Virtual U Manual Foreword
by Jesse Ausubel
More and more people lead dual lives: in real life and in silico. Many occupations are grateful to take risky decisions
first in a simulator. Airplane pilots prefer to learn the consequences of playing with a joystick on the ground to chancing a crash
from the air. In general, we learn by play. As do other animals. Watch kittens leaping about, rehearsing for the hunting that
may later enable them to survive.
In the United States, higher education is one of our largest industries. In the United States, higher education is one of our
largest industries. In the year 2000 some $235 billion will be expended for education and research by about 3,500 colleges and
universities. Almost one million faculty teach almost 15 million students, who will receive more than two million degrees.
Many of those who manage the higher education enterprise, including department chairs, deans, provosts, presidents, and trustees,
have had little chance to play before they find themselves dealing with real students, real professors, and real alumni. And everyone
involved with universities, from parents to state legislators to the millions of employees other than faculty, tends to have a very
partial view of these complex systems. Contemplating a campus, one person sees a huge first-year history course, another sees a
football stadium, and a third sees a research career.
The creators of Virtual U hope that we have set the precedent for exploring the university as a system on-line, to the benefit of all
the stakeholders in the higher educaion enterprise. Surely aspects of the university are ineffable, but so are aspects of battlefields,
factories, and motorcycle racing, all of which have yielded to quite successful simulation.
We hope that Virtual U sets precedents for both education and research. We believe that point-and-click is a great evolutionary way to
learn. You can try things out. You can live life twice. You can see a totality in a few minutes or hours that in real life would require
years or decades of real time. We hope those involved in teaching about higher education and those who want to learn about it will find
Virtual U an intense, stimulating, modern means to lift understanding.
For research, we hope Virtual U proves encouragingly that it can be done, that it is possible to model and simulate a university on a
computer. Every module in this first release could be deepened and elaborated. We hope investigators will do so in coming years. Add
a law or medical school. Consider the relation of universities to regional economic development. Change the perspective from that of the
president of the institution to those of students or faculty. Change to your liking the response functions that determine cause and
effect. The code of Virtual U will be available to those who want to extend research in higher education through simulation.
On behalf of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, I am enormously grateful to the team who have made possible this first release of Virtual U.
Dr. William Massy above all merits appreciation for his development of the mathematical models that underlie the simulator. Trevor Chan
and his colleagues at Enlight Software translated the Massy models into interactive programs. Robert Zemsky and colleagues at the
Institute for Research in Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania assembled the data used in the simulator. Ben Sawyer of
Digitalmill managed the process to bring together the several components of the product package, including the Manual and the Strategy
Guide. Neil Salking and Terese Rainwater did a fine job of extracting the simulator's most important features for the Guide. Many others,
listed elsewhere in this publication, advised and contributed in valuable ways. The Spencer Foundation joined Sloan in making valuable
ways. The Spencer Foundation joined Sloan in making available the resources needed to create Virtual U.
In the end, it will be the development of a community of users and the contributions they make, through feedback and their own creativity,
that can make Virtual U valuable. We hope that through the interactions of users with this product, the understanding and management
of higher education enter the inevitable world, full of fresh potential, of learning in silico.
Jesse H. Ausubel
Program Director, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
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