ABSTRACT
Information technology (IT) is a protean subject; it has many different aspects and is discussed from many different perspectives. The historically shaped characteristics of colleges and universities are highly relevant to the ways IT will be used by the existing structures of higher education. Much discussion of IT is undifferentiated; the focus is on new technologies, new courseware, and issues of pedagogy that arise in connection with the new forms of instruction. Using IT for more-with-less productivity enhancement requires that technology replace some activities being performed by faculty, teaching assistants, and support personnel. The use of IT for instruction is gradually expanding through the teaching faculty of the elite research universities and liberal-arts colleges, as it did for research and e-mail. The technology continues to improve in quality and fall in price. The use of IT for instruction becomes less discriminatory as more students acquire computers and get access to the Internet from home and dormitory.
