Freeconomics, Freeware and Productivity Paradox in Higher Education
ByJay HettiarachchyProfessor of Computer Information Systems
Ferris State University
Big Rapids, MI 49307
Abstract:The impact of Moor’s Law that says the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years has resulted in freeware available on the Internet in an unprecedented way. Freeware programs, including Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flicker have globally pervaded social, business, and personal activities—and perhaps education – in powerful and compelling ways. While there are proponents as well as opponents who whole-heartedly embrace or totally shun these new trends, the reality is that the impact of freeware on people today is significant. The presenter will address the issue of “productivity paradox” created by these trends in today’s higher educational institutions.
Introduction:
While computing and processing technology have doubled almost every two years within the past 40 years, humans on the whole have certainly not kept up with this doubling trend -- not in processing power of their brains, not in the speed with which they work with their brains, and certainly not in micro- miniaturization of their physical composition or functions. Whereas these same technological developments and the opportunities that they have provided have enabled business enterprises to grow almost exponentially, as demonstrated by Wal-Mart, Google, Microsoft, Dell, Twitter, and Facebook. There is little doubt that the primary contributing factors for such growth is the potential of the Internet and the falling prices of processing power, storage capacity, and computing infrastructures with enormous communication networks that enable the sustenance and processing of massive amounts of data and information essential for the efficient running of these business operations.
Our primary interest in this paper is education, in particular higher education, where the impact of the Internet , the World Wide Web, and innumerable freeware programs available on the Internet are continuously transforming not only higher education’s superstructure but also the deeper foundations on which higher education has been built by educators for centuries.
A closely integrated function of the education industry is its “productivity” or the ultimate result that students are to gain from going through the educational system. Although there are no set criteria or standard bench markers to identify and/or measure productivity in education, an attempt will be made in this review to at least stimulate educators to conduct classroom research that will promote an understanding of the challenges as well as possible responses that lie ahead for all educators.
Freeconomics, Freemium and Freeware:
“Buy one get one free” is a popular business model that many business enterprises use to attract customers. Another frequent marketing tactic is to give free food samples at supermarkets. Most shoppers like to eat free samples even when they do not intend to buy those products, and even when they do not know whether or not the food samples they happily consume are harmful to their body.
Freemium is a term that has been coined to label a similar business model that offers basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced special features. This business model has gained popularity within the past few years with most start-up companies that offer a variety of services for free on the Web. A few examples of freeware and freemiums available on the Web are Facebook, MySpace, Classmates, Pandora, Flicker, and Skype. The most popular free email servers are Gmail (Google email) and Yahoo. Freeware is on the rise and novel forms of freeware are introduced by entrepreneurs almost daily at a rapid pace. Smilebox.com, lulu.com, hulu.com, housingmaps.com, programmableweb.com, innocentive.com, istockphoto.com, evreryblock.com are a few randomly selected examples available for free.
In addition to being at no cost, these freeware programs are convenient to use and allow multiple ways of interaction among people through the exchange of video clips, notes, text messages, creative writings, etc. In particular, MySpace and Facebook seem to satisfy a basic desire of people to virtually stay connected with many people at the same time. Unlike email, most social networking sites allow subscribers to interact with hundreds of people with whom they can share their stories and interests. This type of freeware apparently helps most people to stay connected with others without having to spend money to exchange ideas. They have the opportunity to express their inner deep feelings to others openly, using many different forms of media, such as Wikis, YouTube video clips, Lulu video clips, creative writings, and photos. It could be as simple as someone posting that s/he is tired today, or s/he had scrambled eggs for breakfast, or s/he would like to stab her eye with a sharp weapon. Ironically, someone can respond to such postings by indicating that s/he is partial to the posting by clicking a “like” button! Apparently, such sharing of video clips and the comments from friends or fans seems to give the senders as well as the receivers a great sense of satisfaction and ownership of the work that they publish on their own walls.
The multimedia-enhanced interactive social networks seem to be capable of providing great satisfaction to the users who are in control of the way they want to entertain themselves. While television is a passive method of entertainment, the satisfaction users receive from social networking seems to be far greater than participating in the one-way entertainment that television provides. Even more importantly, the friends and fans on social networking sites meet in the virtual world of entertainment for free!
With free social networking available, millions of people all over the world are conveniently connected 24/7 without having to communicate via email or expensive phone services. With Gmail freely available, users are able to switch back and forth between Facebook and Twitter; most other forms of email services may be minimally used or discontinued altogether by many Gmail users. Further, social networking services like Facebook seem to provide a “one-stop-shopping service” to busy people, enabling them to check on updates about their friends all over the world by spending a few minutes or as much time as they want. This may be accomplished at their convenience, perhaps while doing other work, when attending a face-to-face class at a university, while listening to a sermon at church on Sunday, or when having a meal with family and friends in a restaurant!
Another attractive feature of the new social networking services is the availability of instant gratification. Facebook users who keep checking their walls have the satisfaction of knowing that their friends have either clicked the “like” button or have written notes on their posts by clicking the “comment” button. To return the favor, the original sender will also be happy to share observations to the responses received. This process seems to go on in an endless cycle -- building relationships with new friends. Obviously, social networking service companies have found a niche by providing a wonderful and innovative opportunity to people who are constantly bored or need continuous stimulation in their lives.
