Has Technology Made State Regional Universities Obsolete?
The obvious remedy is the electronic storage and retrieval of what were previously printed materials. Such systems, of course, already exist. States must expand and fully embrace those systems. Each SRU can hold a garage sale and get rid of the clutter on the shelves, and then we can talk about re-purposing the buildings that used to warehouse all that paper.
Some institutions have certainly done better than others in converting their libraries into learning commons, with tech-enabled study/learning spaces, student support, labs, makerspaces and more. Others settle for installing batteries of desktop computers that are less necessary every year, as hardware gets ever cheaper for the individual student. Each institution must decide whether an old, oversized library building is too much space chasing too little function.
I don't mean to disparage the army of noble librarians fighting valiantly to keep their campus libraries relevant. Our WTAMU library has become the focal point for knitting circles, comfort dog sessions, coffee and snack distribution, and all manner of mini-events that have little relationship to what the libraries were built for in the first place. All that is wonderful, but it does not add up to sensible use for cavernous multi-story buildings filled with paper versions of arcane government documents gathering dust.
Learner Support
Technology could also revolutionize learner support. We can divide this into content support, which is helping students with actual subject matter in their courses, and diagnosis/remediation of student learning products, such as reviewing homework exercises and compositions. Much learning support involves elements of both.
While I expect professors to be massively uncomfortable with this idea, consider how inadequate the learner support function is now. There is normally very little opportunity to ask the professor questions in an undergraduate lecture hall. Class sizes are large, time is always short, and often a very small number of hyper-aggressive students, who have no social capital to lose with their peers, will hog whatever sliver of face-to-face time remains. Fortunately, technologies already exist for learner content support by audio and video, including the remote control of a student's screen when needed. Technology companies routinely support their customers quite successfully with banks of overseas experts. And questions and answers can always be captured in Frequently Asked Questions documents for the benefit of others not participating in a specific interaction.
Let's return to our Western Civilization class. Jane College has just listened with rapt attention to national expert Professor Jones talking about the exploits of Alexander the Great in a fabulous instructional movie from the system-sponsored standard course. She still doesn't understand how Alexander's army could conceive of him as a god. In our technology-driven school of the future, Jane will be able to call the support number for her course or perhaps initiate a Skype-like audiovisual connection with a support team member.
This team would be trained and experienced not only with Classical History but also in the structure and content of this particular course. Support specialists would be prepared to anticipate the questions they will frequently get from students. They would also have been trained on learning theory and would know that it is far better to suggest resources that will help Jane answer her own question than to simply tell her the answer. So perhaps they would discuss the question with Jane a little, and then send her to a list of primary or secondary sources for dealing with this question and related questions. Better yet, they could help her discover those sources on her own by assisting her to improve her research skills. They would also invite her to call back to discuss what she has found out after accessing the resources. The call ticket is not closed until Jane is satisfied that she has what she needs.