Interview Michael G. Moore, Ph.D. By Namin Shin July 2000

Michael G. Moore is known as a pioneer in the study of distance education, with his published work in the early 1970s being cited among the foundations of the field. Since 1986 he has been director of The American Center for the Study of Distance Education (ACSDE) and editor of The American Journal of Distance Education (AJDE). His publications include Contemporary Issues in American Distance Education (Pergamon Press, 1990); Distance Education: A Systems View, coauthored with Greg Kearsley, (Wadsworth Publishing, 1996); several books of readings and monographs; as well as more than fifty articles published in a dozen different countries. Here he is interviewed by Namin Shin, a doctoral candidate working on distance education in the Adult Education Program at The Pennsylvania State University.

Namin Shin: Dr. Moore, we are accustomed to seeing your name as editor of the AJDE and convener of conferences, etc., but in these roles, you are usually presenting other people’s work. Today we are going to inquire a little into your own story and your own thoughts. First, what do you think about what I just said? Is it a fair characterization?

Michael G. Moore: Yes, Namin, but not entirely. I do, after all, write an editorial for each issue of the AJDE, and I give frequent conference presentations. I just returned from giving a keynote speech at a conference on research and distance education in Hong Kong. However, you are right in that I have regarded my main contribution since we set up the ACSDE to be that of a catalyst, a kind of "impresario," a person who stimulates, persuades, and nurtures others to come together and build this field—I mean the scholarly study of distance education—which, after all, just twenty or thirty years ago, hardly existed.

NS: Well, today we are going to be "speaking personally." From your résumé, I know your career falls into four phases, first in Africa, then North America, England, and finally here at Penn State. So I am going to ask you to talk a little about each of those periods. First, Africa. Is that where you got started in distance education?

MM: Yes. I worked for seven years at the University of East Africa in the adult education department. This was in the early 1960s, and adult education was very academic and formal. I looked for ways of becoming more involved with the learning needs of ordinary people in such areas as health, farming methods, setting up credit unions, and so on. These people were living in villages linked by poor roads with no telephones and, thus, had no access to sources of knowledge. I noticed that one means of communication was quite common, and that was battery-powered radios. So I became intrigued with the idea of using that technology as a means of bringing knowledge to the people in those African villages. I got into a radio studio, and that is how it all began.

NS: That seems a long way from most of what we read about today as the Internet takes over so much of distance education. In fact, people seem to have many different ideas about distance education. What is distance education to you?

MM: Well, technically, I would say, as I wrote nearly thirty years ago, that distance education is a subset of all teaching-learning programs, having the defining characteristic that, for all or most of the time, the teaching occurs in a different place from where the learning occurs, so that the normal or principal means of communication is through an artificial medium, either printed or electronic. I want to emphasize normal or principal and primary because there is distance of a kind (what later I referred to as "transactional distance") in all teaching-learning relationships, and in a classroom, for example, teachers may use communications media to supplement their personal instructionÐbut it is not the normal, principal, or primary means of communication. Another important way of discriminating between distance education and other forms of education where media are used is to ask: Where are the principal educational decisions made? Who is deciding What is to be learned? When and how is it to be learned? When has learning been satisfactorily completed? If such decisions are made in the classroom, this is not distance education. If they are made elsewhere and communicated by a medium, the program is defined as distance education. But then the field of study of learning that takes place in distance environments includes history, philosophy, design, learning, organization, administration, and policy, and even that is not all.

NS: To return to your own story, after Africa you moved to the University of Wisconsin. Why?

MM: In Kenya, I heard about the work of Charles Wedemeyer and decided I would like to work with him.

NS: We have your interview with Wedemeyer in this book. But why did you think it was important to work with him back in 1967-68?

MM: I only knew that he was seen as a kind of crazy visionary who was talking about using orbiting satellites for educating people who couldn’t get to class. Then I found that he had, in fact, developed a program in Wisconsin where they used all kinds of technology in what he called an "Articulated Instructional Media" program. By breaking down the teaching process into its parts and delivering these by radio, television, print, telephone, even primitive computer applications, he had developed the prototype of an industrial model of teaching that was later to become so successful in the British Open University (BOU). In fact, when he wrote to me, he wrote from England, where he was helping them design the BOU, which, as we now know, was to prove so influential in the history of distance education.

NS: So what happened when you got to Wisconsin?

