TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract Summary The Challenges to Education and Information Technologies The Goals and Approach of Project Delta Target Institutions and Staff The Project Delta Network An Information Distribution and Sharing System The Role of Hub Institutions The Role of Vendors Delta's Substantive Focus and the Role of Disciplines Producing the Delta Units Delta Economics The Phases of Project Delta Phase I (12-24 months) Phase II (24-42 months) Phase III (43-48 months) Recognizing Success After Five years of Project Delta Questions and Answers DISCUSSION DRAFT June 1992 A National Strategy for Helping Faculty Use Information Technologies to Serve the Educational Goals of Colleges and Universities: Introducing Project Delta Steven W. Gilbert Vice President, EDUCOM Stephen C. Ehrmann Chair, EUIT Steering Committee, EDUCOM Program Officer for Interactive Technologies, The Annenberg/CPB Project of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Abstract: Confronted with a new set of educational and economic challenges, colleges and universities today need to wring the maximum benefit from their investments in information technologies -- both current and future. A key barrier has been the difficulty in providing most interested faculty and staff with sufficient opportunities for acquiring and sharing up-to-date information about new applications of these technologies. Removing that barrier would accelerate college and university efforts to use information technologies to help improve the quality, accessibility, and cost-effectiveness of education. Consequently, EDUCOM and the Annenberg/CPB Project of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are investigating the development of Project Delta, a national system for producing, distributing, and sharing the kinds of information that faculty need in order to use technology to improve their academic programs. We have named this initiative after the math-science symbol for change - the Greek letter delta - to reflect our belief that any dramatic improvement in education due to the use of information technology will result from the accumulation of many small improvements in the skills of a large percentage of faculty. This new knowledge and insight will enable them to gradually improve their teaching, the degree programs they offer, and the structure of higher education. The purpose of this essay is to test certain ideas about Project Delta. We state many of its features as though they are certainties, but in fact we need to know which of these propositions you would accept, whether any make you uneasy, and what improvements would strengthen the design. We also welcome suggestions about how to make this draft more readable, since its descendants will become formal proposals. Finally, can you see an effective role for yourself or your institution in Project Delta? A National Strategy for Helping Faculty Use Information Technologies to Serve the Educational Goals of Colleges and Universities Introducing Project Delta June 1992 SUMMARY The major challenges facing institutions of higher education in the coming decade are to improve the quality of education for all students, to increase educational access for a more diverse student body, and to adapt curricula to the changing requirements of the workplace, all while controlling burgeoning costs. Colleges and universities cannot fully exploit information technologies to meet these challenges unless large numbers of their faculty know how to use those technologies to improve academic programs. EDUCOM and the Annenberg/CPB Project at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (the Annenberg/CPB Project) are developing a national strategy for producing, distributing, and sharing the kinds of information that faculty need in order to use technology to make such improvements in education. The Problem: Educators at all levels work in relative isolation, without any organized means of discovering and analyzing innovative educational approaches that are being tried elsewhere. This presents faculty with a choice: spend the time and money to (re)invent the wheel or else do nothing with information technologies. Too often, they choose the latter option, in spite of major changes in the way business and society use such technologies. The Strategy: Project Delta will develop a nationwide information distribution and sharing system to help faculty members take the next step in using information technologies to improve the quality, accessibility and cost-effectiveness of education. Project Delta will include: * an evolving, self-sustaining network of human and telecommunications linkages that can be used to help large numbers of faculty and supporting staff to acquire and exchange information quickly and thoughtfully; * an initial set of resources (including databases, workshops, video and print materials, and moderated conversations) that will foster faculty and program development in selected priority areas; and * procedures by which new such resources can be reviewed for possible distribution or sharing across the Delta network. The Delta Network: The Project will use a combination of: * interactive telecommunications technologies (broadcast fax, video conferencing, audio conferencing, the Internet); * conventional mail delivery of print and video support materials; and * regional and national symposia, workshops and conference sessions. Project Delta was conceived as a natural extension of EDUCOM's mission to facilitate the use of information technology in teaching, learning, scholarship and research. Delta will enlist the cooperation of "hub institutions" and vendors from the information technology industry. Hub institutions will typically be EDUCOM members and will play a leadership role in their regions, with opportunities to host regular conferences and workshops on campus, provide moderators for on-line conferencing, serve