Review by: Zellweger, Franziska (2004-08-30)

Sarah Guri-Rosenblit is currently a faculty of education and psychology at the Open University in Israel. She is an expert in comparative higher education, distance education and widely familiar with many higher education systems world wide. In particular she studied the development of the American higher education system during her doctoral studies at Stanford and her affiliation with the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkley from which the discussed paper resulted.

Her paper examines eight inherent and highly interrelated paradoxes and dilemmas in the implementation process of the ICT in various higher education settings worldwide, which are essential to be understood by policy makers at institutional and national levels of higher education systems. In particular these paradoxes should be considered in the process of planning a macro-level comprehensive strategy for the efficient and effective applications of the new ICT.

One of her main claims is that the premises and the rhetoric of e-learning so far didn’t translate into practice. The actual state of e-learning in higher education institutions (HEI) is far from what was envisioned by many authors. Guri-Rosenblit describes the reasons for this fact by proposing different paradoxes accompanying the implementation of e-learning in HEI.

She starts out by questioning why research universities don’t make better use of their well developed ICT infrastructure for distance learning. The reasoning seems to culminate in the fact, that those institutions have no interest in widening the access to the institution to a wider audience.

Related to this is the fact that “traditional” distance learning programs tended to replace face to face contact where as today’s e-learning applications are far more complex but predominately applied for enhancing face to face formats of teaching and learning. Many learners seem to prefer direct contact to the professors.

As a result, e-learning doesn’t seem to realize economies of scale as successfully as the traditional industrial mode of distance learning does. Reasons lie in the communication intensity of e-learning models for advising students, which require enormous amounts of resources.

Not surprisingly having this situation Guri-Rosenblit suggests that it is unclear what problems e-learning is actually supposed to solve and she observed much resistance formed at traditional universities.

Interestingly the new clientele for distance learning seem to be the same people as before where second chance and under prepared students represent a larger fraction. But exactly these people lack the access to the internet and the skills to cope with new technologies. Due to the student’s lack of competence and access to the technology traditional distance learning providers are slow with integrating webbased courses.

In addition one has to be aware that with the Internet access to information is alleviated but it still needs a teacher who helps students to transform this information into relevant knowledge, which means that students can only profit from the Internet with appropriate assistance.

Guri-Rosenblit concludes that according to her opinion the new technologies are not likely to endanger the existence of the campus universities, but rather enrich, support and enhance many of their activities. Furthermore she emphasizes that many studies in the field of the ICT implementation stress that time has come for both governments and institutions to become more focused and strategic in their policies regarding the use of the new technologies

The paper rises some very concrete and relevant points on the current development of e-learning and distance learning and helps to better understand the complex mechanisms of the system. Unfortunately Guri-Rosenblit doesn’t connect the paradoxical points, which are often highly interrelated, well enough for the reader to see a clear red thread. In addition, the concluding remarks aren’t as concrete and powerful as the problems she identifies.