SENTRALORGANET FOR FJERNUNDERVISNING PÅ UNIVERSITETS- OG HØGSKOLENIVÅ
(SOFF)

Abstract

Distance education is just as much subject to change as conventional education because of pressures from new technology, the changing market for higher education, and a changing political and economic environment. This chapter looks particularly at higher education institutions that offer both on-campus and distance courses. It argues that the role of distance education is changing in these institutions, but that while there is evidence of convergence through technology between on-campus and distance learning activities, we are in fact seeing a rapid expansion of distance education in nearly all major universities and many colleges. The reasons for these changes, and the implications for traditional campus based institutions of the growth of distance education, is explored in this chapter.

Introduction

A ‘dual mode’ institution is one that as well as offering regular programs on campus, also makes available a proportion of its courses in a distance format. This in fact is the oldest and possibly most established form of distance education in higher education.

Distance education units in dual-mode institutions are in fact facing many challenges as a result of changing markets, developments in technology, reduced government funding, privatization of higher education, globalization, and increased competition. To understand these pressures and the ways in which dual mode institutions can respond to these challenges, one has to understand a little of their history and context.

The history of dual-mode institutions

Major and highly reputable universities such as Queens University in Canada, the University of London in Britain, and the University of New England in Australia, have been offering distance education programs for over 100 years. (Mugridge and Kaufman, 1986, and Rumble and Harry, 1982, provide more details on the history of dual-mode institutions).

Distance education in dual-mode institutions has continued to flourish, despite the rise of autonomous single mode institutions such as the British Open University, the FernUniversität in Germany, and UNED in Spain (see Daniel, 1998). Dual-mode institutions seem to be more common in Federal state systems, such as Canada, Australia, South Africa and the USA, than in countries where higher education is under a single national jurisdiction, such as the UK, Netherlands and Spain. The Scandinavian countries seem to fall somewhere in between, in that they have resisted the move to single mode distance education systems. Although higher education in each country is under the jurisdiction of one single Ministry of Education, the size in terms of population are quite small, more akin to single states within a federal system. This may explain why Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland have all resisted concentrating higher education distance education within a single mode institution.

The size of the potential target group is another related factor. Single mode institutions depend on economies of scale. Daniel (1998) described the ‘mega-universities’, most of which are single mode distance education universities with over 100,000 students. In a federation of states or provinces, where higher education is the responsibility primarily of state or provincial governments rather than the Federal government, the numbers are generally too small within any single state or province to support a single-mode institution. Nevertheless, Athabasca University, and to some extent Télé-université in Quebec, have been successful in Canada, and UNISA in South Africa, in bucking this trend. Similarly, the National Technological University in the USA has also been able to operate successfully on a national basis, probably because it operates mainly at a Masters and post-graduate level (see Baldwin, 1993).

In general though, in Federal state higher education systems, dual-mode is the main form of organization for distance education. The main institutions involved have historically been the old land-grant universities, such as Penn State University and the University of Wisconsin in the USA. Also, those institutions with an original mandate to serve all the citizens of their state or province, or even cross-provincial regional needs, such as the University of British Columbia and the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, have tended to develop a distance education operation to complement their on-campus teaching. Although in the last 20 years, many new institutions have been established in different areas of a state or province, there are often programs still available from just one institution. Thus while we now have six universities in British Columbia, UBC is the only one with a medical school, and the only one offering graduate programs in a number of disciplines, such as Architecture and Social Work.

For such institutions, extension beyond the campus has been critical to their mandate, and hence distance education is one of several means used to reach out to farmers, professionals, and those who cannot afford to move to a campus away from their homes or jobs.

Guided independent study

A constant threat to the reputation off distance education has been unscrupulous commercial private correspondence skills and diploma mills. Diploma mills offer degrees that can be bought with little or no studying. Unlike the highly respectable private distance education colleges in Scandinavia, such as Hermods, NKS and NKI, unscrupulous private correspondence schools, mainly but not exclusively in the United States, offered programs with little teaching or student support and had low rates of successful completion.

