Common Sense, Traditional Structures and Higher Education: Reengineering as Fundamental Inquiry

Reform movements in higher education have employed technology primarily to mimic standard mechanisms, representations and objects of higher education. While there are important reasons to make use of standard representations, this strategy often reproduces standard artifacts of higher education, which limits innovation and reform. For example, too often reengineering has focused on the bottom line and on things at the university that look like business processes. If there is to be fundamental reform, we must rethink the core processes of the university, namely, teaching, learning, and research. We must understand how to respond to the penetration of technology into infrastructure and how to reward faculty for responding to the opportunities and needs produced by this penetration. Distance learning, because of its inherently asynchronous nature, provides a useful vehicle for such innovation. Once we no longer assume that asynchronous models are weaker than campus models, we can start to reengineer standard classroom practice accordingly. We argue that for reengineering to succeed, we must question common sense beliefs about teaching and learning. This program of reengineering will result in reform and change in higher education that will be neither additive nor subtractive, but transformative.