In 1992, I
was invited by the American Center for the Study of Distance Education to
project long-term trends in the field.
It was an interesting time to be looking forward. We were about a decade into the
rise of video in distance education—the movement from correspondence study to
broadcast telecourses and satellite-delivered live interactive courses (the
latter of which had spurred creation of NUTN in the early 1980s), but it was
clear that the Internet was on the horizon. I identified four trends:
·
The simultaneous
diversification and convergence of technologies.
·
Changing
relationships with students
·
Changing
relationships among institutions
·
The emergence of
a new mainstream
On
the technology side—this was a year before the first web browser I hasten to
note—there were already multiple ways to deliver video, audio, and print and to
facilitate interaction through all three media. It was clear, however, that, amid this diversity,
institutions needed to think in terms of convergence. We could not afford to have video, audio, print, and
computer all in separate organizational silos. My prediction was that “organizational structures that do
not facilitate a mixing of technologies will find it difficult to reach their
full potential in this new environment.” This, in turn, would create a “new institutional
infrastructure” where use of technology for instruction would be considered
alongside its use for administrative and research applications, creating a
“broader community of interest.”
If
that was true for the technologies of the early 1990s, it is true in spades
today as we consider how the Internet has changed the university infrastructure
and created new communities (or, in the absence of these communities, has
paralyzed innovation) at our institutions.
The
second trend was a changing relationship between our institutions and our
students and, particularly, the rise of synchronous and asynchronous “learning
communities” as a critical pedagogical issue. I also mentioned another relationship issue: the rise
of the “empowered student” or “community of scholars” as a result of students
having better direct access to large databases, video and textual
materials—what we now call “learning objects.” This trend, I suggested, “will require that we rethink
our definition of instruction, our assessment of learning, and our ideas about
curriculum.”
Today,
we are still experimenting in this area, but with much higher stakes as the Web
moves from a publishing environment to a collaboration environment and we enter
what some are calling a “conversation economy.” Blogs, wikis, Facebook, You-Tube, social
bookmarking—all of these Web 2.0 applications are creating a demand for a new,
more collaborative, more inquiry-oriented approach to learning—on campus and
off—that reflects how people use technology at work and at home. The goal posts have moved a long
way ahead of us on this issue, but there are some great things happening around
the world as educators experiment with these new tools and as institutions and
governments begin to set new policies on sharing content.
The third trend area was a forecast that
the use of new technologies would also change relationships among institutions. The examples I cited in 1992—the
University of Mid-America, the International University Consortium, the
National Universities Degree Consortium and the Mind Extension University—have
long since passed from the scene, but we are seeing new forms of
collaboration. Two examples point
to the scope of change that is now gathering momentum: the Great Plains Interactive Distance
Education Alliance (IDEA) and its mission of offering collaborative online
degree programs for adults that no single institution can offer alone, and the
CourseShare initiative in the CIC—the academic counterpart of the Big Ten—which
uses online learning to share rarely-taught language across institutions to
regular, full-time undergraduates on campus. When you look internationally, you can begin to
see potential that is just now being explored. In the international sphere, collaboration takes many
forms. Almost every regional
association for open and distance education has an initiative to develop
quality standards that will facilitate sharing, for instance. There are individual examples of institutions
sharing courses at the graduate level, such as Penn State, the Universities of
Leeds and Southampton in the UK allowing their graduate students to take online
courses in Geographic Information Systems from each other’s programs. Perhaps the most dramatic collaborative
initiative internationally is the Open Educational Resources movement. Here, the potential was
articulated by a leadership group that met in Cape Town, South Africa, and
issues the “Cape Town Declaration:”
…we
call on educators, authors and institutions to release their resources openly.
These open educational resources should be licensed to facilitate use,
revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone, ideally imposing no
legal constraints other than a requirement by the creator for appropriate
attribution or the sharing of derivative works. Resources should be published
in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a
diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be
available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people
who do not yet have access to the Internet.
I
projected one other trend back in 1992:
The emergence of a new mainstream in American higher education in which
distance education is fully integrated into a broader institutional strategy to
respond to what I called the “currents of social change.” This has been a little less
easy to track, but I suspect each institution represented here has seen some
evidence of this kind of convergence.
At Penn State, for instance, our online distance education program, the
World Campus—which offered its first fully online courses a decade ago—is now a
leading part of a broader institution-wide consortium called Penn State Online
that tries to coordinate among the many different applications of online
learning for students on campus and inter-campus, as well as at a
distance. Several degree
programs developed for distance education are now being offered as “blended”
programs at some of our smaller campuses; some academic colleges have created
their own online services to support on-campus instruction and then make these
courses available to World Campus students. We an also point to project like the National enter for
Academic Transformation and the CIC CourseShare initiative as examples of
distance education techniques being used to improve instruction on campus.