as distribution centers for Delta materials, and develop on-line resources for regional and national use. Vendors will be invited to provide exhibits and demonstrations of their products at hub institution conferences, and to help develop and distribute Delta materials. Delta participants will also work with representatives of the information technology industries to help them understand the needs of the academic community -- especially the faculty -- as their companies develop new products. The Substance: Project Delta will serve the needs of a number of disciplines where leading colleges have begun to transform curricula based on applications of information technologies and/or there is a national consensus that far more use of technology is needed in the field. Target fields might include: calculus, composition, electrical engineering, graphic arts, physics, education, statistics, political science, music, literature, and communications. Disciplinary societies will help identify faculty who can then play leading roles in developing Delta resources and services. These societies would later act as additional distribution channels for Delta materials. Project Delta's materials and services will focus on a set of high priority themes that are each crucial to each of the targeted disciplines. Such themes might include: sharing of resources across the Internet; developing skills in using professional hardware and software as tools for thought and action; increasing access to education for diverse learners (e.g., working adults; physically challenged, non-native English speakers); and analyzing ethical issues raised by academic uses of information technology. Many Delta resources and services will be organized along disciplinary lines so that faculty can readily locate and exchange information and expertise with peers. Phases of Development: Delta will unfold in three phases. During Phase I (12-24 months) we will assemble a core of individuals, institutions, corporations and associations to work on the project, and identify funding sources. Areas of initial concentration will be determined through a combination of focus groups and data gathered on faculty access to information technologies and faculty need for support services. Test units will be developed and evaluated. Phase II (24-42 months) will comprise review and revision of initial efforts, and expansion of Delta outreach. Phase III (43-48 months) will concentrate on evaluation and dissemination of findings, and institutionalization of Delta networks on a self-funding basis. Delta by itself cannot improve education. Rather, its goal is to remove some of the barriers to change imposed by the isolation of most faculty. In the long run, however, Project Delta should help bring the day closer when academic leaders recognize that information technology has played a critical role in fundamentally improving the quality, accessibility and cost-effectiveness of their academic programs. A National Strategy for Helping Faculty Use Information Technologies to Serve the Educational Goals of Colleges and Universities Introducing Project Delta June 1992 THE CHALLENGES TO EDUCATION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES The nation's colleges and universities are being challenged to improve the quality of outcomes for all students, to adapt their curricula to the new demands of work and citizenship, and to increase educational access -- for adults, the economically disadvantaged and the physically challenged. And all this must be accomplished while attempting to control costs. In this past decade, higher education has learned that it is not possible to stand still. If a college simply tries to maintain its past ways of doing things in the face of changing economics, changing demands for educated graduates, and an increasingly diverse population of potential students, then its position is likely to deteriorate. For colleges that instead want to move aggressively to adapt their academic programs to meet new opportunities and constraints, information technologies provide important tools. Technology by itself is, of course, not enough. Simply learning how to turn a computer on, how to master the commands of a VCR or new software package, or how to connect to the Internet -- none of these steps will, by themselves, improve retention or modernize a degree program. But colleges can use technologies as elements of programmatic reform, e.g.,: * If all students in a statistics course can use computers, then it becomes possible to incorporate new content and teaching methods. * If much of the dialogue in a course takes place via computer conferencing, then student-faculty dialogue can become more productive1 and performance differences among students with different native languages can be reduced.2 * Colleges that make use of live video, computer conferencing, on-line library services, and other technologies are reaching rural students that were never before within reach of a high quality education.3 The important advances come when technology is no longer an add-on but instead becomes the basis of transformed courses and degree programs. And that can only happen when large numbers of faculty take the lead. 4 However, the typical faculty member finds such tasks of invention impossible since he or she must often work in isolation on this dimension, almost entirely ignorant of what his or her colleagues around the country are trying. The potential benefits of information technologies for higher education will not be achieved so long as each faculty member has to invent his or her own ways to keep up with new techniques for applying technology to education, and so long as the creators and producers of new information technologies have no effective means for introducing faculty to them. A one-shot national faculty development effort is not enough. Steadily advancing information technology enables and requires an