MM: What I discovered was that the kind of private individual study that went on in the Articulated Media Project, or was beginning in the BOU, simply was not featured in the educational literature. I therefore set out to write a theory about teaching-learning in which the learners and teachers were not in the same place-time environment.

NS: The outcome was what we read about as transactional distance theory, which said that programs could be distinguished by the extent to which there was structure, dialogue, and learner autonomy?

MM: Yes, these were the macro-factors that defined the field. Incidentally, the term "distance education" was introduced in English after a conversation with Borje Holmberg, the first professor of distance education at the FernuniversitŠt in Germany. He told me about the German term "Fernstudium," or "distance study," which seemed to be the term to describe the subset of programs I was focused on. I did posit the term "telemathic" education, but that found no response from my readers, though it seems to be coming into fashion in recent years.

NS: Some modern critiques say that distance education is, in essence, a form of delivery method, not an independent field of study. What do you feel about that?

MM: It is true that increasing numbers of institutions and individual teachers are adopting the principles and practice of distance education in their conventionally organized courses and programs. So there is some convergence of the old and the new. This is accompanied by an odd tautological kind of thinking, as growing numbers of conventional educators are adding the use of the Internet to their teaching. Without actually changing the way they teach or are organized to teach, or their philosophy of education, they call themselves distance educators. They look at what they do, and seeing it is not very different from what they did before, they then assert that there is no difference between distance education and the conventional—which, if you accept their practice as representative of the field, would be true! If you do distance education well, though, you organize differently and you teach differently, and there are qualitative differences from conventional classes. As for being a field of study, surely it is reasonable for students to study in such areas as the history and philosophy of distance education, the different ways in which it is organized, its administrative demands, the problems and responses of learners, the different ways in which courses can be structured and interaction facilitated. There is just so much to be learned about these and similar topics that it is hardly possible to bundle them together with research focused on settings in which learners and teachers are in the same space-time environment—and I don't see why it should be a problem to study these questions in the distance environment, the same as other scholars focus specifically on higher education, or adult education, or preschool education.

NS: Let’s fast-forward. You moved from Madison to Canada then spent seven years at the BOU before returning to the US to teach at Penn State. Was distance education as big an interest at Penn State as it is now?

MM: There was no study of distance education at Penn State, and as in most universities at that time, distance education as a field of practice was very unfashionable, consisting almost entirely of correspondence courses. From my vantage point at the BOU, I could see how underdeveloped distance education was in the US. In August 1985, during one of my regular visits to the University of Wisconsin, I helped organize a conference on distance education and gave the keynote. I said that, in the US, we needed an annual conference on distance education, a national journal, a research agenda, and a series of graduate courses. Since the University of Wisconsin had successfully met the need for the national conference, when I arrived at Penn State I set about the other needs.

NS: The AJDE has been a success?

MM: Yes, it has. The College of Education and also Penn State’s Division of Continuing and Distance Education have been supportive of our efforts with the journal. The university approved the setting up of the ACSDE in 1986, and that gave us the administrative structure to attack our other objectives. We convened a first symposium on research in 1988 and, later, two other such symposia. To provide a network for discussion after the symposia, we started the electronic listserv known as the Distance Education Online Symposium (DEOS) somewhere around 1990, surely the first online network in distance education. In 1994, I was program chair of the first conference on internationalism in distance education, and among our more recent events have been the 1998 and 1999 national Institutes on Leadership in Distance Education. I truly believe we have made a major contribution to establishing and shaping the field of distance education research and scholarship, and I suppose of its practice as well.

NS: You also mentioned graduate study. What happened there?

MM: We started our first courses, Introduction to Distance Education, Course Design and Development in Distance Education, and Research and Evaluation in Distance Education, in 1989. These were amazingly successful, in several ways. First, we established a nucleus of students who, for the first time, saw distance education as a legitimate field of study. We really broke some new ground in that we made these courses into a kind of laboratory for experimenting with the delivery process as well as teaching the content, and we focused particularly on international and intercultural teaching at a distance. Between 1990 and 1995, we used computer conferencing as well as audio- and videoconferencing with groups of students in as many as a dozen cities in four countries—not just one-time teleconferences, but sustained three credit courses. These courses were recognized with awards from the National University Continuing Education Association and the American Society for Training and Development. Today, all the emphasis is on Web-based instruction—and I will be offering these same courses on the Web—but it will be hard to equal the excitement of those real-time audio- and videoconferences.

NS: In 1996, you took a leave of absence and went as visiting scholar to the World Bank. Tell us about that.