Another
evidence of convergence—of the mainstreaming of distance education—is the
incredible growth in the number of institutions that now offer degree programs
online to off-campus students and, equally important, a commitment not just to
courses, but to complete degree programs. As far back as 2004, the annual Sloan survey, Growing by Degrees, reported that 44
percent of all institutions that offered Master’s degree programs offered at
least one program online.
Sixty-five percent of institutions were using primarily core faculty to
teach their online courses—a rate comparable to face-to-face courses. In short, online distance
education is emerging as an ongoing commitment of academic units, reflected in
the long-term commitment to degree programs and to the assignment of core
faculty to serve both on-campus and distant students.
The
most recent Sloan report—Online Nation—notes
that the number of students taking at least one online course has growth to
3.48 million in 2006, more than double the number reported four years earlier
(p.7). While the Sloan
surveys do not distinguish between truly distant students, full-time commuter
students, and resident on-campus students, I think it is safe to assume that
this dramatic growth is the result not just of increases in adult students at a
distance but also increases in the number of commuter students taking online
courses for convenience and scheduling flexibility, and the number of full-time
on-campus students taking online course as part of their campus
curriculum. In fact, a Penn
State undergraduate student told me last year that he has not had one semester
in which he did not have at least one course that had a significant online
component.
However, online learning is not having
an equal effect at all institutions.
Online Nation reported that
the greatest impact is in public colleges and universities, with community
colleges leading, followed by public universities. The impact has been least felt on private, baccalaureate
institutions (p. 12). In
other words, those institutions that have a mission to serve off-campus or
commuter students are more likely to fully embrace online distance education
than those whose mission is more campus-centric. Interestingly, a clear majority--59.1 percent--of
academic leaders now see online learning as “critical to the long-term
strategy” of their institutions (p.16).
Clearly
distance education and the mainstream have converged and, in the process, the
mainstream has been changed and distance education—at least in some cases—has
been more fully embraced—or is being re-invented—as a strategy for the total
institution. This has been
driven partly by market forces—the rising importance of continuing education
for adults who are already in the workforce, by the need for local institutions
to more effectively compete for commuter students, and by the growing
willingness of traditional-age students to study online. Last, but certainly not least, the
convergence has been driven by economics—the need to cut costs and improve
efficiency on campus and the need to generate new tuition revenues from
nontraditional students in light of reduced government funding and increased
competition.
All
that said, today, we are working in a vastly different environment—both inside
and outside our institutions—than when distance educators began experimenting
with online 15 years ago.
People have begun to notice that the Information Revolution is not so
much about how quickly information is broadcast, but about how it brings people
and ideas together in new ways. We
are beginning to realize that the Knowledge Society, in reality, is a “Skills
Society.” Providing access,
convenience, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness will continue to be important
issues, but the emerging question for the next decade or so is: how can we help individuals learn how
to build and sustain new communities built around collaboration and sharing of
knowledge to solve both local and, increasingly, global problems? For those of us in distance education,
the challenge is more focused: How
can we use what we’ve learned about online distance education to help transform
our institutions to meet the needs of this emerging society?
We
can envision a broader strategic horizon in which distance education is a key
part of a more complex picture, one that includes fully online courses offered
to students both on campus and at a distance, hybrid courses offered on campus
and through continuing education, blended programs that mix distance education
and site-based experiences, and, more generally, an academic environment in
which e-learning is seen as a utility available to all faculty and students. Access will continue to be a critical
strategic issues, along with efficiency on campus and, perhaps most important,
continuing to evolve a new pedagogy that responds to the new needs of
individuals and their communities.
A generation into the Information Revolution, some new trends are
emerging that may signal where we need to go. All of them have something to do with the idea of
building community, so let me use that as an organizing metaphor.
Traditionally,
we tend to think of communities as local. A community is a village or a
neighborhood of people who live inter-dependent lives. You may own the town bank, but my son
teaches your daughter in the local school. The kids we went to school with grow the food we eat, work,
run the shops where we buy what we need, attend the same churches, etc. In a globalized economy that kind
of highly localized interdependence is harder to find. Online learning removes geographic and
time as defining characteristics of interaction. We need to re-perceive the whole idea of community to
understand how we are inter-dependent in today’s world and to develop the
skills needed to work together in a new environment. For higher education, this has implications at several levels:
At
the institutional level, we need to
re-define the communities we serve and re-articulate our mission in those
communities. For most of us,
distance education has meant reaching very far beyond our local campus
community in order to aggregate markets for specialized programs or serve
widely dispersed professional groups. The very first Penn State teleconference
through NUTN, as an example, allowed our Nuclear Engineering faculty to share
with their colleagues around the country what they had learned from analyzing
videotape of the core at the Three-Mile Island nuclear plant after the accent
there. Today, we are
starting to see institutions use online distance education as a way of more
effective serving local commuting students who cannot always come to
campus. In addition, the movement
toward blended programs is allowing institutions to more easily develop
programs that respond to local needs by mixing on campus and online activities.
