AUGUSTA, ME, 2017 - Maine's newest entry into the world of cyber-education was unveiled yesterday in Augusta, Maine. Flanked by the U.S. Secretary of State and the President of the World Bank, Maine's new governor today announced completion of the final deal to deliver a large selection of associate and baccalaureate degrees from the University of Maine System to any country willing to participate in the World Bank's Educate the World Project.

The brainchild of Maine's Distance Education leaders, the Educate the World Project has the support of all of the world's industrialized nations. Incentive funding from the World Bank led the way to a long-term lease of 18 satellite channels and relay stations for 24 hour a day global coverage.

The University System Chancellor praised all involved in the project and spoke of the day when a college education would be within reach -- financially and materially -- for all world citizens. The Secretary of State read a letter of congratulations and praise from the President of the United States.

The University of Maine System, becoming known as "World University," pioneered distance education two decades ago (1990's) when most students attended classes in fixed classrooms with a single instructor, spending a limited amount of lock-step time per week with each group. Students of that era rebelled against the limitations of this type of on-campus education and demanded education be delivered to their communities and ultimately to their personal desktop communication units.

Today, in its new multimillion dollar Distance Education Development Center, the Maine Distance Education Project facilitates planning and provides development expertise in all academic disciplines and supports national and international faculty and other content experts in the development of educational modules in a variety of electronic and independent formats. The U. Maine System aggregates the best and the brightest faculty and specialists from all over the world and puts them together with highly motivated students in the world of cyber-education.

AUGUSTA, ME, 1997 - The FICTITIOUS news release above, datelined twenty years from today in 2017 is intended to stimulate discussion and challenge our usual patterns of solving problems of higher education.

Over the past eight years, the University of Maine System has created one of the most talked about (and controversial) distance education projects in the country. Public rancor over decisions to elevate the distance education operation (Education Network of Maine) to the level of a separate campus with degree granting authority and its own accreditation, appears to have been a contributing factor in the departure of the System's last chancellor and the Board of Trustees' retreat from the decisions. A recent System Telecommunication and Information Technology Task Force Report has concluded that the Education Network of Maine, which once aspired to be a separate college, should remain a centrally administered "utility" providing delivery and student support services to all of the campuses. Efforts are underway to heal the rifts and move on to the next level of development. The Task Force has taken a leadership role in planning the future development of distance education in Maine and the future they describe resembles, to a striking degree, the scenario painted in the fictitious 2017 news article.

Today, faculty and staff in the System are spending a great deal of time preparing for the new structures associated with the emerging learning systems. Distance Education is a key, if not the central focus to those plans. Among the topics being discussed are the following: asynchronous instruction; delivery to desktop communication units; online services from advising, registration and financial aid, to a full range of library and information services and technical help to make it all work; very large classes managed with teams of faculty and support staff; modular and self-paced learning opportunities; students from all over the world; electronic technologies which support high levels of student-faculty interaction regardless of class size; creation of a virtual library including video and e-mail access to the scholars who create the newly published knowledge; and courses by e-mail, web based systems, compact disc and video recording.

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The new options provide the incredible freedom of asynchronous interaction between student and faculty member, and student and student. The focus of these new methods is on student learning. Such strategies recognize that students do not need to (and may even be better off if they don't) sit in a classroom on a fixed schedule every week for every course. Some courses or segments of courses are indeed better learned in a hands-on lab or in a room with other students, but gone is the day when all of higher education agrees that learning can only take place on a live, face-to-face basis.

Students in the first trial asynchronous courses offered at the University of Maine at Augusta are already reporting improved learning and greater ability to interact with the professor by e-mail or on Web pages, and at times which are convenient to them. Professors are reporting very high levels of communications and interaction with and among students. Faculty are finding that students are actively assisting each other on their group electronic discussions, making the students involved contributors, as well as participants--a role which is known to stimulate and support the acquisition and retention of knowledge.

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So what does this all mean to the "cyber-librarian of the future?" It is absolutely safe to say that the functions of librarians have already begun to change and will continue to do so, probably at an accelerated pace. In the University of Maine environment, there is already a library unit dedicated to distance learning programs and their students. These off-campus library staff are playing a significant role in educating and supporting fixed-site librarians, as they make the transition to supporting distance students. All decisions about the on-line library information system are based on what will work as a shared resource for all campuses and our 3,000 distance education students situated across the state. Librarians at all campuses are working together to share Web-based resources for library instruction. Faculty are becoming more and more willing to work with "companion" librarians who team with them to create information management learning opportunities in their distance-delivered academic courses. With the acknowledgment that the Web environment is the best place yet for information access and manipulation, comes the reality that library professionals have little or no control over what the students find (or don't find) on the Internet. There is no collection development policy for what is entered into the "global HTML subject index." The articles and services on the World Wide Web change so rapidly, it takes a superhuman effort to stay abreast of even specialized areas of information, and much of what is published on the web is not useful or reliable information. At the root of all of these problems, of course, is the matter that some individuals may still be overly-inclined to believe everything they read or see on a fancy web page.

The most valued service librarians can provide in the near future -- at least until information sources are controlled, managed or organized in a manner similar to that of current academic library collections -- will be the training and education of faculty and students in the access, evaluation and application of information from the Internet. Librarians will specialize in supporting faculty in course development and implementation, and will increasingly become experts in evaluation and organization of Web-based information. A few entrepreneurs will get rich by creating independent services offering pre-screening of Internet information for specific customers, or on speculation, to be sold to the highest bidder. Application of appropriate academic criteria for selection of resources, combined with the credentials of the librarians, will validate the sources found and save many hours for the companies which need the information. By the turn of the century, there will be an entire new class of "techno-cyberlibrarians," expert managers of information, many of whom will work outside the sphere of higher education.

In the same way that universities will move to independent educational strategies focused on student learning, the librarian of the future who works with these students will function as educational entrepreneurs, seeking and organizing information, and training students in the new life skills required for effective information management.

Librarians of the future will serve as mentors and facilitators to students' learning experiences and finally, and perhaps most important, they will continue to provide the leadership necessary to design and build the next phase of innovative and successful American higher education.

Thomas E. Abbott, PhD
University of Maine at Augusta
E-mail: tabbott@maine.maine.edu

Abbott is currently Dean of Learning Resources and University Development at the University of Maine at Augusta, one of the seven campuses of the University of Maine System. With 6,000 students, over half of whom take their courses through distance education technologies and at remote centers across the state, UMA is the premier distance education institution in Maine. Abbott has worked in a variety of managerial positions at UMA since 1974. He has served as Assistant and Associate Academic Dean, chief academic officer for a year and an half on an acting basis, and more recently as assistant to the president. Abbott received his PhD in Higher Education management from Boston College in 1989 and minored in Organizational Studies in BC's College of Business. He also holds BA and MSEd degrees in Sociology and Counseling respectively. His work as Dean of Learning Resources for the last nine years has led him to become active nationally in off-campus library services. He was a charter member of the Association of College and Research Libraries' Extended Campus Library Services Section, which now boasts nearly 1,000 members, and for the last two years has served as Vice-Chair and Chair. Abbott speaks regularly and consults nationally on distance education, information literacy, off-campus library services and distance education technologies.