The classroom cradles with some unease the technological wonders of the twenty-first century. The ubiquitous powerpoint lecture, a model of clarity and ease, discourages students from coming to class, as they prefer instead to "get the slides" from other students and, sometimes, their professors, complicit in their passivity. As the inevitable backlash gathers momentum, students complain of being taught in darkened rooms where voices lead them, dispassionately, through an electronic form of their textbook. Tests can be generated, randomly and on-demand, from huge databases, and their results communicated immediately. Evaluations lose their standing as "events," and students are put at ease, but inevitably they lose sight of the fact that not everything in the university, or in their world, can be patterned around their individual schedules.
And, so it goes. Luddite professors complain; cyborg professors complain; students complain. All the while, we try valiantly to pick from amongst the electronic flotsam and jetsam those things that we believe, genuinely, to improve the educational experience. We stagger ahead.
But while huge investments in time and money go into course delivery, service expectations outside the classroom continue to grow. Anyone older than twenty-five remembers when retail patterns were determined by what stores could, and would, hold in inventory. The proliferation of e-commerce has changed this for us all, and it has given rise to a generation of people for whom their every desire is as close as a click and a credit card number.
For the most part, distracted as we have been by the challenges of e-delivery, we have ignored the demands for e-service. There may soon come a day when students can log into a university website and secure everything from class registration through books to tutoring services with their mouse. Undoubtedly, there are some schools that do some or most of this. I am not concerned about technology killing off my beloved "chalk and talk." After all, while iTunes may have changed the way we distribute music, it has not changed the way it is made. Some people would argue that in the age of the internet, the live concert is more vital than it ever was before. But amazon.com lost a fortune before it figured out how, in this brave new world, they could best serve people who just wanted to buy a good, old fashioned book. Are we better off because of their pains? I believe we are, and I do not begrudge them their profits now. I hope they are still making some. But my point is that universities do not have millions or tens of millions of dollars to lose figuring out how to cater to a consumer who does most of her or his business over the internet. I hope we can learn from the mistakes of the e-merchants. I think we will find that marrying technology with the classroom will be less of a challenge than will be transforming the university storefront to match the standards of the internet age.