unending process of programmatic transformation. Learning what Mathematica5 is, for example, is one task; developing a calculus course that exploits it is quite another. Learning that information is available over the Internet is one thing, but opening that calculus course still further by using the Internet to share data sets is quite another. And using interactive video so that the calculus course can be taught across a network of colleges, schools, corporations and other educational partners calls for new skills, and still further modifications to the curriculum. Meanwhile, the technology advances still further, so dissemination must proceed rather quickly or the information will become obsolete before it has reached large numbers of faculty. Nor should we rely upon an unrelated set of dissemination projects to do the job. That's what we do now, and it means that each effort has to be important enough to warrant spending large amounts of money to develop a specialized network for dissemination to a relatively small number of faculty, a network that is discarded once the effort has run for a year or two. Other than national conferences and seldom-read, one- dimensional print journals, there are few dependable routes to reach the mass of faculty, and even fewer ways to engage them in conversation with one another. However, if such a communications system could be developed, then it could be used for a variety of tasks. An adequate response to this challenge of faculty and program development must therefore be capable of reaching large numbers of faculty in relatively short periods of time, carrying a variety of types of communication on many topics, and involving faculty in a continuing process of information exchange about how they teach their courses and structure their degree programs. THE GOALS AND APPROACH OF PROJECT DELTA The Educational Uses of Information Technology (EUIT) Program of EDUCOM, working in partnership with the Annenberg/CPB Project,6 proposes to develop a national initiative to reduce the isolation of faculty and supporting staff who are interested in exploiting information technologies. The intent of this effort, Project Delta, is to offer them a variety of opportunities for sharing information about advancing information technologies and the improvements in courses and academic programs that they make possible. The goal of Project Delta is to develop a nationwide information distribution and sharing system to help faculty members take the next step in using information technologies to improve the quality, accessibility, and cost-effectiveness of education. Project Delta will include: * an evolving, self-sustaining network of human and telecommunications linkages that can be used to help large numbers of faculty and supporting staff to acquire and exchange information quickly and thoughtfully; * an initial set of resources (including databases, workshops, video and print materials, and moderated conversations) that will foster faculty and program development in selected priority areas; and * procedures by which new such resources can be reviewed for possible distribution or sharing across the Delta network. Project Delta is not solely an effort of EDUCOM and the Annenberg/CPB Project. On the contrary, it will organize and support the efforts of faculty and staff at colleges and universities around the country as they create and share information with one another. Project Delta will extend the principle upon which EDUCOM was founded - collaboration among institutions of higher education to achieve goals that they cannot reach alone, especially in tight economic times. We have named this initiative after the math-science symbol for change - the Greek letter delta - to reflect our belief that major changes in the cost-effective uses of information technologies in higher education depend on the accumulation of many well-focused small changes made by individual faculty members, and because this project is meant to help colleges and universities respond to changes in their operating environments -- changes in what graduates need to be able to do, changes in who needs to learn, and changes in the need to share and stretch resources in tight times. Target Institutions and Staff If Delta is to be cost-effective, its resources must be tailored and targeted. "One size does not fit all." We therefore have made several design choices regarding the types of institutions and faculty for whom the initial rounds of Delta resources will be designed. (Later sections will describe some other choices that have been made, or need to be made, about targeting Delta materials and services.) First, Delta will focus on undergraduate programs in two- and four-year colleges and universities. ("Focus" here and elsewhere in this article does not imply exclusion of other groups. For example, though designed to help improve undergraduate education, Delta will inevitably and properly also have some influence on other levels of education, from graduate instruction through high school. Delta may also have at least one set of units that focus on graduate programs of teacher education.) Second, Delta's initial resources will be tailored for those academic programs whose students have convenient access -- not necessarily from their own desktops -- to at least a minimal level of technology appropriate for their disciplines and circumstances (e.g., word processing and spreadsheets; modem-based telecommunications; VCR; on-line library resources and fax machines for students learning off-campus). We have chosen to focus on this level of access to technology (rather than on institutions that cannot assure even this level of access) for two reasons: a) most of the major educational gains from using technology seem to come when the students have direct, routine access to technology (as opposed to technology as occasional visual aid for lectures or supplement for a class); and