VOLUME 11, NUMBER 3, 1997
Editorial
Quality in Distance Education: Four Cases
Michael G. Moore
Articles (for abstracts,
click here)
Social Presence as a Predictor of Satisfaction within a Computer Mediated
Conferencing Environment
Charlotte N. Gunawardena and Frank J. Zittle
Competitive Marketing of Distance Education: A Model
for Placing Quality within a Strategic Planning Context
Andrew J. Mowen and Sara C. Parks
Copyright Law, the Internet, and Distance Education
Anita Colyer
Online Graduate Degrees: A Review of Three Internet-Based
Master's Degree Offerings
Robert W. Strong and E. Glynn Harmon
Interview
Speaking Personally with A. Frank Mayadas
Gary E. Miller
Book Reviews
Web-Based Instruction
edited by Badrul H. Khan
Daniel Granger
Distance Learning: A Step-by-Step Guide for Trainers
by Karen Mantyla and J. Richard Gividen
Shirley M. Davis
EDITORIAL
Quality in Distance Education: Four Cases
Michael G. Moore
While I have no doubt that distance education courses can be at least as good as conventional courses, there is also no doubt that a considerable proportion of distance education courses (as well as conventional ones) are of dubious quality. To explore the differences in quality, I would like to mention four cases-not actual institutions, but based on real cases with which I have been involved.
Case One
The first case is a multi-national, for-profit corporation. (I chose this
as the main case because it is removed from the university sector where
most readers of AJDE are to be found, however, close parallels can be
found with practice within the university).
The organization has decided to use distance education methods to train its staff, located in offices around the world. Its organizational culture is very hierarchical, with particular deference given to the chief executive officer.
It is this person who instigated the distance education initiative. He was intrigued by what he read about one-way video/two-way audio, and he dreamed of a chain of video conference sites around the world. His worldwide staff could assemble at these sites to receive instruction from the organization's training division without the trainers or the staff having to travel to a central training facility. Not only would staff be kept up-to-date with what was happening in the company and in their technical field, but the training would be considerably cheaper than the cost of the residential courses that have been the company's traditional approach to training.
Money is not a problem, so a studio is purchased, receive sites set up, and company trainers told to prepare their lectures for presentation on the video-network. One month after the sites are established, the first course begins, with an accounting expert presenting the same lectures he gives in the residential school, only now over the video-system. His lectures run for one hour, with half an hour for questions; they are held once a week for ten weeks.
Case Two
A university president sets up a faculty committee whose purpose is to
propose a policy for developing distance education in the university.
As a result of the committee's report, he establishes a fund to provide
workshops and otherwise help individual faculty learn to use technology.
Many faculty take a course to learn how to set up a Web site and to conduct
interaction by means of the World Wide Web (WWW); others learn to set
up a Listserv for their classes; and one dean arranges with University
telecommunications for use of a two-way video studio, and several faculty
are able to teach their classes simultaneously to groups on-campus and
at one of the university's satellite campuses.
Feedback on Quality
In both cases, the quality of the distance education experience is not
good. A discussion of the various problems seen in both programs, as taken
from the students' evaluation forms, follows.
In the cases where lectures were presented on video, students were disappointed with the slow and, as they described it, boring means of communicating information. Students found they could pay attention to the lecturer's face, gestures, and voice for about ten minutes, but afterward, found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. Compared with the variety and pace of educational programs they had seen on television, there was a noticeable lack of variety in the visual images, and they commented that there should have been at least some change of voice, or the chance to do something other than just listening and taking notes.
Between classes, the students were expected to read a chapter in a textbook. They stated that personal interaction with the instructor was lacking, particularly with help in dealing with some of the terms and concepts in the book.
It was often not clear what chapter of the book or what part of the chapter was related to what was presented in the lecture. Some lecturers seemed to ramble around the subject, often digressing to explain details they had not introduced as part of the lecture which were usually very technical and confusing for relative beginners. Often, the text was repetitive of the lecture, and sometimes, the lecture did not focus on the same issues as the book. Often, neither lecture nor book seemed relevant to the students' previous experience or current problems.
The level of the text and the talk was too elementary for some and too difficult for others, particularly those in overseas locations where they had to both translate the language and also follow the subject matter in real-time lectures.