Because private correspondence education got such a bad name in the 1920s and 30s in the U.S.A., many dual mode universities changed the names of their distance education programs to ‘guided independent study’, which describes accurately the form of print-based teaching supplemented by correspondence between a tutor and the student (Wedemeyer, 1977). Indeed, it was only in 1995 that the distance education unit at UBC changed its name from Guided Independent Study to Distance Education and Technology. The name change was necessary for several reasons, but the main one was because of the move to online learning.

Course development and delivery

Dual mode institutions cannot afford the large central course development costs, and in particular the large course teams, found in single mode institutions such as the British Open University (see Bates, 1995, for a discussion of this issue). Nevertheless, many dual mode institutions do have centralized distance education departments, with instructional designers, technology support staff, and student service staff, working together with the Faculties and central administrative services such as the Registry. My own unit at UBC now has a staff of 17, plus two research staff, producing 15-20 new courses a year and serving over 5,000 student course enrolments, with central funding. The normal practice in dual mode institutions is for a course developer and an individual faculty member to work together on the design of a distance education course, with the course developer drawing on specialist help such as Web programming, video production or graphics design, as needed.

However, in many dual-mode institutions, distance education is decentralized to each Faculty or School. There is evidence from my own province, and also supported by evidence from Australia, that when distance education is decentralized to Faculties and Schools, activity tends to decline compared with a centralized system, except in areas where there are major profit-making or revenue generating possibilities for Faculties.

The move to online learning

The advent of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s has had a remarkable impact on many universities, especially those who never before had any distance education programs. The development of software such as WebCT, Lotus Notes Learning Space, and Blackboard, has made it increasingly easier for professors to develop their own online teaching components. This is often called ‘distributed learning’ in North America and ‘flexible learning’ in Britain and Australia, and these terms are often used interchangeably with ‘distance education’. Even more confusingly, ‘distance education’ is sometimes reserved for the old-style correspondence programs, and ‘distributed learning’ is used for online learning (whether at a distance or not).

However, it is essential not to confuse these terms. I define distance education as a course or program where the great majority of the teaching and learning is conducted without teacher or students meeting each other, irrespective of the technology used for delivery. I define ‘distributed learning’ as a deliberate mix of face-to-face teaching and online learning (for instance one lecture or seminar a week, with the rest done online). I recognize though that ‘distributed learning’ is now commonly used to describe courses taught totally online.

Another confusion is caused by the fact that many of the courses described as online distance courses have not been designed from scratch as a distance course. For instance, many of the courses ‘outsourced’ are often no more than the faculty members’ lecture notes put up on the web, with e-mail and a discussion forum provided for communication between instructor and student. Sometimes a discussion forum or Web site is added to an existing print-based or cassette based correspondence course.

Research conducted at UBC found that students called this kind of course a ‘value-reduced’ rather than a ‘value-added’ approach to the use of technology, because it merely added more work for the students but did not provide anything new on which they would be assessed (Ruhe and Qayyum, 1999). For these reasons all our 35 online distance courses at UBC have been designed from scratch, so that the unique features of the Web, printed materials and online discussion forums can be exploited and fully integrated.

Nevertheless, the most common use of the Web is to support classroom teaching. Web CT reckons that in the over 1,400 universities now with a WebCT license, 80% of the use is to support classroom teaching. The University of Central Florida in the U.S.A. is one of the most advanced institutions using online learning, but even there the majority of courses combine face-to-face with online teaching (article). They report that grades are higher when face-to-face classes are combined with online learning, compared with straight face-to-face teaching or solely distance education (Dziuban et al, 1999).

The University of Central Florida has now established a Centre for Distributed Learning to serve all Faculties and Schools (http://distrib.ucf.edu/dlucf/home.html). Other institutions, such as the University of Wollongong and Griffith University in Australia, and the Universities of Alberta, Calgary, and Waterloo in Canada, have gone further and established Centres for Teaching and Learning (see, for instance: http://www.atl.ualberta.ca/). These centres combine faculty development, experts in new curriculum approaches, such as project-based learning, multimedia, distance education and evaluation specialists. Many research universities (such as UBC), however, do not like the idea of large central units, and instead a few have begun establishing small flexible learning units in each Faculty.