b) institutions that are already making significant investments in hardware and software have greater incentive to find ways to get a return on their investment, and are therefore more likely to encourage faculty use of Delta resources. Third, within academic programs offering such access to technology, Delta opportunities will be tailored for faculty and supporting staff who are already interested in using technology. We assume that faculty in most academic departments within our target institutions are likely to fall in one of four groups: 1) the technophiles, 2) the technophobes, 3) the large number of faculty who would use the technology more if they had the needed skills and materials, and 4) a fourth group of faculty, currently completely uncaring about technology, who might exploit it if they saw group three using it successfully. Initial Delta opportunities will be crafted primarily for group #3.7 If they can be effectively mobilized to work with current enthusiasts, in their own departments and elsewhere, then departments are likely to attain the critical mass of active faculty needed to make major improvements at the course and program level. Fourth, Delta will take advantage of computer telecommunications networks such as the Internet. Institutional Internet connections will be not be required but participants will certainly find Delta more rewarding if they can obtain Internet connections either through their institutions or by personal accounts. The Project Delta Network: An Information Distribution and Sharing System There is no one best way to reach and interconnect faculty and the staff who would work with them. The Project Delta Network will therefore combine three types of communications media: 1. Interactive telecommunications capabilities that reach into the offices and homes of faculty and staff, so that they can ask questions, obtain materials, and share information. These capabilities include broadcast fax, video conferencing, audio conferencing, and, of course, the Internet. The recent growth of on-line forums for active interest groups within academic disciplines suggests an important role for the Internet and its successors in building peer communications and support groups for faculty; 2. Direct mail delivery of print and video materials that illustrate new technologies and techniques, especially materials intended to assist local support staff in their work with faculty. 3. Frequent, numerous regional conferences as well as a smaller number of workshops and sessions at existing national conferences. Face-to-face participation has a special power for fostering commitment and teaching complex skills. Regional meetings are central to DeltaUs strategy because such meetings can be both more intimate and less expensive for participants in times when travel money is hard to come by. The Importance of Intermediate Agents: A substantial fraction of faculty will not be reached directly by any of these three media; instead Delta will first reach an intermediate agent: * a staff member in a department that provides technology-based services (e.g., in academic computing, libraries, or distance education), * a staff member in a faculty development office, * another faculty member within the same academic department who has formal responsibilities for information technology, * an academic administrator (e.g., department head; academic dean), or * another faculty member who tends to be a leader and "gatekeeper"8 to the outside world. Materials and media will be developed with an effort to meet the differing needs of these groups, recognizing the particular importance of these various intermediate agents -- they can often supply the selective, tailored, one-on-one help that seems most often to be the way that most faculty learn about educational and technological innovations. Formats of Delta Resources: The typical Delta unit would combine a number of different formats. Consider a Delta unit on helping faculty exploit widely available information technologies (word processing, e- mail, selected video) in order to teach composition. The core of the unit might be: * text materials including specific guidelines and suggestions for classroom activities and microcomputer laboratory assignments, as well as annotated lists of relevant computer and video software; and * a videocassette of clips from exemplary classes, including critical analyses of each video clip by several different faculty. These materials would be marketed directly to faculty and shipped by traditional mail service, and would also be distributed directly to participants at workshops on this topic held at regional meetings and relevant national conferences (e.g., EDUCOM, composition, distance learning). In order to multiply the number of such workshops held around the country, "train the trainer" sessions would also be offered at national conferences and at selected regional meetings, with the expectation that participants would in turn run workshops on their own campuses using the same materials. A national on-line discussion and related database would be open only to those who had used these materials. Participants would also be informed of other relevant on-line discussions already underway. The Role of Hub Institutions Regional meetings will typically be held at EDUCOM colleges and universities that have chosen to become Delta hub institutions. Hub institutions will play a leadership role in their regions, hosting regular conferences and workshops on campus, providing moderators for extended conversations on-line, serving as centers for the distribution of Delta materials, and developing selected on-line resources for regional and national use. In some instances, a hub institution with a strength in a particular discipline would join with the professional society representing that discipline to lead the effort in providing Delta resources in that field. Perhaps most important, Delta