DEOSNEWS Vol. 2  No. 23.  ISSN 1062-9416.
Copyright 1992 DEOS - The Distance Education Online Symposium
   
DEOS was established with a grant from the Annenberg/CPB Project and it is
supported by NKI in Norway.
   
Editor: Morten Flate Paulsen, MORTEN@NKI.NO
NKI, Box 111, 1341 Bekkestua, Norway
   
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   
EDITORIAL
   
In this thought-provoking article, Gary Miller discusses four long-term
trends in distance education:
   
1. The simultaneous diversification and convergence of technologies
2. Changing relationships with students
3. Changing relationships among institutions
4. The emerging mainstream
   
   
   
                  Long-Term Trends in Distance Education
   
                              Gary E. Miller
                            miller@umuc.umd.edu
                    International University Consortium
                 University of Maryland University College
   
   
     Distance education in the United States has entered a particularly
important stage in its development. After a long period of relative
stability in terms of its basic assumptions and procedures, and a more
recent period of dramatic change marked by rapid diversification of media,
distance education today is entering a period of integration and conver-
gence. This period brings with it significant implications for the prac-
tice. This paper will look at four long-term trends in distance education
and at the possible implications for distance education.
   
   
Trend One: The Simultaneous Diversification and Convergence of Technologies
   
      In 1980, the technologies available for production, delivery, and
interaction in distance education were few and simple. Institutions relied
on the printed word, recorded video and programs, and occasionally live
television programs for development of subject matter; on the postal
service, public television, and cable television for delivery; and on
written essays, individual phone consultations, and audio tape for inter-
action.
      A decade later, the technological environment has changed in ways few
anticipated in 1980. Videocassette machines are in 80% of homes and have
become a routine way to deliver the video portion of a course; increasing-
ly, satellite is a last-mile delivery system and not just a way of getting
programs to a television station. More significantly, live, interactive
media have entered the distance education picture, with microwave ITV,
audiographics, compressed video, computer conferencing, audio conferencing,
and so forth. These media are markedly different from other distance
education media in how they affect the relationship between the institution
and the student. While print and broadcast media--and even videocassette--
are directed to the individual student, these interactive media tend to be
used to extend the traditional classroom environment.
      Looking ahead, one can just now begin to see other technologies
entering the distance education arena. Almost all of these are digital
technologies. They range from hypermedia programs, which allow the student
to control how a body of information is explored, to large scale data
bases, accessible through Internet and other computer networks, to inte-
grated data systems that, eventually, will allow individuals to "dial up"
video programs, audio materials, data bases, software, etc., from home or
work.
   
   
Implications of Technological Convergence
   
     This rapid and ongoing change in the technological environment of
distance education has important implications for higher education.
     First, distance education is, more obviously than ever, multi-media
education. Increasingly, distance education will use a variety of media
within courses and among courses in a curriculum. This has implications for
course design and curriculum planning in distance education that go beyond
the traditional issue of "delivery."
     It also has implications for how institutions organize their re-
sources. Historically, institutions have tended to organize around a
technology. For example, it is not unusual for an institution to have
separate operational programs for print-based programs and television-based
programs. This technology-specific approach is increasingly untenable in a
technology-rich environment. Increasingly, distance education is driven by
curriculum and student need, rather than by technology. Organizational
structures that do not facilitate a mixing of technologies will find it
difficult to reach their full potential in this new environment.
      At another level, the explosion of technology is changing the way we
define distance education. The definition now covers such diverse--and
contradictory--educational methods as independent learning and extended
classroom learning. Increasingly, distance education is best defined not by
the technology used for delivery but by the nature of interaction involved
in the educational process.
      With an increasingly technology-rich environment, the stakeholders in
distance education are expanding. The technology itself is part of a new
institutional infrastructure; instructional applications must be considered
alongside administrative and research applications. This creates a broader
community of interest with regard to the initial investment in technology.
Similarly, the infrastructure extends beyond a single institution. The
technology used by higher education must be compatible with K-12, community
colleges, governmental and private uses. As statewide telecommunications
systems emerge, distance education becomes a policy matter at the legislat-
ive and executive levels. State regulators and regional accrediting
agencies have joined the community of distance education stakeholders.
   
