VOLUME 7, NUMBER 3, 1993
Editorial
Free Trade in Higher Education
Michael G. Moore
Articles
(for abstracts, click here)
Perceptions of Interaction: The Critical Predictor in Distance Education
Catherine P. Fulford and Shuqiang Zhang
Perspectives on an Interactive
Satellite-Based Japanese Language Course
Roger Bruning, Melodee Landis, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Kristin Grosskopf
Collaborative Learning:
More Is Not Necessarily Better
Susan May
Oklahoma's Star Schools:
Equipment Use and Benefits Two Years after Grant's End
Constance M. Martin
Analytic Considerations
in Distance Education Research
Hoi K. Suen and Robert J. Stevens
Interview
Speaking Personally with Linda Harasim
Greg Kearsley
Book Review
Activities in Self-Instructional Texts
by Fred Lockwood
Landra L. Rezabek
Media Review
A Scholar's Journey: Using the Internet for Adult and Distance Education
Research
Jill H. Ellsworth
Conference Report
Internationalism, Interaction, and Interdisciplinarity: Annual Conference
of the International University Consortium (IUC)
John Strain and Elizabeth Burge
EDITORIAL
Free Trade in Higher Education
Michael G. Moore
Around two hundred participants, in equal numbers from Mexico, Canada, and the United States, attended The International Symposium on Higher Education and Strategic Partnerships held in Vancouver in the second week of September 1993. Most of the people attending were the principal administrators of their organizations-either presidents of universities, corporations, or foundations-or were members of governments or officials in government agencies. The purpose of the symposium was to provide these leaders of higher education with an opportunity to share thinking about the future of higher education in a North American community in which the economies and societies of the three countries are increasingly integrated. At the conclusion of the symposium, participants issued a communiqué that laid out some preliminary steps that might be taken toward developing a higher education community that is North American in character. One might presume that most participants at this meeting were motivated to attend by their awareness of the current negotiations regarding establishment of a North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA). However, the opinion was widely expressed at the symposium, and recorded in the final communiqué, that the momentum towards greater collaboration among institutions of higher education should be maintained regardless of the pace of progress towards the formal establishment of an economic common market.
I am reporting on the Vancouver symposium here because distance education came quickly to the fore in the symposium discussions. Virtually all the participants in the symposium came from conventional, non-distance education backgrounds; however, rather excitingly for those of us who are dedicated to distance education, there was a general recognition that our method is likely to have a key role in the future of higher education, especially in matters that require collaboration across national borders. In my opinion, growth in international distance education is inevitable. Some free trade in distance education is already occurring, and eventually the pressures on educational institutions to remove the barriers to such free trade will become irresistible. What was noteworthy about the Vancouver meeting was that the collective higher education leadership of the three countries-with only a handful of distance educators among them-recognized the potential of distance education, and collectively named distance education as a high priority in their vision of future national and international educational development.
The Vancouver Communiqué
The document-referred to as the Vancouver Communiqué-that was drafted
during the symposium consists of a preamble, followed by recommendations
for the setting up of four projects and for the exploration of the feasibility
of six others. The Communiqué's preamble contains the following
statements:
[T]he participants in the Vancouver Symposium call on our colleagues in teaching, research and training institutions as well as those in business, government and other concerned organizations, to join us in forging new partnerships for sharing knowledge across traditional boundaries. We view Canada, Mexico and the United States, along with other regions of the world, as poised on the threshold of a new century, a century in which higher education, research and training cooperation will be central to innovation and human resource development, essential to achieving our goals for social, economic and cultural development. We recognize that our countries cannot fully prosper in all the ways that matter if they remain no more than trading partners. A new sense of North American community, made up of our 360 million people, should be forged, one which will provide impetus to greater cooperation among and within our countries, support our relations with countries outside the region, enhance our distinct cultural identities and acknowledge our asymmetries . . . . The expansion and strengthening of intellectual links and academic collaboration across the continent are fundamental to North America's vitality. They underpin the stability, civility and respect for human rights and freedoms necessary to democratic societies. They are fundamental to genuinely sustainable development.