“Farming” and “Mafia Wars” are other features that attract users to free social networking sites. Not only do these game players find immense satisfaction when playing these games, they also seem to take great delight in sharing their successes with fans and friends by publicizing their stories on their Facebook walls. Seeing such successful “farmers,” their friends and fans bestow recognition by clicking the built-in “like” button or by writing short comments without having to learn HTML or XML coding. The success of their “farmer friends” entices others on Facebook to brag about their successes. This activity demonstrates how people are attracted to doing things easily and conveniently while deriving great satisfaction by doing so interactively. Gaming, faming, and warring on these social networks seems to be almost “contagious.” Only time will tell if people will ever get bored doing such things.
“Virtual stalking” is another past-time of social networkers. Social networking has provided an opportunity for fans to interact with the celebrities they admire. Similarly, people who have similar interests tend to gather in social networks. They establish friendships, share photos and videos, and exchange creative writings, and get together in “meet up” groups in restaurants. Sending invitations to friends and fans to join in for lunch or dinner at popular restaurants and publicizing who will be participating in the meet ups, is gaining in popularity.
Cloud Computing:
Doubling of computing power every 18 months since the 1960s has paved the way to “Cloud Computing”, a new model that completely changes how most business enterprises build and run information systems and business applications. Cloud computing essentially relieves business operations from having to build, maintain, and upkeep computing infrastructures, hardware and software platforms, and business applications by outsourcing those services to service providers who provide such services over the Internet – similar to utility companies providing electricity, gas, and water.
Following are a few of the major services that cloud computing service providers perform: 1) provide software as a service (SaaS), 2) provide computing platforms as a service, and 3) provide the entire computing infrastructure as a service. Some of the major players in the cloud computing service industry today are Salesforce.com(CRM), Google(Goog), NetSuit(N), Taleo(TLEO),Concur Technologies(CNQR), Amazon.com(AMZN)-EC2, Mocrosoft(MSFT) –Windows Live,Terremark Worldwide (TMRM) –The Enterprise Cloud, Salesforce.com(CRM)-Force.com,NetSuite(N)-Suiteflex, Mosso – Mosso, a division of Rackspace, Metrisoft-SaaS Platform, International Business Machines (IBM), and SAVVIA (SVVS). These companies charge their customers a subscription fee and in return host software on central servers that are accessed by the end user via the Internet.
Evidently, cloud computing is becoming a more efficient, effective and economic way of managing computing resources throughout the world. In this review, our focus is on how cloud computing impacts on the education industry —in particular higher educational institutions. Although no clear benchmarking standards for gauging productivity/quality in education exist, the current wave of disruptive technology (especially Cloud Computing) will cause a remarkable paradigm shift in higher education in the foreseeable future as outlined in the section below.
Productivity Paradox in Education:
Productivity is a measure of the amount or number of inputs (capital investment, equipment, and labor) required to produce a number or amount of outputs. In the business world “productivity” is a measure of output from a production process, per unit of input. Productivity of labor is measured by the quantity of output per time spent or numbers employed to produce the output. The productivity of labor could, therefore, be measured in terms of dollars per hour.
In researching productivity in education, the ideas expressed by Barry Bosworth are very relevant. The title of his article, “Productivity in Education and the Growing Gap with Service Industries,” reveals that education in the United States is economically lagging behind other service sectors in productivity. Is this a perception problem or is this gap real and widening due to the lack of valid measurement tools that educators should be using to measure productivity? Ironically, educators who are the innovators, researchers, and guardians of most educational disciplines, do not have standardized measures for assessing the progress and productivity of their own trade – the education industry.
To quote from Barry Bosworth’s article, “For example, we can document that many of these improvements [in the service sector] can be traced to the use of information and communication technologies. However, in the general expansion of services, one industry – education stands out as a notable exception. It is an activity that should benefit the most from the new technologies.” He adds, “Yet, the education industry’s own performance appears poor. Costs have been rising steadily, above the rate of wage increases, while labor productivity—in terms of students per teacher – has declined. A surprisingly limited amount of work has been devoted to measuring the output and productivity of education industry (Bosworth, P. 62)
Obviously, measurement of productivity in education is not as simple and as clear cut as in the service sector. Moreover, the perception of productivity of students could be much different from that of the instructors. Likewise, education administrators may have totally different perception of productivity in education. Accrediting agencies will have their own views and measures for productivity.
In the same educational institution, colleges and departments may have radically different ideas, concepts, and perceptions of productivity and quality. This of course, falls under, the rubric of academic freedom that most educators value. The difficult challenges of transferring credits between educational institutions, as well as the challenges faced by some state universities attempting to establish common course numbering systems, serve as examples of the immensity and complexity of the problems associated with establishing a uniform measuring system of productivity at state and national levels. Further complicating the issue of measuring productivity and quality of learning are the variations between private, for-profit, non-profit, land-grant and state-funded educational institutions. However, ignoring the fact that there is no valid and uniform measuring scheme for evaluating the productivity, especially at a time when the impact of disruptive cloud computing technology (Cloud Computing) is so widely felt in the “flat world,” will only make things more difficult for higher educational institutions to keep up with the rapidly changing world of their customers and stakeholders (i.e., the society at large).
