We will now turn to a discussion of "distance education." Distance education was mentioned several times amongst the suggestions for new topics in CRISTAL-ED LISTSERV volume 6. Maurita Peterson Holland is our guest editor for this topic. Maurita is a faculty member of SILS at the University of Michigan. She is interested in the application of emerging information technologies in classroom and distance-independent learning. In winter semester 1995, she taught a course with Professor Judy Weedman at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Holland and Weedman used ISDN-based conferencing, CUSeeMe, and other collaborative tools to teach simultaneously. Maurita's research centers on engineers' utilization of technical information. She currently heads an ARPA/TRP grant at SILS which is part of a Cooperative Network for Dual-Use Information Technology to create innovative partnerships between community colleges and small- to mid-sized firms using multimedia and simulation training and deploying virtual teams with the goal of increasing the competitiveness of the manufacturing workforce.
Thanks Maurita for taking on the guest editorship of the CRISTAL-ED LISTSERV for a two-week discussion on distance education.
Maurita Holland
mholland@umich.edu
Education at a distance from the primary instructor has been available for many years via correspondence, and more recently, satellite TV. While such one-to-many instruction at a distance has played a major role in educating millions of people outside the United States, distance education in the U.S. has generally been deployed for continuing education or as an extension service of a university.
As the cost of on-site university education rises, as technologies develop for point-of-use video/audio connections, as demand for highly-specialized courses in esoteric specialties is sparsely dispersed, and as the rapidly-changing workplace requires continuous learning from its employees, universities are considering distance independent learning as a potential solution.
In early May, the CIC Provosts convened a meeting of faculty, along with academic and technology administrators, to discuss the feasibility of joint efforts within the organization to develop the administrative policies and structure along with the shared technologies to extend the classrooms of each campus to those of the other institutional sites and beyond. Ideally efforts amongst these schools will take advantage of the wide variety of one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many tools which are evolving at as rapid pace, many at the personal computer level and at a cost which most can afford. Ultimately we are challenged to consider the nature of a university education in the next century.
With Kellogg support at SILS during the Winter 1995 term, we offered two courses using two-way interactive audio and video conferencing in the classroom and at the desktop along with Internet Web pages and conferencing for students at the University of Illinois and at UC-Berkeley. This experience provided an opportunity to explore state-of-the-art ISDN (AT&T Vistium) and desktop conferencing (CUSeeMe), collaborative tools for group work (Timbuktu, HyperNews) and development of a set of all-digital course materials (Web). Most importantly, these experiences provided opportunity to consider several important dimensions of distance-independent learning.
In closing, distance independent learning (DIL) is a very broad term and could mean anything from a correspondence course for thousands of students to a one-to-one computer-mediated instructional interaction. It might be applied to degree programs or to continuing education.
What forms of DIL have you experienced? Please share your observations!
At UW-Superior (UW-S), we provide library science as an undergraduate minor leading to certification at the Wisconsin Department of Instruction 901 level: initial instructional library media specialist. Though the minor is designed to educate students for service in school library media centers others have used it to secure positions in other types of libraries as well as a springboard for graduate studies in library and information sciences. We will be offering our first distance-education class this forthcoming fall using interactive audio/video. We're excited about the possibilities because we service a large, sparsely populated geographic area, where many of the folks are home bound or would have to drive huge distances for on-site classes.
We've entered into a cooperative/collaborative arrangement with two of our sister institutions within the UW-Wisconsin system: the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (UWEC) and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UW-MIL) to provide library and information science coursework at a distance. What UW-S and UWEC have agreed to do is to rotate teaching the four basic courses common to both of our curriculums: cataloging, reference, administration, and collection development among our two campuses. In the fall of 1995, the reference course will originate at UW-S while the collection development course will originate at UWEC, about 160 miles from Superior. Both courses are offered for undergraduate and graduate credit, thus folks taking the courses for graduate credit would be eligible to transfer their coursework to the ALA-accredited master's program at UW-Milwaukee (approximately 400 miles from Superior). The courses will go out to several sites affiliated with the two regional networks that service UW-S and UWEC. We're excited about the possibilities that distance education will provide students in our geographic region. Further, we anticipate that the cooperative/collaborative effort with UWEC will enable us to upgrade our certification offerings.