Online dual enrollment courses—which allow high school students to
simultaneously earn high school graduation credit and college undergraduate
credit—signal another new relationship between higher education and the schools
that is another trend in this area.
These are starting points for rethinking how our institutions relate to
our local communities.
At
the faculty level, new kinds of
academic communities are emerging that may redefine the relationship between
faculty members and their institutions in the long run. Projects like the CIC’s CourseShare,
the Great Plains IDEA, and the Worldwide University Network’s shared
programs—all of which I mentioned earlier—bring faculty from multiple
institutions into an inter-institutional community where they can expand the
impact of their specialized research.
And, of course, the Open Educational Resources movement—something that
began outside the distance education community but that presents great
opportunities for it—allows faculties to retain control of their intellectual
property so that they can share it with colleagues around the world.
Central
to this transformation is the student.
Here, “community” has two meanings. The first is the need to prepare students—of all ages—to
become effective citizens and professionals in this new society—call it a
conversation economy, an age of cognition, a knowledge society, a global
information society, etc. Today’s
world demands that people have the skill to work collaboratively across
boundaries and to participate in communities that are not defined by geography
and time. This, in turn,
calls for a new pedagogy that redefines what we mean by a “learning
community.” For most public
colleges and universities—which need to be responsive to workforce and
community needs—the new environment demands a curriculum that not only ensures
that students gain discipline-based core knowledge but that also emphasizes
active and collaborative learning, inquiry-based approaches that help students
create useable knowledge out of information and apply that to solving
problems. One can envision
this as a new general education—not an introduction to the disciplines, but the
development of general skills and attitudes that cut across all
disciplines. Recent
innovations with Web 2.0 innovations—blogs, wikis, etc.—point the way, but there
is much to do before a new pedagogy is fully understood, accepted, and
integrated into a new curriculum.
Finally,
we can apply the “community” metaphor to new relationships that are beginning
to emerge between institutions.
We can anticipate more collaborative degree programs, especially at the
graduate level. We can also
anticipate that Open Educational Resources movement will stimulate new
partnerships among institutions that have related specialties and between
universities in developed countries and those in developing or transitional
countries. These new partnerships
most likely will be highly variable.
Some may focus on undergraduate curricula, others on graduate programs
or collaborative research that builds institutional capacity, or assistance to
industries served by multiple institutions. Later
this month, for example, the Inter-American Organization for Higher Education
is holding a meeting in Ecuador to explore the idea of collaborative doctoral
programs—what the organizers are calling “sandwich” programs—in which faculty
members from Latin American institutions can earn their doctorates from
Northern institutions while building a research capacity at their home
university. The programs would use
online elements to reduce the amount of time Latin American faculty members
would spend away from their home institutions, in an attempt to reduce the
academic brain drain.
The
international dimension of distance education in a transformed university was
brought into focus by Stemenka Uvalic from UNESCO, at
a distance education conference sponsored by CREAD in Ecuador in May 2008. She painted this picture in her
keynote: There are now 132 million
postsecondary students worldwide; China and India have doubled their
enrollments in the past decade.
However, countries are having trouble funding capacity to handle
demand. This has stimulated three
trends: (1) new private (profit and nonprofit) institutions that do not receive
government funds (she noted that 80% of postsecondary students in Japan are now
in private institutions); (2) student mobility-2.4 million students went abroad
in 2004, with 1 in 16 postsecondary students from Africa going abroad; and (3)
the growth in open and distance learning (ODL). The number of open universities has doubled in Commonwealth
countries; the number of for-profit online providers is growing globally. This has an impact on student
mobility. Fully a third of all
international students enrolled in Australian institutions studied from their
home country in 2004. Uvalic
projected that “cross-border distance education may become the most significant
development” in the years ahead.
Clearly,
distance education has converged with the mainstream of higher education over
the past decade. The challenge for
the future is for us to help stimulate a broader transformation that will allow
higher education to meet the emerging needs of a maturing knowledge society in
which very local communities are affected by global events. This is a momentous year on several
fronts. On December 10, we will
celebrate the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of
Human Rights. Distance education
organizations around the world are collaborating to produce special issues of
their journal to recognize the unique role of distance education in providing
equitable access to education. But
this is also the 40th anniversary year of the assassinations of
Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, both of whom died in the process of
trying to make real the ideals of the Declaration. It is a reminder to us that these rights are not “natural
laws” but need to be claimed and made new in every generation. Higher education is a unique
institution when it comes to helping our communities and individuals in them
fulfill the promise of the Declaration. Our generations are lucky to be working at a time when
distance education has the potential to help our institutions realize the
mission of public education in a new and more complete way than has ever before
been possible as our institutions adapt themselves to the needs of the
Information Age. We can’t do this on our own, but I think the distance
education community—all of us in this room—have the experience and, as a
result, the perspective, that can help stimulate and guide change in each of
our institutions. It is an
important challenge and a wonderful opportunity at the same time.
Thank
you again for the Distinguished Service Award and for allowing me to share
these ideas with you today.
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