   
Trend Two: Changing Relationships with Students
   
      The perspective of a decade provides an excellent view of the
changing relationships between institutions and students that is coming
about due to our changing use of technology. Historically, distance
education has served the individual student in isolation. The tradition of
correspondence education is that each student constitutes a class of one.
The student interacts with an instructor, but has no interaction with other
students. This model, now a century old, was adopted as the basic model for
televised instruction in the early 1980s. Broadcast television, like
correspondence study, assumed a student at home, alone. This approach is
"individual-centered" in the sense that it gives the student a great deal
of control over the time, place, and pace of study. However, it is rarely
"individualized"; the subject matter, the readings, and the sequencing of
study are controlled almost entirely by the institution.
     Since the mid-1980s, the rapid diversification of interactive telecom-
munications media--satellite, microwave, compressed video, audio con-
ferencing, etc.--has brought group instruction into the forefront of
distance education. These media tend to be used to extend the traditional
classroom. The effect is to shift control over the time, place, and pace of
study back to the institution, but to add to the educational experience an
opportunity for student-student interaction and some degree of spontaneity.
      Currently, a third relationship is emerging: "the learning commun-
ity," made possible by the asynchronous use of such telecommunications
media as computer conferencing, electronic mail, and voice mail. Because
these systems do not rely on simultaneous communications, they allow for
the student to again control the time, place, and pace of study, but also
to communicate with other students who may be at a different point in the
same course or who may be taking different courses in the same curriculum.
The purpose of interaction in a learning community is less didactic and
more contextual, offering the prospect of an extra-curricular dimension to
distance education and new opportunities for the curriculum itself.
      We can anticipate that a fourth relationship will emerge late in this
decade or early in the next, as students gain direct access to large data
bases, hypermedia stacks, "dial up" access to video and text material, etc.
Call this the "empowered student" or, perhaps better, "the community of
scholars" in which students will control the time, place, and pace of
study; will be able to communicate freely with faculty and peers; and, in
addition, will have considerable control over the scope and sequence of the
material to be studied.
      These evolving relationships will significantly affect the dynamics
of higher education as we enter the next century. They will require that we
rethink and make explicit our relationships with students, just as we
reconsidered the "in loco parentis" role when adults first entered higher
education during the G.I. Bill years. It will also require that we rethink
our definition of instruction, our assessment of learning, and our ideas
about curriculum.
   
   
Trend Three: Changing Relationships Among Institutions
   
      At the end of the 1970s, institutions generally acted individually
with regard to distance education. They created their own courses or
purchased materials from other institutions and, generally, offered courses
within an established service area. What few inter-institutional arrange-
ments existed tended to be cooperatives designed to reduce the price of
acquiring materials or to share in the cost of delivering materials.
      The 1980s saw, with the first use of satellite, the development of
consortia designed to share the cost of course development as well as
delivery. The precursor to the consortium model was the University of Mid-
America. More successful models were the International University Consor-
tium and, for noncredit materials, the National University Teleconference
Network. Today, such consortia occupy a stable niche in the institutional
environment, but the concept of institutions sharing in the design of
instruction was a significant departure from business as usual.
      As the 1990s unfold, we are seeing still other innovations in
institution-to-institution relationships. The most visibly established of
these innovations is the networked open university. Its precursor is the
National Technological University, which offers a national degree through
the joint efforts of several major institutions. A more recent example is
the National Universities Degree Consortium, which combines the efforts of
nine land grant institutions to offer a national undergraduate degree in
management. The Mind Extension University, which stimulated NUDC, is also
facilitating other, more specialized consortia to offer national degrees in
library science and instructional systems design.
      A more radical innovation is quietly asserting itself at the same
time. We are now seeing, for the first time in American history, the
emergence of national universities. These are not, like traditional
institutions of national reputation, universities that attract to their
campuses students from around the country. The new national institution
reaches out nationally, taking its program to students in their own
communities. Examples include the Masters of Business Administration
offered by Colorado State University, a computer science degree offered by
Chico State University, the library science program offered by Arizona
State University, George Washington University's Master of Educational
Leadership, Penn State University's Master of Acoustical Engineering, and
the University of Maryland University College's undergraduate program in
Nuclear Science.
   