We share many of the concerns that have been suggested in the introductory message for this issue, but we also have a concern that I didn't see mentioned which is a dilemma for us and ought to be for anyone involved with distance education, and that is how do we provide the same levels of support services to students at a distance, e.g., library access and information and advisement? The UW-System is just initiating a study concerning the use of a technology fee and has specifically identified library access as a service that cannot be supported by revenues from the fee. The fees appear to be pretty much earmarked for the technology itself and for direct support of the classes, e.g., network fees. That approach assumes that libraries will be able to absorb the information needs of students within existing library allocations. I don't see how we can do that totally because distance education students are going to have unique needs that are going to be more costly than on-site library services. Further, arranging the internships/student teaching kinds of experiences that are required for certification are going to place an additional cost on library instruction programs.
All of this is to say that there are a lot of issues which need to be addressed in order to make the system work. I think it has a great deal of potential and will be the wave of the future for a lot of us. Here at UW-Superior, we're excited about the potential for distance education in the delivery of library science education. We're jumping in with both feet, and we anticipate a healthy response to our course offerings. We'll be interested in how others are approaching distance education and what thoughts they have, both practical and theoretical, about its application.
Another cost is the travel and stay at campus for a brief residency for each course. But this has been an important component for us, and I think has contributed to the low dropout rate. Only three people have dropped out from those who started in summer 1994. There are 34 of us, most in our forties, and having the group is a strong support factor. The professors contribute in active course LISTSERVs.
Motivation needs to be high. The 36 cr. program is $17,000 ($479 per credit hour). To get done quicker, there is the option of doing two courses per semester, where one stays for back-to-back 4-5 day residencies. I think some do this to qualify for Stafford loans, as one must take 6 credits per semester to qualify for this loan.
Incidentally, the reference course was taught by two Wisconsin professors.
>an interesting and timely topic. i once heard a library administrator predict that those universities who best position themselves to provide distance education are the ones who will survive in the 21st century. i scoffed at the prognostication at first but upon further reflection and now finding myself getting into the act here in northwestern wisconsin i'm not so sure that the person isn't on the mark.
Seeing this from Wisconsin, reminded me that distance learning is not a new concept, but the application of new technology to an old concept. The University of Wisconsin-Extension has supported "distance learning" for a long, long time.
But -- another issue which needs to be addressed is the issue of "socialization." Is part of any educational program, especially one in a profession, to teach the student to "think like a librarian (or whatever)?" If so, then does this happen when people are each sitting at their own remote terminal? Does it happen if they spend only a few days per class together?
I'm not sure, and I don't recall that the discussion a couple of years ago among the ALISE (Ass'n for Library and Information Science Education] came to any resolution either. However, at present at least some universities seem to be rushing into technology-supported distance ed on the assumption that it will save them money and/or that they need to get on the bandwagon. Fortunately, groups like CRISTAL-ED are at least trying to deal with the real issues.
Thanks, Bob Carmack, for bringing up the finance issue: If I teach a classroom full of, say 30 people, that's one class. I am not expected to teach more than 3 or 4 such classes a semester. If I teach in one studio, and teach 100 students via d.e., is that more than 3, only one, or none? And, if I design an interactive CD, after the first try, do I get any royalties, residuals, or even any credit for continuing to "teach" that class?
One might make the case that the end result of distance education in the minds of some of its supporters is to eliminate the pesky human element. I hope not (for more than merely self interest).
I seem to recall that the development of the telephone was supposed to reduce or eliminate the need for large business office concentrations. Compare what New York, or Tokyo looked like in, say 1880 with 1980.
