Once the stepchild of the academy, distance learning is finally taken seriously. But not in precisely the way early innovators like myself had hoped. It is not faculty who are in the forefront of the movement to network education. Instead politicians, university administrations and computer and telecommunications companies have decided there is money in it. But proposals for a radical "retooling" of the university emanating from these sources are guaranteed to provoke instant faculty hostility.

In 1981 I worked on the design team that created the first online educational program. This was the School of Management and Strategic Studies at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California. At the time online education was essentially untried. The equipment was expensive and primitive.

We employed a variant of email called computer conferencing which was suited to our application since it facilitated the sort of many-to-many communication that goes on in the classroom. But no one knew how to use it for education. We soon discovered that computer conferencing was not very useful for delivering lectures, and this limitation led us to explore a Socratic pedagogy based on virtual classroom discussion that proved quite successful.

The school grew to include over 150 students in 26 countries around the world. It pioneered many of the features of online education taken for granted today. Other experiments soon benefited from our example and added their own contributions, however few administrations supported online education and its progress was slow throughout the 80's and 90's.

Consider, then, my surprise when I heard rumours last year that something called online education was coming to my university, San Diego State University, under the sponsorship of Microsoft, Hughes Aircraft, Fujitsu, and MCI! This initiative, called CETI, was supposed to build a $300 million information infrastructure to support virtual learning on our multi-campus system.

Our new systemwide Chancellor, Dr. Charles Reed, was due for a get acquainted visit. As he was leaving I finally had a chance to ask him the question that most bothered me: What is the pedagogical model that has guided CETI? The Chancellor looked at me as though I'd laid an egg, and said, "We've got the engineering plan. It's up to you faculty to figure out what to do with it." And off he went: subject closed!

But in the case of online education, the choice of infrastructure will largely determine the applications. If corporations rather than faculty are consulted about this choice, the outcome will be entirely different from the ideal of educational community to which faculty are attached by their culture and traditions. The ambition of CETI to make and market pre-packaged computer and video based courses illustrated that difference.

CETI illustrates the unfortunate fact that for too many administrators the big issues in online education are not educational. Aministrators hope to use new technology to finesse the coming crisis in higher education spending, and to accomodate exploding enrollments of young people and returning students. Innovations like video conferencing and automated online education will make it possible to improve quality through the use of "star" professors while cutting costs of delivery. Students in virtual classrooms need no new parking structures. What is more, courses can be packaged and marketed, generating a continuous revenue stream without further investment.

It's quite a vision, but few faculty buy it. Faculty ask how one can duplicate the learning experience of a highly interactive classroom on an electronic network, and reproduce the wealth of informal human contacts that add so much to education on a campus.

What makes faculty still more suspicious is the continuity they perceive in administration enthusiasm for cost-cutting at the expense of traditional educational roles and values. Between 1970 and 1995, the number of full-time faculty increased by about half, while over the same period part-time faculty grew by two and one half times. If the trend continues, part-timers will overtake full-timers on college campuses in three years.

The good news for faculty is the difficulty administrations have actually implementing the systems. The failures are due to fundamental misunderstanding of the technology.

When they actually engage with the new technology, faculty sense immediately that it is not mature, nor can courses be easily transferred from the face-to-face to the online setting. The virtual classroom does not reproduce the familiar experience of teaching but merely offers an environment, an empty space faculty must learn to inhabit and enliven.

This is very different from the understanding of the technology purveyed by sellers, who present it as a ready-made substitute for the classroom. Live video, with its complicated and unreliable apparatus, holds little attraction for either teachers or students, but it can be marketed as an online equivalent of what faculty already do. Automated learning is a gamble but technology suppliers play up the big profits awaiting daring innovators. Sadly, these come-ons seem to be working.

Meanwhile, the fact remains that even after all these years the exciting online pedagogical experiences still involve human interactions and for the most part these continue to be text based, just as they were for us in the early '80s. The availability of fancy new technology has not made much difference.

But here is the rub: interactive text based applications lack the pizazz of video alternatives and cannot promise automation, nor can they be packaged and sold. On the contrary, they are labor intensive and will probably not cut costs very much. Hence the lack of interest from corporations and administrators, and the gradual eclipse of these technological options by far more expensive ones. But unlike the fancy alternatives, interactive text based systems actually accomplish legitimate pedagogical objectives.

The basic fact about computer networks is scarcity of bandwidth and we have a well established method for communicating under precisely these conditions. It's called writing. And we have a rich experience of using writing to overcome the limitations of bandwidth. Writing is thus not a poor substitute for physical presence and speech, but another fundamental medium of expression with its own properties and powers.

While interactive writing is the basic medium of expression on networks, in recent years we have learned to enhance the network experience with sound and image, and that is a good thing. But writing is the basic medium of online expression, the skeleton around which other technologies and experiences must be organized to build a viable learning environment.

In online education as in the classroom, we must be careful to distinguish the basic medium from the enhancements and not to confuse their roles. Speech is the basic medium in the classroom, and we supplement it with labs, movies, slides, text books, computer demonstrations, and so on. Similar, enhancements to the written medium are possible on networks. But confusing the medium with the supplementary enhancements leads to the pedagogical absurdity of teacherless education.