In question/answer sessions, many students were only able to understand some of the questions, partly due to poor sound quality. The quality of the images was not as important, even though these were often "jumpy" and very different from regular television. What was much more troubling was feedback noise on the sound channel, which caused difficulty that was made even worse by the lecturers' rapid speech. In some courses, the lecturer spoke English as a second language, so there was the additional difficulty of understanding a foreign accent.
On occasion, the video link was lost and everyone had to wait while it was reconnected. Another time, the room was locked for one group of students, and while they looked for a person to provide access, the instructor, who did not know what was happening, started the lecture without them.
In Case Two, students found that using the WWW to transmit lectures can be even more boring than videoconference. Many students have to use a computer at their office to access the Web, and usually do this after hours. The baud rate is quite slow, taking a lot of time to retrieve the necessary pages. Furthermore, the information provided was almost entirely subject text, which feels more like reading a textbook than attending an actual class.
Students were not sure what they were expected to know at each step in the course, and were concerned that they were not doing the same thing as other students. Before finally submitting their assignments via e-mail, they wished they had known if they were on the right track, but they did not know how to check or who to ask.
The responses they received back from the instructor were very short. He explained that there were 100 people in the class and that he had two other classes to prepare each week, making it impossible to spend more time on each student. Students said they felt isolated and, above all, would have liked a chance to talk with other students as they do in face-to-face teaching environments.
Case Three
Case three involves another corporation. Whereas in the first case, the
training department, under pressure from the president, presented its
first courses exactly one month after installing its videoconference facility,
in this case, the training department spent a full year in designing and
developing its first course. A course team was organized with a principal
trainer, a team manager, a specialist in distance education instructional
design, a teleconference specialist, a video producer, a study guide specialist,
and two specialists in the subject area to be taught.
Since this was a company in the financial services industry, the first course had to do with terms and conditions of borrowing different financial products. The course team met weekly for six months, with all members working only part-time on the project (an estimated ten hours a week each for twenty-five weeks, totaling 1800 hours), calculating to 100 hours of design for each hour of instruction. This does not include clerical and production staff in the video, publishing, and teleconference companies.
At the end of this time period, an eighteen-hour training course was ready for presentation. It consisted of a seventy-six-page study guide, organized in seven units; each unit focused on a specific learning objective, with a presentation of the subject, a set of self-help exercises, and a transition discussion of a section on the videotape. The study guide and videotape were distributed to branch offices worldwide. It was also made available on the Web, though a survey showed that many potential students did not have access to this medium. The study guide was published to high print and design specifications, and the video contained location footage of case studies to illustrate the main themes of the course, with voice-over narration and interviews with recognized international authorities.
A local site coordinator was appointed at each office. A set of video and audioconferences was arranged with each office according to a schedule set out in the study guide. An experienced teleconference instructor, having worked with the team to determine the questions and issues for the teleconference, provided training sessions for the site coordinators and also moderated the three teleconference sessions. For some sites, the medium was two-way video, for others, two-way audio, with as many as ten sites joined simultaneously. Teleconference programs focused on the case studies presented in the videotapes, supported by detailed notes in the study guide. Teleconferences also focused on experiences of the participants in dealing with the issues raised in the course.
Prior to the teleconferences, numerous tests and trouble-shooting sessions were arranged to ensure good audio quality. There were no lectures, only short introductions by the moderator, reports by participants, and responses by the content specialist. The Study Guide also contained exercises that the participants submitted via e-mail to the content specialist. Content specialists were released from regular training duties at the residential training center to provide responses to students at a ratio of one hour per student per week.
So pleased was the organization with the feedback from participants in the course, as well as the satisfaction expressed by heads of operational divisions, that the decision was made to develop a major, 240-hour course for delivery in one year. For development of this course, a team of full- and part-time personnel was appointed, with a $6 million budget. A system of regional coordinators was implemented to oversee and support site coordinators, and a one-week residential component will be integrated into the distance education program, with workshops in several regional centers. Teleconferences will be conducted from both the U.S. headquarters and regional centers.
As before, study guide and recorded audio/video materials will be made Web accessible for the benefit of those who prefer to receive them that way.