leaders at hub institutions will be responsible for follow-up activities after local meetings to maintain continuity in sharing ideas and information among faculty and support personnel in their regions. Project Delta would provide a variety of kinds of support and reinforcement to hub institutions, beyond the benefits gained from the ease of local faculty taking part in the workshops and vendor area, including publicity and assistance in fund-raising for hub institution expenses associated with Delta. The Role of Vendors Vendors would be invited to provide exhibits and demonstrations of the applications of their products at the conferences at hub institutions. Although Delta's initial emphasis will be on helping faculty use technology that their institutions already have, no institution can afford to stand still as technology progresses around it. These exhibits, and the availability of information and consultation on-line, should be of substantial help to faculty and departments seeking to keep up with the latest developments. We will include vendor representatives in the planning of the Delta materials and services not only because we value their perspectives, but also because we hope that some of the Delta products will be distributed in part by vendors' own field staffs. For example, textbook publishers have become increasingly actively involved with EDUCOM and EUIT activities, and many of them already have a system for routinely delivering information and materials directly to faculty members. We will also work with representatives from companies from the information technology industries to ensure that, as their firms develop new products for professional uses, their instructional applications are also considered, and so that the companies can improve the educational value of existing products through feedback from faculty and students. This continuing collaboration should widen the opportunities that vendors have already found at EDUCOM's Annual Conference and the EUIT annual Snowmass meeting to learn about trends, values, and current events in academe that can be valuable in the development and marketing of products and services. Delta's Substantive Focus and the Role of Disciplines Delta's core materials and services will focus on the intersection of selected disciplinary areas and selected thematic priorities. Disciplinary Priorities: One of the next steps in the planning process is to identify those academic disciplines or fields where some academic programs have used information technologies in ways that have changed the substance, quality, and learning strategies in their courses, and/or where the perceived need to do so is greatest, e.g., fields such as statistics, composition, engineering, graphic arts, physics, education, calculus, political science, music, chemistry, and communications. Delta will begin by picking around seven such fields and, within each field, targeting several key courses. Thematic priorities: At the same time we need to identify those substantive areas where faculty, their departments, and their colleges are most likely to get the greatest return for their investment of time and effort in using Delta services. Delta's thematic priorities must be relatively insensitive to changes and variations in hardware and software from institution to institution, and year to year. It may be several years before videotapes reach their final round of users, for example; they must retain full value over that interval. Similarly, materials will be used across institutions with a variety of installed bases; nonetheless the materials must be equally valuable at all target institutions. By focusing on particular thematic priorities that are important to many disciplines, Delta can control the costs of developing disciplinary units (since in many ways a unit on networked resources in physics, for example, will be similar to one on networking in teacher education). Examples of possible thematic priorities: * curricular exploitation of commonly available, affordable tools (similar to those) used by professionals, * ethical issues raised by student use of information technologies, * uses of information technologies that reduce the disability- related problems that would otherwise be faced by members of a diverse population of learners (e.g. physical disabilities, learning disabilities, disabilities arising from being a non- native speaker of English, disabilities arising from learning styles) * sharing of resources across the Internet * techniques for teaching and assessment in courses where students and faculty communicate via video and computer networks, * strategies for evaluating current technology applications and using that data to plan the next generation of work in a college or university. Early Delta units will lie at the intersection of a target discipline and one or more thematic priorities. For example, Delta might develop a unit designed to foster exchange among teacher education faculty about how to develop and offer continuing education programs "at a distance" for working teachers. Another unit might help physics faculty share information on databases and remote machines available over the Internet as part of the effort to bring the introductory physics curricula "into the 20th century." Still another unit might be aimed at the modernization of the calculus course. Delta resources and services will be organized or indexed along disciplinary lines, so that faculty teaching particular courses or re- conceiving certain lines of study can most readily exchange help with peers in their region and across the country. Project Delta will ask relevant disciplinary associations to help identify faculty who can then take part in the development of initial Delta resources and services. Delta products and services would then also be offered through appropriate disciplinary channels, in addition to being available through Delta's own