The Clinton-Gore Administration has championed a strategy for developing the NII that relies on collaboration between the public and private sectors. The first two have responsibility for creating a climate that promotes the effective use of networked learning materials in new learning environments. The second two have the capability of creating and distributing the materials to be used in the new learning environments. Most of higher education's leadership is managing within today's teaching and learning paradigm when what we desperately need is leadership that moves us toward tomorrow's paradigm. It is time for higher education's leaders to step up to the plate and bat.
Administrators love to blame the faculty for their inability to bring about change.
But it is clear that the changes most needed to create a learning infrastructure must take place at the institutional level. Individual faculty members can conduct individual experiments that point the way to systemic change, but they cannot make significant, systemic changes by themselves. Furthermore, in many cases, faculty have little control over the institutional factors that inhibit creation of alternative learning environments, such as class meeting times, contact- hour requirements, registration systems, classroom assignments, and equipment purchase and deployment. The weakness of focusing on individual faculty members as a strategy for change can be demonstrated by assessment of two approaches to stimulating new learning environments at the national level. Similarly, in the 1980s, IBM also spent millions funding more than 3,000 individual faculty projects in its Advanced Education Projects.