President's Message: Facing the Future
The duties of an ICA president are not really very onerous. Once the task of organizing the annual conference is accomplished, and the gavel is ritually handed over - and then quickly removed back to storage, lest the incumbent president actually try to use it - the rest is relatively smooth sailing, especially with the guidance of our skillful pilot, Michael Haley. In fact, the primary obligation of the president, absent an unanticipated crisis - and I have thankfully been spared many of these - is to write a regular column for the Newsletter. As I approach the writing of my final column I can confess that this has been a welcome chore, as it has allowed me to reflect on the current and future state of our common enterprise.
In some of my columns I have touched on familiar challenges and crises faced by the academic world and by communication scholars in particular. The shortage of secure long-term [aka tenure track] jobs for our doctoral graduates; the overly narrow and often scientistic assessment of program and individual accomplishment; the explosion of new forms of publishing that threaten to debase the common currency of the academic enterprise; the lack of institutional support and appreciation for teaching and scholarship that directly engages societal concerns - these are all familiar and real threats that must be acknowledged and responded to.
But there are also some other, less familiar challenges that we should confront, and that may require us to fashion new bottles in which to store our valuable vintage.
Let me start with an analogy. Not too long ago the profession of journalism, one of the essential pillars of democracy and a central province of the empire of communications, proudly asserted its independence from the grubby realm of the commercial, business side of its institutional edifice. There was, we were frequently told, a wall that separated the editorial from the business function, and journalists were admonished not to worry, or even think about the mundane details of how their work was paid for, lest their objectivity be contaminated. That was the official story, at any rate.
At the same time, the newspaper that was plopped on our doorsteps each morning was a bundle of sections focused on a variety of topics and interests. Like many subscribers, I assume, my first move after bringing in the morning papers has been to sift thru the bundle and toss a large portion into the recycling bin. The business model of the time, one that many no doubt thought was timeless and permanent, attracted sponsors that paid most of the costs of production - reporting, writing, editing, printing, distributing - in the hope that the right readers would see, read, remember, and ultimately be influenced by the ads. As we all know, this business model was unable to withstand the competition from new technologies that pulled the ground out from under their feet. To cite one important example, when Craigslist began putting classified ads online one of the single largest sources of revenue dried up almost overnight.
Much the same sort of fate has befallen most branches of what we now call Legacy Journalism, as the digital revolution upended established practices and undermined established business models. Creative destruction, perhaps, but nonetheless destructive to many institutions and careers. Our colleagues in schools of journalism have been faced by the challenge of preparing students for a world that few of their faculty comprehend. At the same time, it is more important than ever that those who train journalism students for these new realities not lose sight of the central mission of journalism: information in the public interest. As usual, everything new isn't necessarily good and everything good isn't necessarily new.
So what does this excursion into the state of journalism and journalism education have to do with those of us who are comfortable situated on the "scholarly" side of the academic house, for whom the upheavals besetting the "professional" side offer a fascinating set of research opportunities? Well, let me suggest a scenario to contemplate.
Suppose your students had the choice of attending lectures by your colleagues - all of whom, I trust, are engaging and inspiring teachers - or enrolling in courses taught online by some of the best lecturers to be found anywhere in the world? Those of us lucky enough to be ensconced in elite institutions - those that can boast of rejecting most of the applicants to their school - might be confident that their students would choose to sit in a large classroom and absorb the wisdom of the eminent faculty who teach their introductory courses. But, looking across the range of institutions and instructors in most parts of the world, wouldn't it be more likely that students would prefer to enroll in the online courses taught by "world class" teachers? Is it possible that the emerging availability of online instruction will turn many faculty members into de facto teaching assistants whose role will be to supplement, explain and expand on the lectures offered by a new class of online "super teachers"?
Far-fetched? Perhaps. But consider the recent experience of Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun. Last Fall Thrun sent out an email announcing a free online class, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence [ https://www.ai-class.com/], offered in parallel with his live Stanford class, that would have quizzes and grades, and a "certificate" for those who were successful. Ultimately, the class enrolled 160,000 students, from countries around the world. Thrun created a website able to handle the scale and demands of the course, and he found that many of the best performers in the class were among the remote cohort, not those sitting in his Stanford classroom. In fact, of the 248 students achieving perfect scores on all of the assessments, every one was remotely enrolled. What lesson did Thrun take from this wildly successful experiment? He's left Stanford - giving up tenure at Stanford isn't a frequent career move - and established a new online university called Udacity [http://www.udacity.com/], and proposes to offer free classes - such as "Building a Search Engine" - to as many as 500,000 students.
Now, I am certainly not proposing that communication faculty emulate Thrun and emigrate en mass to the internet, although I trust that some will. And, I am certainly aware that experiments like this require funding, even if I have no idea how Thrun's enterprise is paid for - it probably doesn't hurt that he remains a key researcher at Google, responsible for their driverless car program. But the model is there, and it's not alone. MIT has been offering online versions of many of its courses, A group of investors and academics have announced a new "elite" institution, Minerva, that will operate online, recruiting "distinguished teachers among great research faculty," who will team up with crews to videotape lectures and craft innovative courses when they are not teaching at their home institutions [http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-for-profit-seeks-to-satisfy-global-demand-for-elite-education/35938].
Even more recently, a new online education company, Coursera, founded by Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, announced official partnerships with Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan and Stanford. These elite institutions will use Coursera's technology to offer a mix of free online non-credit classes including computer science, business, and literature. The Coursera courses may enroll thousands of students completing exams and assigned work that will be graded, either by intelligent software or by their peers. It is not difficult to see how these ventures will be able to "monetize" themselves, given their capacity to connect advertisers with highly desirable potential viewers of their ads.
What does this mean for communication programs, in the United States or elsewhere? Will the university as we've known it become "unbundled" as students consume higher education in pieces? Is it time for the "University Without Walls" to replace the groves of academe? No one has a crystal ball and predicting the future has rarely been more challenging. But it is certain that the tides of change wrought by the digital revolution are lapping at the threshold of the ivory tower. And communication scholars should be among the first to recognize and embrace the possibilities these new technologies afford. After all, this is our territory and we should not limit ourselves to the roles of observer, chronicler, analyst, and theorist of the digital age, although all of these are important contributions that we can and should make as scholars of communication. We owe it to our field, our institutions, our students, and ourselves, to be among the pioneers exploring and developing the new world unfolding around us.