The four recommendations include the following:
- The establishment of a North American Distance Education and Research Network (NADERN), a consortium to facilitate access to information and to support education, research and training among participating institutions (Recommendation 1)
- The establishment of an electronic information base in each of the three countries, with coordinated sharing of information on initiatives and resources relevant to trilateral collaboration. This electronic information base is to be developed in such a way as to be easily accessible by the academic community, business, government foundations and other concerned organizations (Recommendation 4)
The recommendations for further consideration and action include: "As part of the long-term operations of NADERN, the development and implementation of a plan for a consortium to broker access to recognized graduate distance education courses and to develop a mechanism for awarding degrees for such composite programs."
The name given to this proposed consortium during discussions in Vancouver, and dropped from the final communiqué, was "North American University (NAU)," and the idea was the subject of some skeptical comments during discussions. As I suggested when I had the opportunity, the idea is deserving of serious consideration if we abandon the concept of "university as bricks and mortar," and focus on "university as network of learners and teachers." The idea of university as network is the emerging concept of higher education. It is the next generation of higher education, and the next generation-the third generation-of distance education.
Third Generation
Distance Education
Bricks and mortar have provided the technology-the classroom-for higher
education for centuries. An essential characteristic of the classroom
is that instructors and students meet in the same place at the same time
for the purposes of the educational transaction. Another characteristic
of the brick and mortar university is that the learning that occurs there
is validated and certified by the faculty located in that place, among
the bricks and mortar. For example, we earn a Penn State degree, or a
degree of the University of British Columbia, or a degree of the Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México. The certificate of learning
is named for a geographic location. When distance education was invented
in the late 19th century, it was the universities of brick and mortar
that provided the home and the model of instruction. In this first generation
distance education, classroom-like teaching was provided by conventional
teachers to learners at a distance by means of correspondence and, in
more recent times, by telecommunications technologies. Certification in
this model is still associated with the place from which the instruction
emanates.
During the 1970s and 1980s, specially constructed organizations called Open Universities were developed in many countries. These second generation distance education institutions had no classrooms; learning occurred in students' own environments. Specialist distance teaching faculty were appointed, and-a point of great importance-the institutions demanded and were given authority to confer their own degrees. Thus, to take a well known example, in Great Britain today about one tenth of all undergraduate degrees are awarded by The Open University; no place name is attached to the certificate; instead, the certificate indicates the process by which the learning was acquired.
Second generation distance education institutions are only partially place-free. While students have considerable independence with regard to when, where, and, to some extent, how they learn, the range of instructors from whom they learn is as limited as it is in a bricks-and-mortar university. Faculty are tied to the distance teaching institution and must physically be on a campus for administrative and course-design purposes. The second generation distance teaching institution has very limited freedom in who it engages to teach a particular course. True, it is able to contract with external experts, but they are just that: external. The bulk of teaching has to be done by the tenured, regular, "internal" faculty.
Such restrictions are no longer necessary. With the development of the communications technologies of the 1990s-the electronic highways to our homes and workplaces-we are rapidly approaching technical readiness for the Virtual University, the third generation of higher distance education. This is not to suggest that institutions of the first and second type are or will be no longer necessary. There is and will continue to be very important, indeed major, roles for these institutions. However, a third type of distance education organization-the Virtual University-is now technically viable. Such an organization could make instructors anywhere available to students anywhere, and could make courses prepared by any institution available to students anywhere. A student's faculty need no longer be limited to those who assemble in any one place any more than a teacher's students would have to assemble in one place. Students could learn wherever they are located from instructional resources wherever they are located. No student would need to take instruction from exactly the same teacher as any other; students could have access to teachers from any state or country at any time and in any combination; they could have access to information resources from any state or country at any time and in any combination. Students also could have universal access to advice and guidance. Such a network of learners and teachers returns us to the earliest, most basic concept of "university," a point made by Parker Rossman in his recent, and excellent, book. In The Emerging Worldwide Electronic University Rossman writes:
The word university first referred to a guild of students, then to a guild of scholars. From the beginning the universities were international. Students often travelled in search of the course they wanted, wandering from country to country much as some now explore the "electronic highways." The original universities had very little organization, though there was a vigorous intellectual life. At Paris, for example, the university "was not founded, it grew" (Haskins 1957). Its first charter simply recognized a body of students and teachers that already existed. Similarly today, no international governmental agency is establishing a new global system of higher education. Yet the electronic university seems to be emerging and is closely related to concerns of leading educators. (Rossman 1993, xii-xiii)
An International
Virtual Classroom
While we have not yet been able to organize a viable international virtual
university, there are experiments taking place that could be described
as international virtual classrooms. A number of people at the Vancouver
conference found my own experience to be interesting when it became known
that I had walked to the symposium directly from teaching my Penn State
class, "Introduction to Distance Education." At six that morning
I used a Darome speaker-phone in an office at the University of British
Columbia to lead a three-hour discussion with my students, twenty of whom
were in State College, Pennsylvania, and ten of whom were in two other
Pennsylvania cities. For them, it was 9:00 in the morning as we began.