In most institutions, though, the predominant model for developing distributed learning is the Lone Ranger (Bates, 2000). The Lone Ranger is the individual faculty member, working alone or at best with a graduate student, to create his or her own on line course materials, with little or no support from the institution as a whole. Generally, this does not involve the development of a course delivered completely online. Usually it ranges from putting up lecture notes, to links to Web sites relevant to the subject area, personal collections of slides or graphics, e-mail communication with students, and perhaps an online discussion forum. Once such a site is created though, it is sometimes considered a small step to moving it entirely to online delivery.

The ease of use of software such as WebCT to create online teaching materials can be deceptive. With a team based approach, instructional designers provide project management, to keep development within budget and on schedule, select the most appropriate media and software for the learning task, develop professionally designed sites with easy navigation and clear and consistent graphic design. More importantly, a team approach frees up subject experts from doing things which take them a good deal of time and for which they are not trained, such as server maintenance, html mark-up, and graphic design.

Perhaps the biggest difference though between online distance learning and online learning supporting campus-based teaching is in the student support area. Even with on-campus distributed learning, professors are starting to complain about the workload associated with distributed learning - so many e-mails from students to respond to, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, and so many comments to read in the online forums. When the students are unable to come to campus, other problems start to arise: difficulty accessing the course over public telephone lines, not understanding what they are supposed to do, family problems delaying assignments, and the need for a regular assignment schedule to keep working and motivated, for example.

With the move to online learning, dual mode institutions are now seeing increased competition from private sector organizations. Some of these organizations, such as Hungry Minds and Eduprise in the USA, are approaching universities or more often individual departments, offering to ‘outsource’ the development of online distance education programs. Others, for instance publishers such as Addison-Wesley and Harcourt Brace, are now integrating Web sites with printed text books to offer online courses off the shelf to universities and colleges. WebCT started as a course authoring system, but now is branching into ‘value-added’ services, such as training in the development of online teaching, and course management systems.

The major challenge for institutions moving into distance education through online learning is to ensure high quality online teaching for off-campus students. This means not just getting materials up on the Web, but also teaching and supporting students online throughout the delivery of the course. Thus as well as content, professors have to start thinking about high quality media or web design and production, the best way to organize online tutoring, and above all instructional design issues for an increasingly wide variety of students.

Drivers of change

It would be fair to say then that in many universities we are currently in a state of transition and change. What is driving this change and how will it impact on distance education in our universities? There are several drivers of change, among them new markets for higher education, technology, and the commercialization of education.

New markets

Probably of most significance to distance education is the growing importance of lifelong learning. A competitive, globalized knowledge-based economy depends on continuing improvement and change. Education and training therefore does not stop with a B.A., an M.Sc., or even a Ph.D. Learning is literally for life. Universities need to respond to this with new programs, new qualifications and new means of delivery.

A typical lifelong learner is someone working mainly full-time, in a high-tech or service industry, with a family and a rich social and personal life. Such a learner requires ‘just-in-time’ and personally relevant content delivered conveniently and flexibly. Such potential students or their employers are able and willing to pay the price necessary to obtain the knowledge and qualifications they need. If they are professionals, they need access to the latest research and developments in their field. They will naturally look to their alma mater and in particular the public research universities for this education, but if they cannot find it there they will without hesitation to go other providers.

They will be more interested in small modules and short programs, in qualifications that can be built from small modules or courses, and in learning that can be done at home and fitted around work, family and social obligations. They will want their experience and knowledge taken into account with regard not just to admission to programs, but to their participation and contribution to knowledge creation. Their experience in work and ‘real’ life is as important to them as the professor’s research knowledge. They will want to be measured by what they can do, as well as what they know.

Therefore, our higher education systems will need to respond to the demands for prior learning assessment, flexible delivery of learning, professional updating requirements, non-credit certification and re-certification, and the measurement of learning outcomes.

The market for lifelong learning is huge. The Conference Board of Canada (1991) has estimated that ‘knowledge workers’ require at least the equivalent of three months education or training every five years just to stay competent in their field. If this was totalled across the workforce in most developed countries, this would require a doubling of the current post-secondary education system. Much of this growth will be addressed by the private sector, but for working professionals the link to research and new knowledge creation will be critical.

