EDITORIAL
Words of Welcome and Intent
Michael G. Moore

Welcome! It is with great pleasure that I welcome you, Reader, to the first issue of The American Journal of Distance Education. I wish to begin by thanking you for giving your time to consider what we have put before you. Those of us who have worked for so many months to compile this first issue are very conscious of the responsibility that you have placed on us and look forward to justifying your confidence when we explore together the great new field of study, research, and practice that is distance education in the Americas.

It is ten years since I went to England to work at the Open University and soon after became Associate Editor of Teaching at a Distance. Since then I have served on the boards of the Australian Distance Education and Canada's Journal of Distance Education. Every year on my return visits to the U.S.A. I asked: Why no American Journal of Distance Education? Among the various responses to this question, the most common were that there are not enough persons interested in reading such a journal and not enough potential writers. The birth of this journal, like any such venture, is a test; it is a test of our hypothesis that there indeed are people with things to say about distance education, and people like you who wish to know what is going on, when, and where, and perhaps more importantly, why. Welcome to The American Journal of Distance Education. Thank you for your support.

Misunderstandings
As I began to write this editorial, I was shown the announcement of our new publication in a widely-read adult education newsletter. The announcement was accompanied by a commentary which I would like to refer to briefly as illustrative of the kind of misunderstandings about distance education that are not uncommon in the field of educating adults, and which this journal should help overcome. The commentator wrote that fifteen years ago he was told that "old-fashioned face-to-face learning was passé, and the wave of the future was the airwave, which would deliver distance education on the TV screen." Since then, he continued, "the TV screen has delivered very little education, but the American people have learned more bad habits and things that aren't so (sic) from watching TV in the ensuing years than has been accomplished in all history by the printed word." (Adult and Continuing Education Today, XVII, No. 4.) Now, setting aside the extravagance of the assertion that TV has been so much more harmful than print, and print quite so innocent, and setting aside the unlikelihood of his use of the term distance education before its public introduction at the 1972 Conference of the International Council for Correspondence Education, this commentator makes a good point. Who would disagree that television in America has had a chequered history in education or that general broadcasting is a pathetic and inaccurate (one hopes) reflection of American culture, values, and accomplishments.

What should be the response to this state of affairs from distance educators and educators generally? Surely, it is not to denounce television as a medium of instruction or distance education, in general. If television has been misused and underused, it is not the failure of television producers; this has happened because educators have failed to use the medium. It is we educators, not television, that are culpable if we have failed to add the newer media to our traditional methods of facilitating learning. There is no point in our attacking the messenger because television has not delivered the messages we would like; it is for we, who are teachers in higher and continuing education, trainers in business and the armed forces, community educators, and educators of adults generally, to make better use of the media. With regard to television in particular, we should endorse and support the efforts of the Annenberg/CPB Project, the International University Consortium, and the dozens of television stations and universities around the country that, among other agencies, are working to use television and other media more effectively as instruments for individual learning and social and community development.

Having broadened the focus of discussion from "television" to "the media," let us here emphasize most strongly, for the benefit of others who might misunderstand the meaning of distance education, that it does not mean only learning from television. As will be seen in this first issue, The American Journal of Distance Education will be concerned with all adult and higher education that employs all communications media. However, we limit our interest to the use of these media when, and only when, the following criteria are met:

There is no single super medium. Each communications medium has characteristics that make it especially suited for learners of particular learning styles, for particular fields of knowledge, and for each of the instructor's main activities. Staying with television, for example, it is the preferred medium for transmitting impressions of activities that are too expensive or otherwise unavailable to the learner's own direct experience, such as overseas field visits, microscopic observations, industrial processes, archive film, and interviews with politicians and researchers. Broadcasting is often the most desirable form of television, but sometimes different educational needs require the use of cassettes or disks instead. For distance education, the learners' needs determine the use of media, and the media must be suited to the educational message. Obviously, television is not the appropriate medium for, say, the educational process of learner self-evaluation. For this process, the distance educator is likely to call on print, perhaps placing a self-testing exercise within a printed study guide. While it is essential that adult and college educators become users, not opposers, of modern communications media, it is also highly desirable that they avoid single medium fixations. Above all, they must develop techniques for planning and delivering educational programs that integrate media use to meet well researched learner needs.