For the seven students at the University of Turku in Finland, and for
the five at the Lahti Center of the University of Helsinki, it was 4:00
in the afternoon, as it was also for the ten students in Tallin, Estonia.
As usual in this class, we were joined an hour later by my twenty students
at the Universidad National Autónoma de México in Mexico
City and by the ten at the Universidad de Guadalajara. I also had a request
that day to entertain a visitor in Toronto and two visitors in Preston,
England. Thus, my virtual classroom included eighty-five people in eleven
cities in six countries. This was not a special experimental event. It
was part of a regular class that convenes for seven Saturday meetings
of six hours each.
At each of the class sites in all countries, I have introduced Darome-brand microphone/amplifier sets that permit each student to be included comfortably in the discussions of the seminar. In advance of the class meeting I sent a videotaped lecture by Federal Express to each site; earlier I had distributed a book of readings that are referred to in the lecture and the audioconference. Both before and after the conference I posted a set of notes to a computer Listserv, and I have on-line discussions with individual students as well as with students in project groups. At the last count there had been more than 400 student submissions to the Listserv. Some students are videotaping the audioconferences so that interactions can be analyzed as part of our research into the dynamics of this form of distance education. We are currently preparing audiographic presentations for next semester's course, and also are experimenting with multimedia delivery through the Internet. The students are all professional people, with the largest sub-groups being trainers in corporations and college teachers, with smaller numbers of K-12 educators, military trainers, church educators, and others.
So, here is one example of an international virtual classroom, although it must be fully recognized that it is a very crude and primitive international classroom. What is needed to improve on this example, and what is needed to move from the simple virtual classroom to the virtual university? Obviously, more than can be discussed here, but in general what is needed is an organizational structure that reaches across international boundaries and links resources and institutions and individuals within participating countries. We need to invent a structure that informs students of the learning resources that are available; that recruits instructors and supports them as they design courses; and that organizes, controls, and monitors instruction. Presently, there is no organization that links the efforts of one virtual classroom with others to provide a full curriculum. In the context of a bricks-and-mortar university, the resources available to one professor are severely limited; there is no organization that provides the resources needed to design and deliver such instruction with better quality on a much larger scale in a Total Systems approach. (see "Is Teaching Like Flying?" in The American Journal of Distance Education 7:1, 1993).
In regard to the issue of certification, there is no organization that can provide the foreign student with an internationally exchangeable, reasonably priced credit towards a degree. In spite of a number of efforts to establish certification of learning by non-traditional methods, there is still no agency in North America that has the power, recognition, or authority to provide a certification of independent, individually constructed learning programs that has credibility in the academic and business environment comparable to the degree awarded by a brick-and-mortar university. As Rossman contends,
The agenda for global higher education begins with questions about who is to coordinate and regulate electronic courses offered on network or satellite; who is to set standards, especially when nations and universities disagree; what technology is to be used and how can it be shared; and who is to arbitrate and decide on such matters as degrees and exchange of course credits. Also, what kind of administration and funding can a worldwide electronic university have if it involves many governments, private colleges, and the teaching programs of business corporations? (Rossman 1993, 13)
There is a great opportunity facing the Vancouver symposium representatives who meet to plan the next steps in implementing the decisions contained in the Communiqué. As usual, the availability of communications technologies for education and our ideas about how to use them in teaching and learning are running far ahead of administrators' abilities to conceptualize ways of organizing and managing these technologies. The Vancouver representatives can perform a great service in this respect. They must apply their imaginations to the idea of a North American University, not of bricks and mortar (of which we already have too many!), but rather a Virtual University that provides the administrative structures and the validating and certifying roles needed to take advantage of the emerging electronic highways. If these representatives are able to advance this idea, it will be a magnificent contribution toward opening up the educational resources of the three countries to the learning community (which means all of us!), and the Vancouver meeting will then prove to have been of truly historic importance.