If our publicly funded universities do not respond to this challenge, they run a very serious risk. Lifelong learners are taxpayers, and have children. If the private sector provides the education that lifelong learners need, especially if it is not available from the publicly funded universities, support for the public education system will decline.

So far, though, despite steady growth in distance education and distributed learning and student enrolments which suggest increasing demand, most dual-mode research universities are still transfixed on attracting the best of the high school leavers. ‘Why,’ asked one UBC professor, ‘do we need to worry about attracting more mature students when we are turning away eight high school applicants for every place?’ The mistake is to think of this as a zero sum game: more mature students means fewer high school leavers. The lifelong learning market is an additional market that can by and large pay for itself.

Universities then will have to meet both markets if they are to survive. Distance education and distributed learning are just two of the means by which higher education can deliver to the size of the lifelong learning market.

Technology

Another major driving factor of change is technology. Technology is increasingly pervasive in all aspects of life. We book our holidays and air flights over the Internet, we send e-mail to our loved ones, we work with colleagues across the world.

One can legitimately question the wisdom and desirability of this, but if our students are to be properly prepared for a technological world, including their ability to assess its dangers and limitations, they need to both learn about it and through it. It is thus becoming increasingly recognized then that students need to know how to study using the Internet and multimedia, if they are to control them and use them wisely.

This is putting pressure on all teaching, and not just distance education, to make greater use of technology. Because such technologies are valuable both on and off campus, it is natural then to see a convergence between distance education and face-to-face teaching. While there are still differences, it is now much easier to move between the two previous solitudes.

The technology also has potential to improve the effectiveness of our teaching, while being more transparent to use. Access to resources over the Internet provides students with opportunities that were previously beyond their reach. Perhaps more importantly, technology, wisely used, facilitates the achievement of higher levels of learning suited to a knowledge-based society, through the use of simulations, games and decision making, based on expert systems.

Because technology is also now so pervasive in the workplace, and in particular through e-commerce, it is natural to think of integrating education and training within the work environment (‘just-in-time’ training).

Lastly, there are clearly both ideological and commercial pressures on education systems to make greater use of technology in teaching. There is increasing pressure on institutions to use technology in its teaching, from hardware suppliers such as IBM, through its ‘partnership’ with schools, colleges and universities to supply every student with a portable ‘ThinkPad’, and from software suppliers of course development and management software, such as WebCT. This can make it difficult for educators to avoid the use of technology, whether or not it has value.

Commercialization of higher education

There is also a growing tendency to treat education as a ‘business’. The CEO of the giant American network company, Cisco, has described education as the next Internet ‘killer application’. Education is seen as just another application of e-commerce. Many business people certainly see the lifelong learning market as one with people ready and willing to pay, a public education system that is fragmented, poorly organized , ‘inefficient’, increasingly underfunded, and hence under great stress: in other words, a ‘plum ready for the picking’, as one stock market analyst put it.

In response to this, more and more North American, British and Australian universities are looking to online education as a cash cow, and to protect themselves from increasing competition from the private sector. Indeed, several are making strategic alliances with private sector companies, to build on the private sector’s experience in business and marketing.

However, there are also many risks in this move to commercialize online learning. First of all, there are no real precedents to follow. Few if any organizations are currently making real money from commercialized higher education online courses. Margins are small and competition is fierce and growing. Quality issues remain problematic with commercial enterprises, especially in the area of student support and tutoring. There is a scarcity of qualified people with skills in instructional design and distance learning, and few universities have a workable long-term business strategy for online learning. In other words, all the major problems of e-commerce are found in spades in e-learning.

Nevertheless, the threat to the public sector is very real. The private sector will concentrate on those areas where profits are more easily made, such as business programs and information technology courses. However, it will leave those areas that cannot pay their way, such as many arts and social science programs, and possibly health science because of the high cost, to the public sector. With the loss of cross-subsidy, the higher education sector will be in even more financial trouble.

Even more seriously, the private sector will cream the best talent from the research universities, professors whose research has been funded by the state, and may still be working for the public universities, but who will be moonlighting for the private sector. Indeed, university professors may even be encouraged to do this by their employers, who otherwise would lose them altogether to the higher salaries they could earn in the private sector.

