"I have hope that society may be reformed, when I see how much education may be reformed." GW vonLeibniz (1646-1716)

For ages, education reform has been a matter of concern of educators, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and now, technologists have joined the group. Technologists come from quite different areas, some of them come from the scientific field, such as biologists, mathematicians, physics, computer programmers; some others come from the humanistic departments and the arts, linguists, philosophers, art designers; even architects, doctors and economists are involved in this "new" field.
Why is that so?, What particular attraction has this area that has made people with so different interest and orientation become technologists, even when most of them admit "I would never consider myself expert with computers, but many colleagues want me to tell them how to use this or that software, or how to solve some tricks the computer is playing to them."
 If so many people, mostly professionals in different fields have adopted this trend of teaching and learning with technology, it is because they can see the potential of  instructional technology. Seymour Papert calls them "visionary teachers" .
 

THE TRENDS

From the use of Plato in the sixties, educational technology has evolved to become the "magic" tool that allows the instant access to information and people around the globe. The beginning of the use of computers for education was in the UIUC where a computerized  system was the first educational tool of that type used to display slides and computer graphics, though very primitively it worked.
The system was called PLATO, Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations. It had all the elements that made PLATO unique: computerized instruction, an authoring system designed to make writing computerized instruction easy, and a learning management system that continually tested the student's understanding of the material and prescribed additional materials if the student needed more help. (Heinich et al-p.203, 1998)
Then the appearance of educational software made people think that computers were going to replace books for training. But computers were used for drilling or some presentations, the sound still came from tapes or cassettes. Later the image and sound were put together into the video and it became the most widely spread technological device in use for training .
Nowadays the major trend in media and technology is the merging of media formats. Digitization has led inevitably to the development of new systems for information storage, retrieval and transmission. It has also led to  the convergence of media formats, with the potential for making other formats obsolete. (Heinich et al., p 335, 1998).
Then we could say that the future of technology is leading to having the best toolbox for training in the smallest space, all the media formats in a single place, the computer. The easiest and most economical way for teachers to build virtual classrooms.
And not only schools and educators became aware of the advantage of this media convergence, but also business corporations which have  taken great advantage of technologies, such as audio recordings, video, and computers, to improve the quality of their training without increasing costs.
The latest trend in media selection is the Internet. Media selection is the same as web tools selection when thinking of training and development at present.

THE CHANGING ROLE OF TEACHERS, STUDENTS AND ORGANIZATIONS.

The dramatic change of including computers in education involved serious adjustments in teachers' minds and way of teaching. Kinnaman in Technology and Learning (18, 1997) says  "modern technology comprises the richest sets of educational tools in the history of the world, but the art of teaching is still safely and surely the province of human teachers only."
Even when we agree that good tools do not make good teachers, but good teachers make good use of tools. It must be admitted that teachers will have to keep up with technology to be able to deal with the education demands of today.
Teachers as well as trainers in business or other corporations will become Web Based Trainers, and their role will be that of providing the clues, the guide and the environment to encourage  collaborative learning between the students in the world wide web.
As Heinich et al, say, their (the teacher's) role change from information presenter to learning resource coordinator. They serve as facilitator, manager, counselor and motivator. Their new role frees them to work more independently with individuals and small groups while they let the formal presentation to another media. Teachers help students find and process information from many sources. Teacher will become many more "the guide on the side" rather than "the sage on the stage." Even when the teacher may be miles away from the students, communication will flow easily as they can choose  different tools to keep this communication fluid.
The role of the students has also changed, in Computer Based Training he was the one who sat down to practice or follow the instructions of the educational software. Now his role will be that of interact with the instructor and other students in a virtual space. He will be receiving updated information and will have the whole world to seek for more material via the Internet.
The role of the schools and organizations will no longer be the same. Teachers and employees may receive training at home, or any other place, and at any time. Some organizations may even prefer to keep their employees in the "field" with no need to have them in the office. This may even change the architecture of buildings, which may not need to have so many empty offices, and they will be able to design open spaces or rooms for other purposes.
Educational institutions will also have to provide lifelong learning since the nature of the workforce is becoming older. Disabled will have the possibility of getting jobs or studying in places where they cannot  go. Then the educational system of the countries will have to prepare for this change.
Big corporations are already on the move for web based training. Jack Hanley from chemical giant Monsanto describes as a "nightmare" when the time for planning the timing of the 18,000 employees  training--who would get what skills?, and when? (Datamation,1997/09). Now WBT provides just in time training with no need of long hours travelling from their headquarters.
The Internet breaks through many time, cost and availability barriers. Students can work when and where they have the time, and teacher interaction can be as easy as an e-mail message. (A.Crowley, PCWeek OnLine) The material updating will be done with little or no cost, and it will just take the time that logging on a network and clicking some changes may take.

