Distance Learning Issues in Higher Education

As we all know, distance education is becoming more and more pervasive in higher education. Increasingly, courses are offered entirely online and as a compliment to face-to-face courses. The trend seems to be following the technology to some extent; that is, technologically proficient students expect to be able to use such technology in their learning—so universities are complying. But other issues are at hand as well including distance learnings’ ability to reach students who might not otherwise be able to attend school, cost savings in some cases, better pedagogy (again, in some cases), and a simple competitive drive (other universities are doing this, we better get going with it).

As higher education moves in this direction, many issues have arisen as one would expect with any revolution. I have described some of these challenges below, but let me add one precursor here : the technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that solutions are being reached just as the problem is being well-defined. In other words, the pace of this revolution is so fast that the speed itself is an issue in meeting various challenges. Software developments, bandwidth and other hardware progress, and so on, all contribute to rapidly changing problems and solutions. So much so, I think, that the difficulty to keeping up with all of it is one of the major challenges facing those involved whether they be instructors, administrators or instructional designers. Here are some other challenges:

Instructor tenure and promotion. Universities are having to rewrite the rules about how professors are evaluated. How much does online course development count in tenure and promotion decisions? Does it matter that you spend months developing great multimedia content for a course? Which counts most: a couple of basic articles published or a couple of new stellar online courses developed? Though most schools have developed at least some new policies about this, they seem to be very fluid and still under development. The outcome will matter a great deal to those who intend to spend their career teaching in higher education.

New skills. What new skills do college-level teachers need to be excellent online instructors? While higher education instructors have never been known as a group for their pedagogical expertise, teaching online requires a new set of skills, and therefore, offers new need for and opportunity for evaluating teaching methods. On the other hand, the move toward online teaching may offer the opportunity for developing pedagogical skills that may not have been done in a traditional setting. Instructors who lack a clear understanding of online teaching are motivated to learn how to do it. But if they have taught only in a classroom for many years, and continue to do so, they may not be as motivated to learn better pedagogy.

Level of technical expertise needed. What level of technical expertise is needed by online instructors? Can they depend on instructional designers to translate their face-to-face pedagogy into an online version? Can you be a great online instructor with just a basic understanding of, say, laying out a course in WebCT, or do you need advanced multimedia skills to be a good instructor? The relationship between instructors and instructional designers is still being defined. The outcome of this relationship will say much about what life will be like for university instructors in the future.

Content Development and Resources. One of the challenges, I believe, that instructors and universities in general face is how to create great online courses without reinventing the wheel with every course. Due to financial and time constraints, it is nearly impossible to create great courses for every subject without using pre-existing content (i.e., multimedia). So the challenge is in how to identify existing content and use it without violating copyrights or spending an inordinate amount of time searching for the content. There are some efforts underway to help with this including the Merlot project (http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm) and MediaMatrix (http://www.matrix.msu.edu/~mmatrix/index.php) for example, but these and other resources are still underdevelopment.

Online resources

Some basic statistics about distance learning in higher education:

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=80

General trends and issues:

http://www.umuc.edu/odell/cvu/ann_links_gen.html