The only bright side is that business so far has not really understood the essence of higher education, and is therefore making many mistakes. However, the purses of those investing in e-learning in the United States are deep. While many mistakes will be made, and a lot of money lost, someone, somewhere is likely to find the way to make substantial money from e-learning

Barriers to change

To deepen the depression, there are many barriers that inhibit an appropriate response from higher education institutions.

Probably the biggest is the lack of interest of many professors in using technology for teaching. In most cases, this is based on a very considered rational decision. Without increased technical and instructional support from the institution, technology-based teaching and in particular the Lone Ranger model requires more skill and more effort than classroom teaching. When the rewards for appointment, tenure and promotion are driven primarily by research accomplishments, there is no incentive for professors to put more effort into their teaching.

Secondly, many university professors have no other model of teaching than the classroom method. University teaching is basically an apprenticeship system, watching the ‘master’ or more senior teachers and copying them. As a result, many university teachers are unaware off the importance of instructional design, or team approaches to teaching with technology.

Third, there are major financial implications for universities and colleges seriously wishing to use technology for teaching. While the potential for revenue generation from online learning is there, it will require major investment if it is to be do be done well. A conservative estimate based on best practice examples is that at least 5% of the total teaching budget needs to be spent on technical and instructional support staff for professors (Bates, 2000). In addition, there is a steep learning curve for professors in getting up to speed in using new technologies, and because the technology is constantly changing, there is a large hidden cost in the time of professors learning to keep abreast.

Probably though the biggest challenge is the lack of vision and the failure to use technology strategically. The focus is still on the local high-school leaver, and on enriching the classroom experience through technology. The technology however allows institutions to deliver education globally, to reach out to the continuing professional education market, and to use technology to change in fundamental ways the organization and delivery of teaching. This will not happen though without major re-organization and cultural change within higher education institutions.

Conclusions

The protected, cloistered life that has been the tradition of universities for hundreds of years is now under serious threat. We are moving more towards a ‘consumer-driven’ market for higher education, where students and parents are having to pay more, and hence are demanding more, where governments expect greater accountability, and where the private sector is offering serious competition to state-funded universities.

At the same time, there is growing differentiation in the market. Universities in the past have tended to be a ‘finishing school’ for young people, between leaving school and going on to work. The student body has traditionally been drawn from relatively local recruitment areas. Most students have been in the 18-24 age range, studying full time. Once qualified with a bachelor or graduate degree, the students would not return.

This is now rapidly changing, at least in North America. As tuition costs increase and government grants and subsidies decrease, more and more students are working their way through university on a part-time basis. Once in the labour market after graduation, they are finding they need to continue studying to remain competitive in a fast-changing work environment. Particularly for such students, distributed learning and distance education provide flexible alternatives to time and place dependent full-time education.

Despite, though, the increased competition from the private sector, and from other universities now operating on a global basis, dual mode universities still have a number of advantages. Probably the main competitive advantage for a dual mode university is its research base. New knowledge can be rapidly disseminated well beyond the campus through distributed and distance education. Institutions that focus their global distance education activities on those areas where they have an international research reputation will be able to develop ‘niche’ markets. Their competitiveness will increase even more if they partner or collaborate with other research institutions whose research activities complement each other.

Dual mode institutions with a history of effective distance education also have a major advantage over institutions just entering this market. While online teaching requires a different approach to course development and tutoring, many of the design principles and nearly all the student support requirements transfer well from print-based correspondence education to online learning, whether for on-campus or off-campus delivery. The awareness of the importance of instructional design and student support systems, combined with already existing funding and infrastructure, reduces the risk of failure in online learning compared with new institutions entering the market.

Also for many universities the campus remains an advantage. Combining face-to-face teaching with online learning provides a richer learning context and enables differences in learning styles and preferences to be better accommodated, and in particular enables universities to respond better to the new student demographics.

Finally, though, competition from the private sector and from foreign universities is growing rapidly and will continue to grow. If universities do not respond with imagination and flexibility to a rapidly changing student clientele they will lose students to these competitors and will increasingly lose public support and hence state funding. Their ability to respond appropriately will depend on institutional vision, strategic use of learning technologies and distributed learning, the identification of ‘niche’ markets, and above all a willingness to implement radical changes in organization and structure to support new approaches to teaching.

References