VOLUME 7, NUMBER 1, 1993
Editorial
Is Teaching Like Flying? A Total Systems View of
Distance Education
Michael G. Moore
Articles
(for abstracts, click here)
Factors Affecting Achievement in a Satellite-Delivered Japanese Language
Program
Rebecca Oxford, Young Park-Oh, Sukero Ito, and Malenna Sumrall
Faculty Planning for
Distance Teaching
Linda L. Wolcott
The Effectiveness of
Traditional vs. Satellite Delivery in Three Management of Technology Master's
Degree Programs
William E. Souder
Student Achievement and
Attitude in a Satellite-Delivered High School Science Course
Elaine D. Martin and Larry Rainey
The Development of an
Instrument to Measure Student Attitudes toward Televised Courses
Paul M. Biner
Interview
Speaking Personally with William J. Kelly
Michael Moore
Book Review
Empowering Networks, Computer Conferencing in Education
Edited by Michael D. Waggoner
Roy H. Mattson
EDITORIAL
Is Teaching Like Flying? A Total Systems View of Distance Education
Michael G. Moore
There are beliefs about learning and teaching that are shared by all distance educators. They include the premise that learning and teaching can occur in different places and at different times, and that teachers and learners can communicate effectively through electronic and print media. There is general agreement also that distance education is the only cost-effective way of distributing scarce expertise, and making it available on demand. Equality of access to good teaching resources is especially appealing to educators of children and of university students. The ability of distance education to deliver instruction on demand is important for business and industry, which have to find ways of providing training and retraining, throughout the year and on the job, in response to ever-changing market conditions. While there might be agreement about these benefits of distance education, there are two distinctly different perceptions about how resources should be organized to bring about these benefits. One of these views is very common, yet the future success of the field depends on a wider acceptance of the other.
Teaching as a Craft
The most popular perception is that the benefits can be obtained with
little change in the ways that education is organized. In this view, it
is the mere act of linking learners with teachers through a medium that
results in effective teaching and learning. All that is needed is for
schools and universities and training departments to buy new communications
hardware. Then schoolteachers, university professors, or corporate trainers
can be transformed into distance teachers by moving them from a classroom
to a studio, or by moving the cameras and microphones into their classrooms.
Their classroom teaching can be transmitted to learners in other classrooms.
In this view, once the educational or training organization has established
a communications channel there is little more to be done except to let
teachers get on with practicing their craft as they have always done.
The teacher decides what to teach, prepares a lesson, and addresses the
students through a camera, telephone, computer, or one of various combinations
of these. Many teachers consider the conventional classroom to be an ideal
teaching-learning environment and they seek to reproduce it for their
distant learners.
This view of distance education is the one that influences almost every article submitted to this journal. However, it is a very immature view. It reflects the field in its infancy and has its parallel in the evolution of many other innovations. It is said that the first movie makers placed cameras in the pit of a theater and filmed stage plays, until they perceived that they were allowing the structures of the older art form to limit their use of the new technology. The new technology required that they invent new ways of organizing their work, which then led to the development of a new art form and a new industry. Perhaps a better analogy for the potential of distance education is found in the airline industry. It is well within living memory that air passengers would be met by a pilot and one or two assistants on a grass strip runway, pay for their tickets, be walked with their bags to the airplane, and flown to their destination. The industry's organization was as primitive as its technology; it was not too different from the organization of the horse-driven stage line. The organization of today's airline depends on a sophisticated, computer-generated information flow, a high degree of specialization of labor, and capital. No individual, not even the pilot, is able to move the passenger without the contributions of thousands of other workers. The result of this sophisticated organization is the provision of a high-quality service at a lower per passenger cost to vastly more travelers than could have been imagined even thirty years ago.
When we compare the airline with the school or university (or even the training department of the airline itself), we arrive at the heart of our problem in distance education. It is not simply new hardware that makes the airline efficient and effective. Nor will hardware alone lead to good distance education. The future of distance education depends, as does the success of the modern airline, on new forms of organization that are based on the application of principles of systems management. The crippling weakness in American distance education and training is failure to apply systems management principles. The more mature perspective of distance education, the second perspective, the perspective that must be acquired if distance education is to make its full contribution to solving the nation's educational and training problems, is distance education as a total system.
Mature distance education does not consist of adding new technology to old ways of organizing teaching and learning. It consists of organizing, or reorganizing, educational resources into a total delivery system. At the present time we do not have any total distance education system in the United States. A number of other countries do, although it is very important to recognize that some of these systems are dated, having been established to take advantage of the technologies of the 1970s. There should be no question of simply copying the systems of other countries, but rather of building on their experiences of systematic program design and delivery.