media. To the greatest extent possible, Delta will attempt to bring leaders in the disciplinary societies into the leadership of Delta. Producing the Delta Units Some of Delta's initial media and formats may be tested with existing materials and existing meetings: * e.g. materials from EUIT's Higher Education Software Awards Program, Joe B. Wyatt Challenge, Project EASI, and Valuable Viable Software Project; from CPB's New Pathways program; Cornell's learning technologies program; and programs of the Institute for Academic Technology; * e.g., at conferences sponsored by regional associations such as C- CUE and NERComP, at regional disciplinary society meetings, and at existing national conferences. EDUCOM and the Annenberg/CPB Project will not develop the Delta networks or units on their own or in isolation. In the summer and fall of 1992 we will sponsor a number of focus groups, involving faculty and staff representing Delta's target audiences (including intermediate agents) who will react to the design of Delta and suggest foci for its units. From then on, Delta's work will be shaped by empirical inquiry, including surveys, focus groups and observations about which types of resources are most used. We will also soon convene an informal group of advisors, representing EDUCOM, EUIT, the Annenberg/CPB Project, the initial participating disciplinary groups, the first hub institutions, and initial vendor participants. A more formal advisory council will be created later, with responsibility for annually reviewing, suggesting changes to, and approving Delta Unit guidelines and criteria. These guidelines will point to priority areas for coming years, and suggest how to develop Delta resources that are appropriate to audience, academic discipline, themes, and delivery media. From year to year, the scope and specific emphases within these areas will shift to reflect changing perceptions of the needs and resources of Delta participants. The guidelines and criteria will be used as the basis for an annual process of soliciting and judging proposals. The annual guidelines will function in part as a Request for Proposals, encouraging the development of new materials to become Delta Units. The guidelines will also help the producers or publishers of existing materials understand how their products can become designated as Delta Units and be eligible for distribution through the Delta Network. The criteria will favor proposals from participating institutions and vendors. As major funding is obtained, Project Delta will support the development of units in areas covered by the terms of those grants. Delta Economics At this writing, this section includes the largest number of unanswered questions influencing the basic design of Delta. We want the Delta networks to be self-sustaining and capable of growth, but we need to figure out how to accomplish that. What combination of fees, dues, and pricing for materials is likely to cover the expenses of maintaining and expanding the networks? What role should grants play in creating and expanding the Delta networks (we already have decided that grants will play a principal role in developing many of Delta's units, especially in early phases of its growth). Should we develop a grant proposal aimed at starting the Delta networks, at expanding them after testing them at on small scale with EDUCOM and Annenberg/CPB resources? Or should the proposals be aimed simply at the development of units, with a share of the money paying for use of the networks? We assume that the hub institutions will charge for events held on their campuses, but what should be the financial relationship between hub institutions and Delta Central? Does Delta Central pay the hub institutions to run the meetings? Do the hub institutions pay Delta Central for materials needed to run their events? Should they share with Delta Central a portion of the registration fees collected? Should materials distributed electronically be sold (e.g., by subscription or by item), or given away? Given all these assumptions, what kind of budget will be required to give Delta a start? to operate it as it grows? We would like to hear your thoughts about each of these questions. THE PHASES OF PROJECT DELTA Phase I (12-24 months) Begin to build a core of individuals and hub institutions committed to participating in the development and extension of Project Delta (e.g., Cornell region, central New Jersey, Washington DC region, Pittsburgh region, Cincinnati region, North Carolina region, New Orleans region, San Antonio region, California State University System). These institutions and individuals help shape and start the Delta networks. Refine target disciplinary areas, thematic priorities, and media options for distribution and information sharing; test them with focus groups. Begin to develop partnerships with selected disciplinary associations and vendors; develop advisory structures involving these groups, hub institutions, and others. Gather data on faculty access to and responsiveness to media (electronic mail, fax, video, US mail, campus and regional events, etc.). Seek major funding for acceleration of Delta's development. Test Delta units (e.g., workshop designs already developed for other purposes; structures for on-line information sharing) and experiment with their use in * local and regional events (some aimed at faculty, some aimed at "trainers", some inviting the participation of disciplinary societies and vendors), * disciplinary society events, * moderated on-line discussions focusing on the use of information technologies in selected disciplines. Phase II (24-42 months) Based on phase I experience, increase the number of Delta hubs and Delta units to perhaps fifteen hub institutions and ten Delta units. By this time, each hub institution would host at least two conferences a year, with each conference including a variety of Delta workshops plus a vendor area. In Delta's