References
Haskins, C. H. 1957. The Renaissance of the 12th Century. Cleveland:
World Publishing Co.
Rossman, P. 1993. The
Emerging Worldwide Electronic University. Westport, CT: Praegar Publishers.
Perceptions of Interaction: The Critical
Predictor in Distance Education
Catherine P. Fulford and Shuqiang Zhang
This study examined learner perceptions of interactionand
satisfaction in a course delivered by interactive television.The participants
were 123 K-6 teachers in a Developmental Approaches in Science and Health
program. Three sessions of the ten-session course were examined. Significant
correlations were found between perceptions of personal and overall interaction
within the class. Perceptions of personal interaction were a moderate
predictor of satisfaction. The critical predictor of satisfaction was
the perception of overall interaction. These findings suggest that when
learners perceive the level of interaction to be high, they will be more
satisfied with instruction than when they perceive the level of interaction
to be low. Overall dynamics in interaction may have a stronger impact
on learners' satisfaction than does strictly personal participation. Vicarious
interaction within the class as a whole may result in greater learner
satisfaction than will the overt engagement of each participant. However,
both perceived level of interaction and satisfaction appear to decline
with increased exposure to interactive instructional television.
Perspectives on an Interactive Satellite-Based
Japanese Language Course
Roger Bruning, Melodee Landis, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Kristin Grosskopf
Learning outcomes for an interactive television-based distance learning course in introductory high school Japanese were evaluated in three successive years by comparing student achievement in the distance learning course to that in traditional classes. Year-end achievement tests of listening and written language competency were administered to students in both the distance and face-to-face courses. Results in the first two years showed that test scores of students in the distance learning course were higher than those of students in the face-to-face classes; however, possible group differences in motivation, general ability, and experience as language learners could not be ruled out as explanations for the difference. Therefore, achievement measures were supplemented in the third year with data on students' perceived efficacy as Japanese language users, their grades, and their previous foreign language learning experience. The achievement data again showed differences favoring the distance learning group; trends were consistent for students with differing levels of school success and amount of prior language learning experience. Factors that could account for these results are hypothesized and suggestions for future research are proposed.
Collaborative Learning: More Is Not Necessarily
Better
Susan May
What are the effects of distance on collaboration
and learner interaction as it relates to women learners in feminist courses?
Personal interviews with nine women from a variety of backgrounds and
personal circumstances indicated that interaction as an educational issue,
strategy, and process is not of primary concern to women distance learners.
Significantly less interaction occurred among students and tutors than
was anticipated, and the majority of students endorsed the relatively
solitary nature of distance study as appropriate and useful for them.
Because of the importance of the principle of collaboration to feminist
pedagogy, distance educators should clarify, broaden, and adapt their
understanding of the concept of learner interaction. We should question
our assumptions about the nature, prevalence, and utility of learner interactions,
resist applying traditional classroom models to distance contexts, and
creatively structure and moderate interactions between learners, tutors,
and technology.
Oklahoma's Star Schools: Equipment Use and
Benefits Two Years after Grant's End
Constance M. Martin
A 1992 survey of the thirty-five Oklahoma schools
that received satellite downlinks as part of the 1988-1990 Midlands Consortium
Star Schools grant investigated the extent to which schools were continuing
to use the equipment and the impact of satellite access on their educational
programs. Four schools did not use their downlinks in 1991-92, and two
of the four also did not use the equipment in 1990-91; thirty-one schools
were continuing to use the equipment to receive student and/or staff development
programming. Sixty-one percent of thirty-three respondents believe satellite
access has very significantly or significantly improved the educational
program for students at their school; 39% believe it has very significantly
or significantly improved their overall staff development program. Forty-eight
percent of respondents reported a decrease in use since the first year
of operation; 76% of respondents anticipate an increase in use in the
future.
Analytic Considerations in Distance Education
Research
Hoi K. Suen and Robert J. Stevens
All articles submitted to The American Journal of Distance Education are subjected to a multi-stage review process. One of the stages of review is an evaluation of methodology, including the appropriateness of any analytic procedures that are used. For this article, a number of empirical research reports submitted over the past several years were reviewed to identify common analytic problems and errors often overlooked by distance education researchers.
