What the Future Holds: The Evolution of Distance Education

When I graduated from high school in 1985, there were many factors that affected future educational choices.  Had distance education offered the range of opportunities it does today, my choices would possibly have been different.  Although distance education has been around for over 160 years, in 1985 it was not even a consideration for most of us.  I had no idea that distance learning degrees were offered although the limited scope of these would of have hampered my interest in them even if I had known.   Upon starting my teaching career in 1990, I became aware of correspondence courses offered to many high school students, particularly those that needed remediation or wanted to take courses not offered at the school.  

A few years later, when I moved to the American School in Kingston, Jamaica, I found myself coordinating the correspondence course program offering high school degrees from the University of Nebraska. These courses were comprehensive, required self-motivation and initiative from the students, and provided very limited interaction between the teacher/facilitator and student. I think it was this early experience with distance education that made me so skeptical about participating in an online degree program.  Prior to my experience seeking a degree in Instructional Design and Technology, distance learning was something that you engage in if you have absolutely no other alternative.  I viewed distance education as a reading list and a set of questions, only there to demonstrate what we already knew or could learn on our own. 

Today, distance learning is not only defined by what is available now but also by what is possible in the near future. Distance education connects the learner and the teacher using the ever increasing advances in technology communications.   Garrison and Steele offer the following criteria for distance education:

            1. Distance education implies that the majority of educational communication

between (among) teacher and student(s) occurs noncontiguously.

2. Distance education must involve two-way communication between (among)

teacher and student(s) for the purpose of facilitating and supporting the

educational process.

3. Distance education uses technology to mediate the necessary two-way

communication. (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, Zvackek, 2012, p. 35)

Distance education today is much more than a mere reading list and set of questions.  It requires interaction between teacher, student and content.  An interesting debate has emerged possibly sparked by the work of Otto Peters.  Peters used industrialization to explain his rationale for distance education. Focusing on the changes in distance education over the years, educators have used Henry Ford’s industrialization model to explain its evolution.  Post-Fordist thought focuses on “product innovation, process variability, and labor responsibility” (p. 54).  It stresses the needs of the student and the responsibility of the teachers to meet these needs and provide feedback. It is more flexible and individually customized as it focuses more on the consumer, the students, than the product.  While educators continue to research and debate over how learning takes place, what conditions are best and which strategies are most effective, post-Fordists promote a constructionist view of learning. Distance learning today adheres to many of the post-Fordist ideas encouraging students to learn through experiences (p. 58).  The idea of mass produced learning programs (Fordist) would not meet the needs or the expectations of this technology savvy generation.

The future of distance education will be driven by technological advances and research on learning theory.  The ability to target instruction so that optimum learning takes place using all of the technology resources available, I believe, is the goal of distance education.   Not only will distance education offer learners more choice and flexibility, but quality of education will also become a benefit.  Much more research needs to be collected on the use of eLearning for K-12 (Huett, Moller, Foshay, Coleman, 2008) but more and more we will see blended approaches in traditional settings. The future will bring exponential growth of distance education (Laureate Education, n.d.).  As e-schools emerge and the use of technology is prevalent in K-12 settings across the world, it is easy to conclude that web-based learning will be used across grade levels and through higher education, although it is unlikely to ever replace traditional face-to-face instruction particularly in the K-12 environment (Laureate Education, n.d.). 

 See "The Future of Distance Education: The Sky's the Limit"

References

Huett, J., Moller, L., Foshay, W., & Coleman, C. (2008). The evolution of distance education: Implications for instructional design on the potential of the web (Part 3: K12). TechTrends, 52(5), 63–6 7.

Laureate Education Inc., (Producer). (n.d.). Distance education: The next generation [Video]. Baltimore, MD : Simonson, M.

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.