocates claim that used effectively, a CMS can be an important and beneficial supplement to the classroom experience. Antagonists (and campus conspiracy theorists) argue that these products will eventually be used to supplant the traditional role of the instructor in the learning experience. In their worst moments, the debate between advocates and antagonists sounds like the old Miller Lite commercials: Supplement. Supplant. Supplement! Supplant!

Having opened the Pandora's box of CMS in our classrooms, we now confront some important policy choices. First, we need to view CMS costs in the broader context of the campus investment in information technology resources. Some on campus will argue that the rising CMS licensing fees, timed just as campus deployment has hit critical numbers, are part of a well-planned corporate conspiracy: Create dependency and then raise prices. But the quest for conspiracy theories appears to be just that--a hollow quest. The new generation of CMS products is more sophisticated: stated simply, they do more--and, ones hopes, do more better and with greater ease than the earlier products. Consequently, it is not surprising that the companies that produce these products would increase prices to cover their rising development and support costs.

There is also a second, much broader issue here, one that involves the appropriate role of the CMS in the curriculum and as part of the larger institutional efforts to use technology resources in instruction and learning. This is more important than the "Supplement/Supplant" argument among advocates and antagonists. Too, this is a debate that will continue for a long time, on campuses and at academic conferences. It is a debate about the education community's long-held, very great aspirations for the role of technology in teaching and learning. It is a debate about the inherent tensions between education's "high touch" traditions and education's "high-tech" opportunities. And like the traditional version of the Pandora story, this is also a continuing discussion about hope.