Case Four
Case four concerns an education department that wants to provide in-service
education for its school teachers. A management team of five full-time
administrators was assembled. Requests for proposals were published. As
a result of a bidding process, a university was awarded a contract to
provide content expertise for the program. Three television stations were
awarded contracts to make videotapes for three courses. Each course had
ten videotapes. The total video budget was $5 million. A distance education
instructional designer worked with both content and video specialists,
and a study guide was produced.
Study centers were set up at schools. Course objectives focused on teachers' classroom practices. Good practice was explained in text, modeled in video, and was the subject of project assignments to be attempted by groups of teachers in the study centers.
Approximately 90,000 teachers took part in the training, clustered around 5,000 study centers. A system of regional monitoring was required to manage such large numbers. The management team, university team, and distance education instructional designer provided training sessions for site coordinators and regional monitors.
In this project area there was inadequate computer access and telecommunications access for the team to plan for teleconferencing. However, a new project designed for smaller numbers (10,000), including school principals, plans to use a similar design and delivery model, but will also include a series of one-way video/two-way audio teleconferences.
Discussion
What distinguishes the poorer quality programs from the better quality
programs? What follows is a discussion of some of the factors that distinguish
the poorer and the better programs.
1. Poorer programs are most often the result of administrative decisions to provide technology without concomitant support for training and course design. There is no cause and effect relationship between cost of technology and quality of a distance education program. There is, however, a direct relationship between the quality of the program and the quality of the design process, as well as the capacitation of trainers.
2. Since technology is most commonly used in everyday life to disseminate information, there is a tendency of faculty and administrators to equate presentation of information with education. A good quality distance education program not only delivers high quality presentation of information, but also provides a high quality personal experience for every individual student to interact with that information through an instructor in such a way that the student can process information into personal knowledge. Again, this interaction has to be carefully planned and skillfully facilitated.
3. Administrators and/or faculty believe that since faculty are presumed to be able to teach their subject in conventional settings, they can also teach it at a distance, using similar techniques. This is not possible. Teaching at a distance has its own techniques that can be learned. Furthermore, nobody can master all these techniques with equally good quality. The single main reason for poor quality in distance education is the transfer of the traditional "craft" approach of higher education to the media-based world of distance education. Individual faculty cannot produce quality courses alone with their limited skill in instructional design, interaction at a distance, and media management, together with their content knowledge. Teaching at a distance must be organized differently. There has to be division of labor. Distance education can only be designed and delivered with the highest quality by teams of specialists.
4. There is a tendency to think that the teaching process can be controlled entirely by the central authority. Good distance education is impossible without good learner support. Some of this comes from the center, but it is also essential to identify good local helpers close to the interface with learners. In particular, when teleconference media are used, the success of the project depends on having good site coordinators. They maintain communications channels, both technically and psychologically, and also separate the process of personal knowledge construction from the presentation of information by content experts. The teaching institution must have a clearly articulated program and process for recruiting, monitoring, rewarding, and, above all, training these key individuals.
5. With the expansion
of technology and the consequent need for specialization, low quality
accompanies the institution that attempts to be "all things to all
men." Instead of fighting a rear-guard action of restrictive practices
to protect its geographic monopoly, it is essential for every educational/training
institution to identify its areas of specialization and excellence. In
other words, it must establish its niche markets, identify a limited number
of content areas, and invest in producing materials of world-class standards
for distribution over the global market. The bad news for suppliers of
educational services is that the geographically restricted monopoly market
is fast disappearing. The good news for consumers is that in the emerging,
highly competitive global market, those institutions that do not produce
better quality programs will be replaced as suppliers of educational services
by those that do, wherever they may be. The encouraging news for educational
providers is that not only is the market opportunity unparalleled, but
there is a body of knowledge on good quality distance education for those
who have the wisdom and the will to tap into it.
Social Presence as a Predictor of
Satisfaction within a Computer-mediated Conferencing Environment
Charlotte N. Gunawardena and Frank J. Zittle
This study concentrated on the effectiveness of "social presence" as a way of forecasting learner satisfaction in a text-based medium that had its base in the GlobalEd inter-university computer conference. The authors defined "social presence" as "the degree to which a person is perceived as "real" in a mediated communication." Gunawardena and Zittle note that there have not been very many studies that evaluated the influence of social presence in the context of distance education; and that none of these has measured the impact of social presence on learner satisfaction in the computer-mediated communication (CMC) context.