More than ten years ago, Richard N. Katz (1999) in his publication “Dancing with the Devil –Information Technology and the New Competition in Higher Education,” wrote “many of the readers of this volume may think that higher education’s relationship with information technology as a dance with the devil…many of us in higher education now wish that we could push the information technology genie back into the bottle, as this technology is raising cultural, organizational, economic, and even survival issues for which the questions greatly outweigh the answers” (p. xiii ).The same author, in a recent publication writes, “I continue to feel as if I am in Wonderland. The life of the mind is, of course, always filled with wonder, and higher education enjoys proximity to two renewable sources of wonder: young people and a mission of discovery. Immersion in higher education IT adds even more to the wonder. I suspect that careers in IT in higher education leave many of us feeling like we have tumbled to a pool of tears, the queen’s croquet grounds, or mad tea party” (Preface, p. xi).
Ironically, the period marked by the digital revolution was also the time when enrollment in universities and colleges started spiraling downwards and college tuition started spiraling upwards. The birth of Western Governors Open University and University of Phoenix began championing the cause of reaching out to under-served populations through online class offerings. While the stakes were high, almost all universities and colleges started following suit competing in this land of opportunity. The sentiments expressed by the author of “Dancing with the Devil” underlines the risks involved in this bold and adventurous journey started by the higher education administrators, information technology(IT) professionals and the early adopters of online education in higher education. Unfortunately, according to Eduventures, a recent survey of 96 institutions indicated that “online programs are generally profitable. But despite the buzz around Web 2.0, the education they provide is still dominated by rudimentary, text-based technology…the underlying delivery model or pedagogical model hasn’t really changed much in the last five, 10 years” (Volume LVI, Number 10, p. A12). This report adds, “the Eduventure survey found that the widely used tools are email, online discussion that don’t happen in real time, physical textbooks, and Word and PDF documents that contrast with what you find on the programs of distance-learning conferences, where the talk is often about Web 2.0 technology that allows students to interact with the content or the provider in tangible ways. Those tools might be social networking platforms or Wikis or virtual worlds; innovation is really on the periphery in terms of the odd synchronous session, or the odd video clip, or the odd simulation” (Volume LVI, Number 10, p. A12). These observations by the very first attempt to bench mark online specific operational activities across a large number of colleges by a consulting firm appear to portray a very poor picture of the productivity of online education by most online programs of universities and colleges during the past 20 years.
Some Concluding Thoughts:
Is the use of social networking freeware programs productive? Do they serve any productive purpose in an instructor-centered classroom? Although most of the social networks, including Facebook, could serve as socializing and communication agents, they may be an obstruction as well as a distraction to real learning in a traditional classroom set up. It does not make good sense for students to live in a residential college or university to take online classes from the same college or university. With no measuring system to assess the quality of instruction between online and face-to-face instructional methods, educators will continue to perform their job not knowing if they are productive or not at the end of the day.
While the secular educational system in the oriental world can be traced back to the Buddhist monasteries as early as the sixth century B.C ., the Western universities and colleges are an outgrowth of medieval European monastic and guild life which later became the strongholds of learning. It took more than thousand years for these universities and colleges to be what they are today: 1) places with majestic buildings where faculty with vast knowledge as well as administrators and support staff live and work, 2) large libraries storing books, magazines and research materials, 3) students in residence halls with access to personalized teaching, the discovery of knowledge, and research, and service to the community.
The United States has the second largest number of higher educational institutions and the largest number of higher educational students in the world. The U.S. Department of Education reports 4,861 colleges and universities with 18,248,128 students in 2007. Unfortunately, the cost of college education has been steadily rising while the enrollment trend has been slowing down. The demand for affordable higher education is on the rise and online education has been selected by most colleges and universities as well as online universities like Western Governor’s University and University of Phoenix as the answer for affordable higher education for reaching out to under-served populations.
This is also a time when digital revolution is transforming the society in an unprecedented way. Today’s college youth have outgrown the television age. Most of them are highly connected to a variety of digital devices even while they are attending on-ground classes. James J. Duderstadt poses the question, “Can Colleges and Universities Survive in the Information Age? “ (EDUCAUSE, 1999, p.1). Will the place-bound, brick-and-mortar colleges and universities survive in the competition for customers in the de-regulated broader open market of cloud computing? The more resourceful universities and private enterprises (yet to be born), including book publishers may be successful competitors in this market.
References:
2. Richard N. Katz and Associates, Dancing with the Devil, Information Technology and the new Competition in Higher Education, A Publication of EDUCAUSE, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco1999.
3. The Tower and The Cloud, Higher education in the Age of Cloud Computing, An EDUCAUSE Publication, 2008.
4. The Chronicle of Higher education, October 30, 2009, Volume LVI, Number 10, p. A12, A12 “Online Education is Mired In Old Technology.”