MM: I went on missions to South Africa, Russia, Brazil, and Egypt. I designed the first course of training inside the bank, on an esoteric subject about the currency choices that borrowing institutions have to make when they negotiate a loan. I did a similar project, a course in financial planning, for the IMF Training Institute. Among other things, I played a leading part in designing an online resource called the "Global Distance Learning Network."

NS: You like international work?

MM: Yes, I regard this as my main research agenda—with the nexus of distance education and economic development being my special strength. I am still involved in a large action-research project with the Ministry of Education in Brazil, where distance education is used in training 35,000 unqualified schoolteachers. A few months ago, I did a needs assessment in Peru. I am particularly proud of the work I did with the Ministry of Education in South Africa in the early days of the democratic government. But I have also worked a lot in developed countries, where I have been engaged in either systems design or program design or evaluation. I do a lot of "training the trainers" work. For example, I introduced distance education to universities in Finland, in Estonia, in Mexico, and to the armed forces of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.

NS: And in this country?

MM: I have done quite a bit over the years. Examples include work with The Annenberg/CPB Project, the University of Wisconsin Disaster Management Center, the US Army Forum Project, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the American Association of Teachers of German, and the Kentucky Department of Education. I was very pleased with the opportunity I was offered in the mid-'90s to work with the Florida Higher Education System. I played a big part in developing their state distance education system. But the favorite part of my personal action-research agenda focuses on development and on less-developed economies.

NS: With so much involvement in helping developing countries launch programs and infrastructure of distance education, what was the most exciting moment you felt in those practices?

MM: There is a moment that occurs from time to time that is not exactly exciting, but is certainly what keeps me going in international work. It is hard to describe. It is the moment of direct, eye-to-eye contact with simple people who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the program. So much of what we do is done at a distance from those people, in city offices, meeting rooms, working with well-educated colleagues. I may spend a couple of years in this way, advising on the infrastructure and the detailed design of the teaching program. The "peak experience" comes when, eventually, I am able to leave the city and the computer society and meet the people, usually rural people, for whom that work was done. The feedback—I don’t want to sound too sentimental, but the warmth of appreciation—from people in a Brazilian or African village for a program you have worked hard to give them is very touching. It is not so much excitement, as I said, but it is very, very meaningful to me.

NS: With all this background, over thirty years’, nearly forty years’ experience, what do you think of the state of distance education today? I imagine that the advances of information technology have had the effect of "boosting" the status of the field of distance education, especially in terms of public relations. Could you tell me what you see as a positive or negative side effect of this?

MM: There are lots of things to worry about today. In some ways, I am more worried in today’s climate of exuberant enthusiasm for distance education than I was when we were a very marginalized field of practice and study. It seems that everyone in education who can access the Internet thinks they are in distance education, and most think they are entering unexplored territory. They are not, of course. The basic research questions about learners, faculty attitudes and skills, organizational and administrative issues, policy, philosophy, even history did not begin with the Internet. The Internet is merely the latest communications technology, and it extends a history of research and practice going back to the beginning of the last century. If people will build their research on what is known, the research will have value, but when they gather data in a theoretical vacuum, ab initio with no connection to what is already known, most of it is a waste of time and energy. Unfortunately, as editor, I see a lot more of this naive empirical research than I used to.

NS: Is there any solution to this problem?

MM: I hope the influence of the AJDE (and here I should acknowledge the equally important influence of the refereed journals published in Canada, Australia, and Britain). I hope that together we can have an educational influence. Obviously, there should also be more training programs, but there are problems here because there are really no quality controls on the offering of training programs, so you are as likely to have courses offered by the people who most need training as you are to find courses from people who really know what they are talking about. Education, at least higher education, is an amazingly uncontrolled, unprofessional field. Can you imagine such license in, say, nursing or dentistry—a state of affairs in which virtually anyone can offer a course, regardless of what previous training that person may have? In higher education in general, and distance education in particular, there are virtually no knowledge or qualification prerequisites. It is very worrying.

NS: Your comment refers to research and training in higher education, but what about the current state of practice in what we sometimes call "delivery systems"?