   
Trend Four: The Emerging Mainstream
   
     Distance education is a relatively new term in American higher
education. While correspondence study is a century-old tradition in the
land grant institution, "distance education" has been part of the common
vocabulary of higher education for less than a decade. There are some who
feel that distance education is, rather than a distinctive approach to
education, a symptom of broader changes in the educational paradigm. In
this sense, we can see distance education as simply a label that we use to
make change more manageable. In another decade, the term may fall into
disuse as the technologies of distance education--and the new relationships
set into motion by our use of those technologies--enter into the mainstream
of the educational process.
      In this view, we can see higher education adapting to currents of
social change. In the process, we can see evolving a new technological
infrastructure that defines the environment just as reliance on the
classroom and the campus led to development of our concept of academic
time. The new mainstream will see more explicit articulation of the
customer-supplier relationship between universities and the students they
serve. It will also see a new sense of mission, in which institutions are
defined less by their immediate geographic community and more by the
professional communities that they serve through national degree programs
and continuing education programs.
      These same trends hold great potential for re-conceptualizing the
curriculum. The technologies used by distance education lend themselves
well to an outcomes-oriented assessment of learning and could facilitate
the movement toward outcomes-based curricula. Similarly, the "third
generation" of distance education will empower students to be autonomous
scholars, greatly changing the basic teaching-learning relationship.
Moreover, the media and methods of distance education will enable us to
make explicit educational objectives that traditionally have been held as
implicit assumptions about education. Decision making, problem solving,
values development, intercultural communication all have the potential to
be treated more directly through the use of distance education methods.
   
   
Implications for Planning
   
      How can higher education respond to these trends? The trends suggest
several areas for strategic development.
      First, institutions should begin thinking of distance education in
institution-wide, rather than programmatic terms. This may require some new
approaches to program development at the institutional level, as distance
education may extend beyond the traditional boundaries between on-campus
and off-campus instruction or between resident and continuing education.
     Second, institutions should think about how to organize their distance
education development and media resources to allow for more flexible
combinations of media as required by individual programs. As distance
education moves from a single-medium program to a multi-media institution-
wide system, new organizational approaches may be needed that open the way
for new kinds of collaborative media development and that provide ample
space for both distance education and other instructional and non-instruc-
tional applications of technology.
      Third, institutions must develop a set of vision and mission state-
ments that accurately reflect their distance education capabilities and
goals. The vision and mission should address academic as well as techno-
logical and administrative goals for distance education: what academic
programs can best benefit from distance education? How broadly should these
programs attempt to reach?
      Fourth, institutions should visualize an institutional matrix to
guide exploration of possible inter-institutional collaborations. The
matrix should consider potential relationships with public schools and
community colleges, with client businesses and industries, with other
institutions within its state or region, and with other institutions
nationally and internationally.
     Finally, recognizing the increasing potential for distance education
innovations to migrate toward the institutional mainstream, institutions
should review their policies and procedures and, where needed, broaden them
to include distance education delivery.
   
   
Conclusion
   
     In the last decade, distance education has emerged as a powerful force
for change in American higher education. The potential scope of that change
is suggested by trends in the use of technology, in changing relationships
between our institutions and the students they serve, in changes in
relationships among institutions, and by a new dynamic within institutions.
The current environment offers institutions an exceptional opportunity for
planning that will facilitate the emergence of a vital educational environ-
ment that uses technology to keep the student's needs in the foreground.
   
--------------------- End of DEOSNEWS Vol. 2  No. 23 ---------------------
   

Top of Page

The American Center for the Study of Distance Education (ACSDE)
The Pennsylvania State University
College of Education
110 Rackley Building
University Park, PA 16802-3202
Phone (814) 863-3764  FAX (814) 865-5878
ACSDE@psu.edu
www.ed.psu.edu/ACSDE

©2001 The Pennsylvania State University
College of Education