Face-to-Face Instruction
And where does this leave "old-fashioned, face-to-face learning?" Face-to-face instructional methods, like any other, are to be used in distance education when educationally most appropriate, and not other-wise. In some institutions of our acquaintance, like the British Open University, face-to-face meetings between learners and instructors are an optional supplement to distance methods. At least one major American private correspondence school arranges for its students to attend a residential summer school.

The American Journal of Distance Education rejects any contrived partisanship that sets distance education against the small group, the individual tutorial, summer school, or any other face-to-face method. William Rainey Harper, father of distance education in the American University, said it a century ago: "Away therefore with all baseless and foolish prejudice in this matter! The correspondence system would not, if it would, supplant oral instruction, or be regarded as its substitute. There is a field for each which the other cannot fill. Let each do its proper work" (W. R. Harper 1886).

New Methods, New Needs
Since Harper, two major changes have occurred. The first has been the invention and proliferation of new technologies to be set alongside the correspondence study guide as well as improvements in ways of teaching by print. The second has been the growth in need-or more precisely "felt need"-for continuing education among adults at all levels. In their review of adult education participation studies, Darkenwald and Merriam (1982) contrast the findings of the research by Tough and others that show that nine out of ten adults engage every year in one or more learning projects, and the National Center for Educational Statistics estimates that only one out of every nine adults participates in institutionally organized continuing education. This is not the place to explore the implications for distance education of studies in participation and nonparticipation in education by adults, but it can be said that the need appears to be very large-the need for professional continuing education, for college level courses, for learning related to family and community concerns, for leisure activities and self-development, and for basic skills. It also appears that these needs cannot be met, nor need be met, by withdrawing workers and homemakers from their proper places in adult society and sending them back to school. With the aid of modern communications media, education can be provided at the adult's convenience, when, where, and in whatever ways are most congenial to the individual. In our colleges, universities, the private home study schools, the armed forces, corporations, and community colleges, and in our media centers, are many people of great skill who are able, when properly organized, to meet the changing needs of the contemporary adult learner. Organizing and enhancing these skills to meet those needs is what distance education is all about.

Purpose
To encourage and assist educators to know when and how to organize media to meet the needs of learners, especially adult learners, is the purpose of The American Journal of Distance Education. To meet this purpose, this journal will present research, status reports, theories, reviews, opinions, and discussions about the characteristics of the people who learn at a distance and those who teach; about methods of planning and designing programs especially programs that integrate several media; about the interface between mediated instruction and face-to-face teaching; about the history and educational philosophy of distance education; about teaching strategies and evaluation of both programs and learning; about new media, and indeed, about old media; about organization and administration of distance education institutions; about the social and political impact and the forces in our society that in turn impact upon our field.
Our field is large and growing larger. Like any field that grows quickly, the opportunities for training, for research, and for study are too few to meet the need. There are, therefore, dangers of mistakes and misunderstandings. Yet, because of the great importance of the field-especially the impact on the nation's technological and social development through professional continuing education-anything that can be done to minimize misunderstandings and facilitate communication among distance educators and between distance educators and others should be a service to all. The aim of AJDE will be to clear away the kind of misunderstanding and perhaps prejudice that was illustrated above, and to give information, encouragement, and enlightenment to both those who work in distance education and also to those outside.

We have a method to develop; we have problems to solve. I am quoting that other great pioneer of American distance education, W. H. Lighty, first radio adult educator and intellectual giant of American University Extension, who said: ". . . (there) must be created the method, the technique, the atmosphere . . . to solve the difficult problems connected with long-distance instruction. This solution has hardly begun" (Lighty 1915). To educators and to communications specialists who wish, together, to explore these problems and to search for solutions, we place at your service the pages of The American Journal of Distance Education.

References
Adult and Continuing Education Today. 1987. New journal planned on distance education 17 (4): 2.
Darkenwald, G., and S. Merriam. 1982. Adult Education: Foundations of Practice. New York: Harper & Row.
Harper, W. R. 1886. The system of correspondence. In The Changing World of Correspondence Study, ed. O. Mackenzie and E. Christensen. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Lighty, W. 1915. Correspondence-study teaching. In The Changing World of Correspondence Study, ed. O. Mackenzie and E. Christensen. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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