Services to Remote Users: Marketing the Library's Role - academic libraries can benefit from distance learning via computer - Abstract

Library Trends, Summer, 1998 by Ann Wolpert

ABSTRACT

Distance leaning is an emerging educational market of compelling interest to higher education. Driven by economics and enabled by innovations in educational technology, this new market presents significant marketing challenges to academic libraries. Libraries should approach support to distance education as a new business opportunity, utilizing techniques of market evaluation and analysis. Close alignment with faculty and administrators, together with meaningful performance measures, can position academic libraries to provide appropriate educational support while improving awareness of the importance of libraries as a competitive advantage in distance education.

INTRODUCTION

As they approach the end of the millennium, colleges and universities are engaged in an extraordinary investment in technological innovation. Educational technology has become an irresistible force on large and small campuses across the land, infiltrating institutions to a degree that rivals the level of corporate investment in information technology over the past decade (Cunningham, Tapsall, & Ryan, 1998, chap. 2).

Educational technology is a compelling investment for higher education for a number of reasons. The marketplace demands computer literate workers, and students must be introduced to computing technology while in school if they are to succeed in the workplace. Faculty can conduct research more easily and collaborate more productively if they have access to colleagues and research data via the Internet. And, as has been the case in the corporate world, an institution may well expect lower administrative support costs in a computing-rich environment.

For many academic institutions, the prospect of increased revenue from distance education plays an equal, if not greater, role in this technology investment decision. The revenue streams presently being realized by established continuing education and distance education institutions are significant, and forecasts for growth in this educational arena are consistently optimistic. The Western Governors University, the University of Phoenix, Britain's Open University, and Florida Gulf Coast University are representative of institutions that have already made serious investments in the success of this new form of higher education. Many other colleges and universities can be expected to seek much-needed revenue from distance education (Blumenstyk, 1997a, 1998).

Higher education also needs flexible capacity. After two decades of declining enrollments, the children of baby boomers now threaten to swamp colleges and universities. In another decade, the cycle will go bust again (Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education [WICHE], 1998). The difficult economic climate in which these market swings must be managed is well documented. Rapidly escalating tuition costs have brought market resistance and drawn unwelcome attention from the political arena. Physical expansion is increasingly problematic for many institutions. A declining federal research base must cover a growing number of research-oriented universities. Competition for grants and individual philanthropy is on the rise. These trends combine to place relentless pressure on institutions to find new sources of revenue and new low-cost educational models. Distance education is such a model.

As a practical matter, education at a distance has been available for many years. Correspondence schools, public television, training videos, and satellite download programs are familiar examples of educational opportunities available to those who live and work at a distance from traditional institutions of higher learning. Until recently, such educational alternatives held minimal interest for traditional higher education, and academic libraries had little reason to provide support to the students of these programs. As a result, academic libraries have, by and large, only recently turned their attention to the challenge of supporting this community of learners.

The rapid expansion of educational computing has dramatically altered the prospects for, and interest in, post-secondary distance education. Whether the prospect of distance education is imminent or distant, academic libraries dare not ignore this change. In his classic work on innovation, Peter F. Drucker (1985) describes in detail the transforming role of technological innovation on industries and market structures (chap. 6). Although academic libraries are not accustomed to thinking of their products and services as an "industry" with "markets," Drucker's insights are both enlightening and relevant to contemporary libraries as they seek to define a relevant role within the emerging phenomenon of distance education.

Like most venerable institutions, academic libraries are justifiably proud of their strengths. The current model of academic librarianship has developed over the past 100 years as a sustainable strategy for providing cost-effective information service and products to resident communities of scholars. Yet Drucker provides compelling examples of similarly stable industries that were plunged into crisis by changing markets--almost overnight. The U.S. health care system, long distance telephone service, and mainframe computing are among the industries that went, in less than a decade, from confident secure stability to a scramble for survival.