CHAPEL HILL -- Globalization, economic restructuring and telecommunications are radically influencing the way we will live and work in the future, and people and educational institutions not keeping up with the changes will be left in the dust.
That's the view of Dr. James Morrison, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education.
"These forces are changing the nature of our work in higher education remarkably and will continue to do that," said Morrison, who specializes in trends likely to affect the future.
Global economic competition and the corresponding need to keep the work force up to date has made education big business, he said. Major universities like Cornell, Columbia, New York University and Temple have started marketing online courses, and that's an indication of how schools are changing in how they view themselves and their mission.
Increasing band width and development of the one gigabyte chip -- a computer chip that can handle eight billion separate bits of information in a single second -- will accelerate use of multi-media presentations and voice input over the Internet and enhance educational interactions even more. Eventually, most books will be available electronically for a small fee.
Morrison made his remarks this week in a talk titled, "A Futurist Looks at Education" at a conference put on by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education at New York's Baruch College in New York.
"No longer will you be able to just get a degree and then go get a job," he said. "Learning has become perpetual, and if you don't learn and know how to continue to learn, you are not going to stay viable in the marketplace."
Traditionally, college degrees have been based on how many hours students have accumulated sitting in classrooms, Morrison said. But now, institutions like Western Governors University, a major virtual university, are breaking with that tradition by becoming competency-based. That means students must demonstrate competency in their fields before they can receive degrees.
"This trend is really going to explode because businesses must employ competent people for jobs, not just people with diplomas," he said. "That may sound like a narrow distinction, but it's not. Corporate and for-profit universities are coming on like gangbusters because their graduates can do what their certificate or degree says they can do."
Professors no longer are chiefly fountains of knowledge as they have been since the Middle Ages. Instead, they are evolving into mentors who use information technology tools to help students learn to access, critically analyze and effectively communicate information.
So far, relatively few faculty members have grasped the potential for incorporating information technology into their instructional work, but younger professors "absolutely must be technologically proficient," Morrison said. "Many are doing PowerPoint presentations or posting their syllabus on the Web, but what we really should be doing is using the technology to enhance education not just through distance learning but also on campus. We need to give professors technical support and release time to learn the technology so they can incorporate it into their work."
Before the Web, professors wrote articles for journals that could have fewer than 1,000 subscribers, he said. Last year alone, 200,000 people visited Morrison's Horizons Web site at HTTP://HORIZON.UNC.EDU , which he maintains as a resource for educational leaders, and much of what he has written for the past eight years appears there.
"The Web allows universities to distribute knowledge in a way that could not be done previously," he said. "It is an amazing tool."
Students of the Nintendo generation are changing too, said Morrison, who remembered spending an entire day as a freshman registering for classes in a hot gymnasium.
"These kids, who are very sophisticated technologically, don't want to do that anymore. They want to sit at their computer and register online in 15 minutes. They want education on their own schedule with 24-hour accessibility, and many of them need it because they are working parttime as well."
Some students are uncomfortable with new demands made on them to work in teams, learn new technologies, communicate electronically and write and rework drafts into publishable papers, the professor said.
"This is a different role for them, one that they're not accustomed to and one that sometimes causes a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth," he said. "To me and to many other people, however, it's exciting because it expands what we can do exponentially."
The half-life of knowledge is decreasing tremendously rapidly, Morrison said. In other words, much information does not remain viable very long.
"The critical questions are how do you get the knowledge, how do you keep it up to date and how do you advance it?"
Note: Morrison can be reached at (919) 962-2517 or at MORRISON@UNC.EDU for more details on how education and universities are likely to change in the future.
Contact: David Williamson, 962-8596.