MM: As well as what I called naive research, we have naive practice. More and more institutions are rushing to recruit distant learners by means of the Internet; most do not have the human resource management structures necessary to support good-quality design and delivery. They have structures set up to provide a very different type of educational service. I think it is very important for an institution, whether public or private, for profit or not for profit, to take stock of its resources, human and technical; make a careful analysis of its "market"; and decide if there is a niche that it can fill—some subject matter that it can deliver with a comparative advantage over any competitors. Then the institution can set up a system that focuses its resources on designing, delivering, and supporting a really high-quality instructional program for that specifically targeted audience. As with other dot.com enterprises, success in Internet delivery of distance learning will depend on providing a quality product, and that will require substantial investment, careful marketing, new organizational structures, and distance education pedagogical expertise. I am afraid there will be many failures before the current market will stabilize. I just hope the cause of distance education itself will not be damaged too much by the fallout.

NS: Distance education today seems to be driven not only by technology, but also by money. Is that right?

MM: Yes it is, at least in the US. Most of the world is not so preoccupied with the Internet as we are, and in a way, they are better off. I am sure that, if a country or an institution develops a good knowledge of design and delivery by various media, i.e. by text and also recorded and interactive audio and video, then when the Internet becomes available, they will be well placed to transfer their knowledge to the new technology. Our problem is we are moving directly from classroom teaching to the Internet with little knowledge of distance teaching in between. The BOU and the Indira Ghandi Open University in India, to take two examples, are better placed to take advantage of new technology because their programs are based on sound distance education pedagogy.

Something else that worries me about the recent developments is the change of mission. The core mission of distance education since its invention in the nineteenth century has been to open access to those who were denied opportunity in the conventional systems, especially in higher education. It seems that this mission to reduce inequality does not preoccupy many of the newer providers—who regard online distance education as a consumer commodity. It can be bought, if one has the purchasing power, but is inaccessible otherwise. Not only is distance education no longer able to achieve its traditional goal of narrowing the gap between those with greater knowledge and those who have less, but, in the online era, it may even contribute to widening the gap.

NS: So there are many things to think about as we go forward. What do you think about the globalization that we hear so much about?

MM: On balance, I welcome globalization. If we have a good sense of our values and a good understanding of the appropriate use of technology as a tool for providing good-quality design, delivery, and learner support, the scale on which we teach and learn can well be global and, at the same time, be benign, not harmful. I am aware of the fears of less-technologically advanced countries, and I think those fears are well founded. The North Atlantic consumer culture, supported by our educational and other institutions, is a powerful predator. However, what we have to do is understand the threat to the cultures, societies, and economies of those countries and try to deal with them. The answer is not to try to halt globalization of communications and the programs that global networks will deliver, because that cannot be successful.

Further, I think there are opportunities in the global market for smaller institutions and those in less-developed countries. As I said before about the institution within a country, a smaller country has to identify its global niche market, i.e., decide what content it has a comparative advantage in and plan to design and deliver, perhaps in partnership with a more powerful agency, its program in that content to a worldwide market. There is actually a place for every country, probably every institution and most teachers, in a global learning system. The challenge is to bring about the institutional and systems reorganization and restructuring that is necessary for each to play its more specialized role in a world knowledge economy. Such reorganization can come about as a result of intelligent planning or after the more brutal fallout resulting from competition in a free market. I fervently hope we can have more of the former and less of the latter.

NS: In your interview with Dr. Wedemeyer in 1987, you asked him whether it was a good time for researchers and scholars to get involved in distance education. Can I ask you the same question, now more than a decade later? If the answer is yes, as I presume it will be, what lessons from history would you like to give them?

MM: It is a good time to get involved, yes, but it is also a difficult time. The lesson from history is that, if you are going to get involved, put ahead of everything else a determination to abide by the rules and conventions of good quality. Cultivate and take pride in a reputation for quality. No quick results or quick fame will prove as valuable. Under current conditions, it is too easy to jump underprepared into the field, to get published on the Internet, and to add to and get lost in the babble of confusion that is threatening to drown good-quality research and also good practice. My hope and belief is that, after the noise subsides, the good-quality thinking, research, and scholarship will remain standing. So attach yourself to that vision. In practical terms, read back issues of The American Journal of Distance Education and the Canadian, British, and Australian journals. When you are reasonably well read, follow the traditions of good research as you frame your question and research it. In particular, be sure your question is based on previous research; give its research pedigree. These are very unoriginal points, but they have to be reiterated today when there is so much poor-quality work being churned out by people who simply do not bother to adhere to traditional standards of quality research.

NS: Michael, there are many more questions, and I am sure you have many more ideas to share with us, but that is all we have time and space for here; so, thank you for "speaking personally" with me.