In giving my Vice Presidential report at the World Conference of the International Council for Distance Education in November 1992, I used the analogy of transportation to compare the organization of distance education in the United States with that of some of the other countries present:
American distance education remains a highly heterogeneous business. Stated differently, the situation remains chaotic and confused. There is no national policy, nor anything approaching a consensus among educators of the value, the methodology, or even the concept of distance education. There is no national system nor any system of any kind. There is instead a plethora of activities on the part of thousands of organizations, most of which are attached to a single medium or limited range of media, from simple correspondence produced by desk-top publishing to networks of personal and mainframe computers, satellite, microwave, fiber-optic and video-disc; from courses written and taught by individuals with virtually no support to multi-million dollar integrated text/television/audio/computer conference/classroom projects. The American idea of "distance learning" remains a very limited one. It is usually seen as the addition of high technology communications media in otherwise conventionally organized and taught classes. Because there is still a "craft" view of teaching, most distance education programs suffer from amateurishness and are under resourced. Few educators, administrators, or policy makers have yet come to terms with the consequences for program design, for teaching, and for redistribution of educational resources if these media are to be used to anywhere near their maximum effectiveness.
If the model of distance education in countries with Open Universities could be compared to a national railway or airline system, with a politically approved policy about priorities and objectives guiding a planned and integrated use of resources, the U.S. model would be more comparable to a road traffic system, with innumerable drivers using vehicles of all shapes and sizes and quality and efficiency, all deciding on their own travel plans, travelling in their own different directions, sometimes breaking down, and occasionally colliding with each other.
A Total Systems Perspective
What does a total system look like? A total system has many parts; they
are integrated and they interact with each other (Figure not included
in Web version). A distance education system should be thought of as a
network of knowledge sources, processors, managers, communication media,
and learners. A total system generates and derives knowledge from schools,
universities, corporations, public and private organizations, and individuals;
it provides for the planning of instructional programs, and produces and
delivers them through a variety of communications media. The work of centrally
located course designers and media experts is integrated with activities
in learner groups and the activities of individual learners who are supported
by experts in interpersonal interaction and learning, located in schools,
colleges, workplaces, homes, and elsewhere. While it is reasonable to
describe and analyze each of these parts of the system, it is essential
to recognize that all are integral parts of a whole. In other words, as
is characteristic of the airline, there is the same kind of division of
labor, specialization, and use of computer communications. No person tries
to do everything needed to bring about learning. No single medium is used.
Instruction is no longer an individual's work, but the work of teams of
specialists-media specialists, knowledge specialists, instructional design
specialists, and learning specialists. Programs have to be prepared for
distribution over large areas to large numbers of learners; this process
requires negotiation and agreements among several or many existing providers,
large budgets, and long periods of design time. Uniform high quality is
guaranteed and, with large numbers of users, average costs are lower than
in conventional education, or in the current "horse and buggy"
stage of distance education.
An Imaginary Example
From Higher Education
Let's begin with any major university. Most four-year universities have
the media and human resources needed to produce world-class distance education
programs. They have people experienced in writing and publishing study
guides (usually in correspondence departments); they have television and
audio recording facilities, and teleconference, audio, audiographic, video
and computer networks. The university also has content experts as well
as specialists in instructional design, learning, and counseling.
The process in an American university would resemble the procedures followed by the total systems in other countries. These procedures are outlined in the following, imagined, example.
The University Distance Education Center calls for proposals from its faculties and, after reviewing these, it awards $3 million to its humanities faculty to produce a course in art history. This course is proposed to provide instruction intended to occupy the undergraduate student for one hundred and thirty-five hours of work (the equivalent of 45 hours of in-class time and 90 hours of out-of-class time). The award provides for relief of three professors from teaching for two years, payment of consultants from two American and two foreign museums, and salaries for two instructional designers, television and audio producers, computer programmers, editors, and secretarial and clerical staff. A course team chair is appointed to oversee the process of producing the course over a two year period. One of this person's important responsibilities is to select state and regional partner institutions and locally resident tutors. Institutions will provide facilities for, and tutors will give assistance to, learners in their localities once the course has been produced. Credit exchange arrangements include acceptance by our university of courses from collaborating institutions in exchange for their support of the art history course we propose to teach nationwide.
The design process is long and extremely detailed, with frequent meetings of the course team and daily online sessions, during which the details of the content to be taught and the procedures of providing it are argued and agreed upon.