TECHNOLOGY AND WEB BASED TRAINING:

The future for training and development is in Instructional technology. Distance learning via Internet has important advantages over other media to make it the one to be considered first.
Corporations adopted video training to avoid moving their employees from one city to other with all the expenses and waste of time that this meant. Video was a good media, but the problem was time, when video reached all the employees in a nation-wide company, some of the information may have become obsolete or different from the data at the time of watching the video. No collaborative learning was possible, and tutoring was not quite effective.
Video is still a good media to deliver certain training, but not the best any longer. Web Based Training offers among other benefits, important reductions in travel expenses, consistent delivery of training and global access for learners. (M.Driscoll, Nov, 1998) Besides updating of content is easy and fast, access is controllable and the WWW has become a vast, untapped market for training.
Though bandwidth/browser limitations may restrict instructional methodologies, this will not keep the technology behind.
Being cost and timing the most important issues that corporations take into consideration regarding training, I think that the following table may show that training via Internet is not the least expensive at the beginning, since all the equipment must be provided, and employees must also be trained in computer skills, but it will prove to be the most effective and cheapest in the long term
 
 

Type of training	Approximate cost	Timing issues
Books and self study kits	$40-150	Users can pick them up when they are ready to learn and skip over chapters that are not important to them.
Videos	$50 -200	Another good self paced method. Make sure there's an easy way to skip over the parts not of interest to the learner
Wizard embedded applications	Varies	Excellent Just-In-Time method because it is precise, timing and available at the user's discretion
Computer Based Training	$ 200 - 1,000	Often used to supplement or reinforce ILT. Make sure CBT is easy to use and modular.
Instructor- led method	Varies	The least timing and most popular training. They are usually short, modular courses so students can come and go according to the subject matter.
Distance learning via Internet	$5,000 - 50,000	Timely in that companies can arrange for instruction from the best teacher of the subject, no matter where the expert is located.

Demands of web based instructors, programmers, on line resources (libraries) will be the rule for the next years, as well as on line libraries and knowledge base resources, so most companies are trying to use their storage of data to frame their knowledge base an put in the internet, available for employees all over the country or the globe. As corporations continue to increase their reliance on the Internet, the Web services business models will become more widespread. By the end of 1999, we're sure to see companies from many different industries making Internet distributed services an essential part of their plans for growth. (N.Burbules, 1998)
 Regarding education, many universities have already adopted the on-line courses as a future trend. This may be seen as a menace by instructors and professors, because one person will be in charge of larger courses, though the management of the distance learning will demand more collaborative working and several professors may become the head of a course, sharing their research and updating data. Professors will have time to research, since on line courses are easily updated and once the modules have been created, they will spend  less time in front of a class, but more time in research.

RE-THINKING HOMES

Home life will absolutely change by the next century due to Instructional Technologies. More people will settle their office at home and stay there more part of the day. Houses will have to be larger and provide a comfortable working atmosphere. Students will not miss classes since they will be able to follow class instruction at home, even when they are in bed. ( Perhaps IT will even be the cure to the common flu, that doctors have fought for years.)  As a consequence family relations will also change.
 

CONCLUSION

Instructional Technology is the present and the future for instruction, but what is most important is the overall change that is taking place in learning, and that will cause a different demand for instruction. Seymour Paper says in his essay Education's 19th-Century Thinking in a 21st-Century World (Jan 1998)," I anticipate megachange in the way children learn. When we look around us we see not only an absence of megachange, we see a number of ways in which policy seems to be designed to prevent the megachange....the model that says learn while you're at school, while you're young, the skills that you will apply during your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you're at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right answer to questions about what you were taught in school, but to make the right response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We need to produce people who know how to act when they're faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared."  How will instruction face this "megachange" if not using all the available things that the technology hands out?
He also states that knowledge in the 21st century is going to be very different. The need for knowledge is going to be very different. You can capture this by noting that even today a very substantial proportion of people are engaged in work, in jobs that did not exist when they were born and that number is increasing. And this includes the large number of people that I mentioned at the beginning of this document, people who got involved into this education reform, because we believe it is going to work.