Fifty students from the five following universities were the participants: San Diego State, Texas A&M, University of New Mexico, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University of Wyoming. These students had taken part in the Fall 1993 GlobalEd inter-university virtual conference. 62% of the students were women and forty years was the mean age. The GlobalEd 61 - item Questionnaire took shape in this context.
"This study has shown that social presence is
a strong predictor of satisfaction in a computer conference. The results
also indicated that participants who felt a higher sense of social presence
within the conference enhanced their socio-emotional experience by using
emoticons to express missing nonverbal cues in written forms."
Competitive Marketing of Distance Education: A Model for Placing Quality
within a Strategic Planning Context
Andrew J. Mowen and Sara C. Parks
Academic directors have embraced strategic marketing tactics as a result of dwindling resources, competition and the need for less expensive education. A very significant trend in today's educational arena is the sharp rise in distance education.
"Across a wide variety of educational contexts, quality is being recognized as a major source of competitive advantage." The role of quality is looked at in this paper in an attempt to define the most beneficial market-driven strategies, and the authors present a model for combining essential elements rooted in "competitive ability and market attractiveness".
Mowen and Parks' strategic quality model has six main
aspects, namely, identifying target markets, delineating present and future
requisites of quality in distance education, advancing a quality position
with respect to anticipated competitors, reckoning the aggregate quality
position, locating quality in the overall competitive situation, and selecting
workable strategies with an eye towards competitive position and how the
market looks. Mowen and Parks believe that these six steps can help organizations
in attaining a high quality position by placing quality within a context
of strategic planning.
Copyright Law, the Internet, and Distance
Education
Anita Colyer
Although the Internet is a "land of infinite possibility" for distance educators, there are advantages as well as risks involved. "The Internet, for many practical reasons, renders obsolete most existing copyright and royalty systems." It is nearly a hopeless task trying to control information once it is furnished electronically.
"The goal of this article is to provide some guidance on copyright and intellectual property issues in the electronic environment." Copyright law is based in the era of print; in the beginning copyright law was not difficult to enforce. The 1970's saw the advent of the extensive use of the photocopier and that was the beginning of the copyright problems of the electronic age. The second change occurred when personal computers had the capacity to become a desktop publisher. "The third major aspect of information that has changed is its increasing mutability. While a publication was previously recognizable by certain parameters of it own physicality, the electronic environment has removed many of the defining features of 'publications'." Ownership is the fourth change; when information was published almost entirely in books, it required a lot of time and effort to change the original author's work. That is no longer the case when material can easily be downloaded, changed, and another can posit it as his work.
"We must be reminded that the original intention
of copyright law was not to thwart information usage but to protect the
free flow of information in the public interest." Colyer notes that
there are new challenges to current copyright law because of the electronic
environment; a solution can be to educate the public on the proper uses
of information. The practice of copyright law rests on mutual respect
for producers and utilizers of information.
Online Graduate Degrees: A Review of Three
Internet-based Master's Degree Offerings
Robert W. Strong and E. Glynn Harmon
This article reviews and contrasts three on-line Master's programs. Two of the programs are in Management and one is the field of Library and Information Science. The following universities are involved in the study: the University of Phoenix's three different management degrees, the Master of Arts in Management conferred by The Graduate School of America, and the Master of Science in Library and Information Science conferred by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Strong and Harmon develop a "Consumer's Guide" that offers important questions for potential students.
Although the article describes briefly differences
among the three programs, the focus is general questions to take into
account when considering any online university programs. Some of the questions
are: does the program meet the needs of the students and help him/her
reach their goal, qualifications of faculty, type of interaction between
learners and instructors, e.g., synchronous/asynchronous subjects, requirements
for on-campus orientation or instruction, and cost.
"The evaluation of these offerings (not of the degrees themselves)
indicates clear and distinct differences in the aims, the quality of information
provided, and the potential benefits of various programs." Strong
and Harmon consider their article a initial step to apprise potential
student about some specific graduate degree options, but more importantly,
how to evaluate them.