When the course is ready, and the University's marketing personnel have publicized it, about 4000 students, primarily from within the United States but with several hundred from overseas cities, register for the course. Students pay a tuition fee of $400 for the equivalent of three credit hours of conventional instruction (this relatively small fee, made possible by economies of scale, compares favorably with the standard tuition charges of $570 and $1200 for three credits of instruction for state residents and nonresidents, respectively). Each student is provided information by mail about a tutor who is located within local phone and traveling distance and about the location of a study center. Each study center is located at a local school, college, or public library, where arrangements have been made for voluntary group meetings of the tutor's group of advisees. Students receive a schedule of activities and a study guide. The study guide provides details regarding meetings at the study centers; a calendar of study; direction regarding readings; and instructions for using audiotapes, videotapes, and computer disks, as well as for accessing online bulletin boards and electronic mail. The course team has produced the study guide; an original text; eight new films of professional quality, filmed in museums throughout the United States and overseas; and interviews with the world's expert art historians, recorded on audiotapes. All these and more are distributed according to a planned schedule to students' homes by mail or, in some cases, are delivered electronically by satellite and cable to workstations at places of employment or by electronic mail. It is important to select communications channels that are available to most of the student body, which usually means selecting relatively simple media.
The System From a
Student's Perspective
Students who read of the course are excited at the opportunity to obtain
a substantial part of their college credit requirement from a prestigious
university at low cost, working mainly at home in their spare time. The
advance information explains that agreements have been reached with most
major universities for credit transfer. The attractive printed materials
that accompany the registration documents give promise that this well-produced
course will give access to the world's greatest authorities, yet also
give access to a local tutor and tutorial group where personal assistance
and personal exchanges of ideas should occur. After registering and receiving
a preliminary package of materials, students receive further packages
every two months for forty-eight weeks. Each package contains a study
guide, a video- and audiotape, a computer disk, a packet of readings and
photographs, and a written assignment to be answered and returned to the
university by mail or by electronic mail. Video, text, computer disk,
and every other item in the package is tightly integrated. There is emphasis
on learner activities, numerous exercises, and projects. For example,
the computer assignment may be undertaken alone or in cooperation with
other students at the local study center or by electronic mail. The video
is a lavishly produced program filmed in foreign and American museums
and universities from which great art historians address the students
of this course. The audiotape carries a discussion between two of the
university's own faculty and a panel of museum directors, and conveys
the professors' enthusiasm for research in this field as well as a sense
of their connection to the students who have joined this course. The professors'
names also appear in the book of readings that is part of the course materials;
their ideas are summarized, and questions are asked about them in the
study guide. The study guide directs the students' attention to what is
to be learned and explains relationships between ideas in the text, the
videotapes, and the audiotapes. It directs students to exercises to be
done on the computer and to the assignment to be mailed and uploaded.
Attending at a study center the student finds a group meeting and is welcomed by the Study Center Adviser, as well as by an Art History tutor. This tutor is the person who received, graded, and commented on the student's written assignment. A satellite-delivered videoconference begins in which there is a presentation on the topic of the current module of the course given by a professor who is recognizable from both the videotape and the text. The talk is being transmitted to 200 sites across the country and lasts only 20 minutes. Then each local group is turned over to the local tutor, who has a list of questions based on the professor's talk. The group is guided by the tutor in a discussion of these questions and prepares a response to one of them. After half an hour the teleconference is resumed and a facilitator, sitting beside the professor in the studio, skillfully extracts from the various sites reports that are transmitted by audioconference microphones. Speakers are encouraged to compare and contrast their answers and from time to time the professor is called on to comment.
When the student returns home she begins work on the assignment given in the study guide, which requires a communication with four other students in the group she met that day. They must choose the topic for a paper that they will prepare on line with their personal computers and then upload for their instructor's comments. In preparation for the next module there is a chapter of text to read and a written exercise to return to the instructor. The next module begins with a videotape, a reading, and an audiotape, with another teleconference scheduled for two weeks time. Knowing she has a hospital appointment on the day of the teleconference, the student calls the local study center and speaks to the Adviser, who authorizes her absence and discusses how she can receive a videotape of the teleconference.
Cost Effectiveness
This course is offered to 4000 students and
has a planned life before revision of five years. Total tuition income
is therefore 20,000 times the tuition fee or, in this imagined model,
$8 million, a substantial return on the university's $3 million investment.
After allowing for the variable costs of tutor payments, telecommunications,
and administration, substantial money remains for investment in further
courses and for introducing newer technologies, especially CD-ROM, videodisc,
and online database applications. Other income is possible. It is in the
interests of the providing university to enter arrangements with more
universities, including foreign universities, so that there is increasing
exchange of courses and students. This has the effect not only of increasing
the cost effectiveness of each course, but also of releasing faculty to
do more work on their areas of research. Since the cost of producing more
copies of teaching materials is a small proportion of the total cost,
any addition of students will lead to lowering of average costs, even
allowing for the higher expenditures on local tutoring, advising, and
administration.
