Currents in Electronic Literacy Spring 2000(3), 
 <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/spr00/slatin.html> 

The Appeal of Distance Education

10. Faced with these challenges and with a projected shortfall of 2,000,000 teachers in the coming decade (Richard W. Riley, "Seventh Annual State of American Education Address." February 22, 2000, http://www.ed.gov/Speeches /02-2000/000222.html ), it is hardly surprising that distance education is all the rage. Two- and four-year colleges, research universities, public schools, government entities, and corporations are all interested, all spending time and money and intellectual and emotional energy designing and implementing techniques for using the Internet together with digitized traditional technologies to "deliver education" in situations where instructors and students are not physically present in the same location at the same time.

Assumptions About Distance Education

11.  Many, perhaps even most, of these distance education initiatives proceed from shared but usually tacit assumptions which in turn shape the design and implementation and, ultimately, the quality of the learning experience. The first of these assumptions is that the only difference between distance education and classroom-based education is in the "delivery platform." (Of course some would argue that the delivery system is everything; for them, Internet-based distance education can never be anything but an attenuated version of what can really only happen in a classroom, in a face-to-face interchange between teacher and students.  But here, too, the assumption is that distance education would reproduce classroom-based education if only it could.)
12. The words information and instruction are often used interchangeably in talking about distance education, as in the slogans information anytime, anywhere and instruction anytime, anywhere. This way of speaking reveals a fundamental assumption: that making instruction available on a 24/7 basis can be accomplished by making information available on a 24/7 basis. To put it crudely, many people appear to believe that teaching is the same as publishing. The unexamined corollary is that learning is little more than access to information. Here, then, we have the basis for the equation of distributed information with distributed learning, as in the news clipping below, from the March 2, 2000 edition of Edupage: 

NO MORE PENCILS, NO MORE BOOKS   
Distributed learning is gaining momentum as companies find that today's atmosphere of fast-paced technological development requires constant internal training.  Corporate training programs enable employees to learn new applications and IT management lessons, as well as encourage workers to remain loyal to their employers.  Distributed learning has emerged as a useful method of corporate training because it is flexible--employees can take a lesson anytime, anywhere, using the Internet, a corporate intranet, or a CD-ROM.  The IT industry is particularly well suited to distributed learning, because constant education is needed to introduce workers to the latest technologies. Furthermore, training often gives rise to loyalty among workers, a necessity during the current shortage of IT professionals. "Particularly for technology employees, training is a huge and key retention factor," says TrainingNet's Dave Eagan.  "One thing they expect from an organization is not only the opportunity to learn by doing, but to expand their knowledge by training." (Industry Standard, 28 Feb 2000).  
13. Stories like this one, with its conflation of education and training and its failure to differentiate between Internet- and CD-ROM-based activity, reveal what Etienne Wenger (1998) has described as another embedded assumption typical of many institutions today: the assumption that learning is an individual process with a clearly delineated beginning and end.
14. The starting point for most distance education is the assumption that distance is an obstacle, that it is essential to compensate somehow for the fact that instructors and students are not in the same place at the same time in order for learning to occur.  This assumption is neatly captured in a recent Op-Ed piece by Texas Lieutenant Governor Rick Perry: 

Technology is breaking down barriers to college. The rise of virtual universities makes campus location and classroom size less relevant. Vast distances can be overcome with the click of a mouse. And classes can be made available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.  (Rick Perry, "The Rise of the Virtual University."  February 2000.  Forwarded via email from John C. Gilbert, chair, Technology-Enhanced Learning Committee, UT Austin).

15. Taken together, the assumptions I have enumerated -- that teaching is little more than disseminating information, that learning is a circumscribed process whereby individuals consume specific information, and that distance is an obstacle to all this-- drive many decisions about which technologies to use and how to use them.  In particular, they encourage people to think of distance education on a broadcast model rooted in the technological innovations that characterized the first half of the twentieth century. In such a broadcast model, information is disseminated from one point of origin to many points of reception. This sort of thinking is evident in James J. Duderstadt's suggestion, in an otherwise fascinating and challenging essay, that the 21st-century university might best be thought of as a "knowledge server" (James J. Duderstadt, "The Future of the University in an Age of Knowledge," Journal of the Asynchronous Learning Network, 1.2 (August 1997)" http://www.aln.org/alnweb/journal/issue2/duderstadt.htm). The analogy is with a file- or Web server, which delivers identical copies of an electronic document to anyone who is authorized to receive it.
16. The broadcast model of distance education might appear to make a good deal of sense, given on the one hand the generally poor showing of U.S. schools against international "competition" as measured by the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, and, on the other hand, the devastating shortage of qualified teachers mentioned earlier.
17. However attractive the broadcast model may look in the short run, and however commonsensical the underlying assumptions may seem, in the long term adopting that model will only compound the problem, producing increasing concentrations of knowledge and expertise in selected geographic regions while diminishing the capacity of most areas to do an effective job of educating their children and young people. As Etienne Wenger (1998) writes,

If we believe...that knowledge consists of pieces of information explicitly stored in the brain, then it makes sense to package this information in well designed units, to assemble prospective recipients of this in formation [one word: information?] in a classroom where they are perfectly still and isolated from any distraction, and to deliver this information to them as succinctly and articulately as possible. From that perspective, what has come to stand for the epitome of a learning event makes sense: a teacher lecturing a class (Communities of Practice, p. 9)

18. But decades of research have demonstrated that that lecturing is not the most effective way to ensure learning (Dewey, 1996; Vygotsky, 1927, 1978; Papert, 1980; Hutchins, 1994; Syverson, 1999).  Wenger continues: 

But if we believe that information stored in explicit ways is only a small part of knowing, and that knowing involves primarily active participation in social communities, then the traditional format does not look so productive. What does look promising are inventive ways of engaging students in meaningful practices, of providing access to resources that enhance their participation, of opening their horizons so they can put themselves on learning trajectories they can identify with, and of involving them in actions, discussions, and reflections that make a difference to the communities that they value." (Communities of Practice, 9-10)

19. What we need, in other words, is much more than a model of distributed information.  Putting information online is an important enterprise and poses important technical, logistical, and economic challenges-- but it is just the beginning, just a necessary precondition for the real work of teaching and learning online.  The Internet is not just an online classroom; the World Wide Web is not a textbook; and learning is not just “an individual process” (Wenger, p. 1).  We need to develop  models of distributed teaching and learning that take advantage of the knowledge and expertise distributed throughout the educational system to support development of new knowledge at all points.  Only in this way can we augment the quality of the system as a whole, enhancing its ability  to develop the knowledge necessary to thrive in a rapidly changing world. 

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