I am interested that the comments on the one distance education program noted the value of the short on-campus sessions, even with the other expense.
However, there are also some serious disadvantages which deserve consideration if the developmental path of distance education is to be an improving trend. I believe that the discourse surrounding this topic has been overwhelmingly positive in part due to a perception that the alternative to distance education is, essentially, nothing. Even if this were the case, it would not remove the onus on distance education models to establish the proof of their value in the educational marketplace.
Eloise Green is right to point out that student motivation needs to be high in order to participate in such a venture. The interpersonal communication we take for granted in our day-to-day lives comes at a premium in any distance learning experiment. Even with audio and video links it can be extremely difficult to recreate the sense of connection between participants that occurs in a traditional classroom. After all, the camera eye and microphone determine who we can see and what we can hear at any given time; everything else is just "noise."
E-mail and other modes of telecommunication can be important tools for establishing dialog and reducing the sense of alienation among isolated individuals. However, this thread of connectivity is a tenuous one at best. Certain quirks of human nature may come into play during a distance learning experiment that can't be eradicated by a mere stream of electrons. In my experience, many individuals are far less accountable to people far away than they are to those nearby. Bear that much in mind when it comes to choosing partners for a distance collaboration...
There is a very real possibility that the very technologies which enable distance education "classes" may overshadow the course content to an unacceptable degree. Some of these technologies are still fairly new and somewhat unreliable. The novelty of using them is distracting enough, but when they go down, or otherwise fail to perform as expected, it can be very difficult to proceed as though nothing has happened! Even more significantly, these disruptions steal away valuable class time that rightly belongs to the course material -- presumably what people take courses for in the first place. Unless these and other problems can be addressed and dealt with, future participants in the distance education experiment may be only those driven by the most dire necessity.
Over the years the military (!) have had some of the most professional and long term experience with distance education. The USAF AFIT (Air Force Institute of Technology) courses and some of the professional courses for promotion are offered virtually worldwide. One of the key elements they include in such programs is either a small group of peers that works through the course work together or a mentor situation in which, ideally there is one mentor per student. Wonder of wonders, the professional programs are usually backed up by collections in the base libraries. We should be so lucky as to have libraries that are "in the picture" and coupled tightly to the educational process!
Industry does a lot of distance education as well, even though it is usually called "training". You bet that they do a lot more checkpoints to see that students are learning the material, study groups, and packetized support materials than we tend to do.
The one problem I've always encountered with the courses I teach, which have technical content, is lack of lab support. Administrators seem really reluctant to work with each other to set up special fees, arrange lab use and so forth. Maybe its just the folks I've worked with, but, back to the military, setting up host-tenant agreements is not a big deal. In academia there is so much turf-protection going on that what should be routine staff work can become wound up in a bizarre contest of wills.
I sure second everyone else's suspicion, that budget is a major concern in distance education. I think I've seen a real reluctance to charge fees greater than those for a main campus course, even though logistics may be entirely different for the instructor, not to mention the cost of whatever telecommunication agent is used. There is a bit of administrative overhead in setting up user fees for labs and such too, that should be done in advance of the semester.
Enough -- I'm not a specialist in this area although I've done some extension teaching, both by wire/satellite and onsite. The two elements I do feel most strongly about are 1) using study groups or mentoring and 2) having a strong local support plan.
During the next few days, I'd like to turn our attention to ways in which we think distance-independent learning technologies might be used to further enhance the learning experience or extend our classrooms. For example, we might create a course based on experts far-removed from our campus or bring such guest lecturers into the classroom using conferencing technology. We might develop new paradigms for academic instruction partnerships with remote-site practitioners or create virtual environments for hands-on labs using Web WR tools.
What opportunity spaces do you see in the emerging technology for significant changes in how the educational process might grow and evolve?
By the way, the on-campus courses should be just as organized as the distance education courses. We might see some improvement on campus as a result of using distance education instructional and support strategies.
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