In attempting to describe what is very complex, it is inevitable that I have oversimplified and perhaps given some wrong impressions as a result. Perhaps more writing, discussion on DEOS, or even in-person discussions are needed to further explore the idea of the Total System. Perhaps some readers will feel that what I have described is very obvious; in particular, it does not deal with any technology that we are not using already. Others might feel it describes a process that is disturbing in being a mechanical or inhuman process. It should not be inhuman, indeed it must not be so. The point of the system is to use available technology, and to organize it according to principles of specialization and division of labor and rationalization of resources, so that the technology will do the work that can be done more efficiently by technology and, thus, release people to be creative and to provide intense human interaction and support where such human contact is most rewarding and most valuable.
A total system can
be developed by almost any university, school district, or corporation,
or by a consortium of such institutions. The reward will be the provision
of higher quality instruction to larger numbers of consumers at lower
average costs than before, as well as national and international leadership
in the chosen areas of specialization. The alternative to "thinking
big" is pettiness; it means overworked staff, underachievement of
learners, frustration, and the delusion or the dishonesty that says that
distance education of this kind is the best we are capable of. Such pettiness
represents a failure to maximize the power of communications media and
the accumulated knowledge regarding distance learning. The challenge for
American distance education is not to produce more technology . . . the
communications industry will take care of that; it is not even to develop
techniques of teaching through technology and to train educators in these
techniques . . . though we would be foolish to allow the communications
industry to take care of that. The challenge is to change our view of
distance education, to learn to think big, to change the culture of our
institutions regarding the role of the teacher, to learn to give up some
fields and to specialize in others, to learn to cooperate with other institutions.
In short, our challenge is to learn to make education look more like NASA
or United Airlines by turning the development and provision of education
into a total system.
Factors Affecting Achievement in a Satellite-Delivered
Japanese Language Program
Rebecca Oxford; Young Park-Oh; Sukero Ito; Malenna Sumrall
This article reviews previous research and reports
on a study relating to six factors relevant to achievement in learning
a new language: motivation, language learning styles, language learning
strategies, gender, course level, and previous experience in learning
a foreign language. Although motivation, learning styles, gender, and
learning strategy use were all found to be influential, motivation was
the single most important predictor of success. The authors suggest that
awareness and understanding of the influence and interaction of student
characteristics on achievement will allow instructors to provide optimal
learning opportunities for all students.
Faculty Planning for Distance Teaching
Linda L. Wolcott
How faculty in higher education plan instruction is
an area about which little is known. The purpose of this study was to
describe instructional planning by faculty teaching adult learners via
interactive telecommunications technology and to identify their principal
concerns when designing distance instruction. Qualitative methods were
used to collect and analyze data on planning by eleven full-time faculty
members teaching on an audiographic distance network. Their distance instruction
planning process was characterized by three features: term rather than
day-to-day planning, a primary emphasis on content rather than process,
and reliance on the syllabus as the focal point of planning.
The Effectiveness of Traditional vs. Satellite
Delivery in Three Management of Technology Master's Degree Programs
William E. Souder
This paper presents the results of a "natural
experiment" that directly compared traditional classroom and distance
learning settings. The distance learners performed better than the traditional
learners on several dimensions. It appears that the distance learners'
higher levels of maturity, experience, "kindred spirit," enthusiasm,
and sense of responsibility contributed to their performance, and that
these conditions might be vital to successful distance learning. This
study also reinforces the importance of giving quick feedback on homework
to distance students, and the importance of frequent telephone or other
electronic media contacts between the instructor and the distance students.
Additional information useful for designing effective distance learning
programs was collected.
Student Achievement and Attitude in a Satellite-Delivered
High School Science Course
Elaine D. Martin and Larry Rainey
This study investigated the effect of satellite-delivered
instruction on student achievement and attitude in a high school anatomy
and physiology course. The experimental group included students from seven
high schools enrolled in the satellite-delivered course. The control group
consisted of students from seven high schools in which classroom teachers
provided instruction. An experimental versus control matched- pair design
was used in the study. Two hypotheses were tested using the t-test for
dependent samples. The findings show that there was no significant difference
between the experimental group and control group in attitude toward anatomy
and physiology. However, on the achievement test the mean post- test score
of the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control
group.
The Development of an Instrument to Measure
Student Attitudes toward Televised Courses
Paul M. Biner
This article describes a method for developing a customized, empirically-based attitudinal assessment instrument. Issues relating to the effective administration of the instrument and to faculty resistance are discussed. The authors suggest that the structured assessment of student attitudes toward distance delivery made possible by such an instrument is an important initial step in the overall evaluation process.