third year at least six thousand faculty should make personal use of its resources. Increase and enhance the participation of disciplinary societies by offering a special track for their representatives at the EDUCOM Annual Conference. Evaluate and review results and progress. Revise the program again, focusing especially on adjustments needed to accommodate still larger numbers of participants. Phase III (43-48 months) Evaluate results and progress and disseminate conclusions. Institutionalize the Delta networks (i.e., continue them on a self-funding basis through some combination of fees from the providers of units, plus fees and/or dues from institutions and/or individual users). RECOGNIZING SUCCESS: AFTER FIVE YEARS OF PROJECT DELTA The following milestones are offered to clarify the intentions of Project Delta and elicit comments and suggestions. By being specific and ambitious in these draft statements, we hope to provoke you to give us some feedback on the feasibility and desirability of objectives such as these: * At least 50% of the faculty in at least 75% of all colleges and universities have easy access to the materials and activities of Project Delta -- and are aware that they do. * At their annual meetings, at least 50% of all disciplinary societies include sessions directly focused on the role of information technologies in the teaching in their field. * At least half of all disciplinary societies sponsor their own continuing on-line conferences focused on the uses of information technologies in teaching within their field. Delta by itself cannot improve education. It simply aims to remove the barriers to change posed by faculty isolation and ignorance. In the long run, Project Delta will have succeeded when most academic leaders in higher education believe, at the very least, that their ability to exploit modern information technology is no longer blocked by the inability of their faculty and supporting staff to lead the way. We hope that by then they also believe that information technology has become a critical component in fundamental improvements in the quality, accessibility and cost-effectiveness of their academic programs. By making higher education a more "rational" and attractive market to the information industries, Delta should also stimulate the development of more successful information technology products and services aimed in whole or in part at higher education. Finally, we hope that the activities of Project Delta will stimulate and advance the debate about the nature and financing of the infrastructure needed for distributing and sharing information about the application of new information technologies in higher education. Who should develop such structures and resources, and how should they be paid for? Is there a significant role for federal and state governments? Such systems will be needed as long as new technologies emerge, as long as creative faculty members find new ways to use them, and as long as most colleges and universities cannot provide these services independently. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Q. Why is Delta focused on information technology and not on all types of instructional innovation? A. In an ideal world Delta would cover all forms of instructional improvement, but in an era of tight resources, Delta is focusing on units that are time sensitive and have a great deal of leverage for instructional improvement -- units involving the application of information technology to challenges of educational improvement. Q. (Your question here) ________ REFERENCES 1990 Ehrmann, Stephen C., "Reaching Students, Reaching Resources: Using Technologies to Open the College," Academic Computing, IV:7, (April), 10-14, 32-34. 1992 Ehrmann, Stephen C., "Challenging the Ideal of Campus-Bound Education," EDUCOM Review, XXVII:2, March/April, pp.22-26. 1988 Hiltz, Starr Roxanne, "Learning in a Virtual Classroom" (Executive Summary volumes), Research Report #25 and 26, Computerized Conferencing and Communications Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology. 1 Ehrmann, 1990. 2 Hiltz, 1988. 3 Ehrmann, 1992. 4 Faculty isolation is not the only barrier to exploitation of technology or to improvement , of course. Higher education will not improve, even if Delta is successful in reaching its immediate objectives, if other steps are not also taken. For example, in many institutions the faculty reward systems for promotion and tenure must be modified to enable and encourage faculty to spend the needed time to adapt their academic programs to changing times. That's as necessary for innovations that do not require information technology as for those that do. Delta may help to spread the word about progress in redefining beliefs about the nature of "scholarship," shifts in policies governing faculty rewards, and changes in the definition of faculty "workload," but achieving such changes is not an explicit objective of Project Delta. 5 One of the most widely used mathematical symbolic processing and display software packages. 6 Future versions of this document will append material about EDUCOM, EUIT, and the Annenberg/CPB Project of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). 7 We expect group #1 to be heavily represented as important intermediaries (and "gatekeepers") as part of the Delta Network. See "The Importance of Intermediate Agents" below. 8 A "gatekeeper" is a person in a formal or informal community who is comparatively heavily linked to outside sources of information. He or she then selectively passes along some of that information to colleagues within the community. As a result, most people in any organization get most of their information from colleagues who are gatekeepers, rather than directly from outside. The term was coined because this practice places considerable power in the hands of the gatekeepers about which information reaches their colleagues, and which does not.