The time has come to reveal my perspective on Distance Education. As we get into the last half of our week on defining distance education, it’s important for us to come to grips with the arbitrariness of currently accepted definitions and consider the assumptions upon which they are based.
The phrase “distance education” is redundant. All education is done at a distance. The problem is that we’re so close to the issue — and so fluent in certain technologies — that we fail to recognize one existential truth. Education involves two people — the teacher and the learner. As soon as you’re dealing with more than one mind, you have a distance that needs to be bridged and the only bridge we have — barring the psychics among you — is technology. The distance is almost always due to physical displacement, but may also involve temporal shifts.
Contrary to what you may think, the classroom is a distance environment. The teacher and student are not in the same place at the same time. They are in relatively close proximity but so long as they are different people, they are not in the same place. As I pointed out earlier in the week, teachers in classrooms use a variety of technologies to bridge the gaps. Your bias is that spoken language — the main communications tool for humans in propinquity — is not technology because it is based on biological mechanisms. It’s so familiar to you — you’re so fluent in it — that the amount of cognitive load you require to use it is almost nil.
Consider the differences in communication when you are forced out of your most comfortable zones of communication — both in terms of channel and content as you have been over the last week and a half. Not only didn’t you know how to use the channels very effectively because most of you have had little opportunity to use them, but you were stymied by lacking the knowledge you needed to interpret the communications. Had we been in the same room and I started speaking Geek to you in a classroom, you would have been more comfortable in the channel and would have interrupted me to ask about ‘gators’ and ‘feeding’ and all that stuff. You’d have known when and how to address the failures in comprehension using the technologies of signal and speech. But you had to deal with foreign technologies — email, IM, and discussion boards — to cope with resolving the discontinuities in your comprehension. You had to spend considerable amounts of cognitive load on just manipulating the channel in addition to trying to decode the messages from it.
And before you start blaming the channels, let’s consider what the real problem is. It’s lack of fluency.
If you’re an expert in the manipulation of the channel, then overcoming discontinuity in comprehension becomes less onerous. Conversely, if you’re an expert in the subject matter, then picking the bits you recognize out of the communication stream becomes easier. As classroom teachers, you know this and do it with a level of automaticity that makes it transparent to you — you never even think about it. But as teachers at a distance, you are more aware that you are using different modes of communication. This is most frequently evidenced by the observation that “I can’t tell what they’re thinking because I can’t see their body language” or “I’m not sure what they’re saying because I can’t hear their voice inflection.”
So, consider the definitions of “distance education” you’ve worked on, read, and believe. Start recognizing that definitions based on arbitrary collections of technology are valueless. Start recognizing that even very small distances require bridging and that fluency in a technology means more cognitive capacity is left to manage learning. Start thinking about what it means when the students are more facile with the technology than the teacher.
August 30th, 2007 at 8:13 am
[...] The main problem with these definitions are that they are not diagnostic. They fail, almost entirely, to distinguish between “distance” and “classroom” when one starts examining the two side-by-side. I believe there’s a reason for that. Read On Distance Education and find out what it is. [...]
August 30th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
I never even considered the classroom when I composed my definition of ‘distance education.’ The ‘distance’ is bridging the material want them to learn from the context of the teaching to their brains. To establish the connection, we use well constructed educational activities to present the material in the best manner possible.
Its good that people don’t have the same perspective on things. Diversity allows you to build your understanding of the content. Case and point has been the many blogs I’ve read about the definition of distance education.
August 30th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
That’s one distance — the cognitive distance — but the parallel to other definitions of distance education is the physical/temporal distance between teacher and student. I don’t care if you’re only a foot away. You *still* need to bridge that distance using some technology, because neither you nor your student is psychic. Arbitrary collections of technology do not change in any real sense the notion of “distance education.”
Is spoken language different if it’s recorded on tape, digitally, or on wax disks? The fidelity of the recording may be an issue, but the actual encoded message remains constant. That’s what makes the whole notion of distance education simply arbitrary.
August 31st, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Does this mean that ALL education is distance education? Seems like a tough sell to me. There has to be some way to distinguish one from the other. Either that, or we should just do away with the whole term distance education and merely start talking about different technologies that enable/enhance education. Maybe that makes the most sense–especially when you start trying to classify classes that have in-person meetings as well as an online component.
August 31st, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Yup. That’s exactly what it means — or more precisely — there’s no such thing as “Distance Education.” It’s all just Education and the only questions become how to most effectively deliver educational experiences to the widest audiences.
August 31st, 2007 at 10:24 pm
I think we, as teachers, have SO MANY preconceived notions when we hear the term ‘distance learning’, most of which come from conceptualizing it alongside what we define as ‘technology’. In my own mind, I connect technology to a specific teaching standard that I was held to, a standard that I am required to evaluate new teachers. Then, I consider hands-on activities, or simple ingenuity; I also consider this to be a form of technology. The term can be so utterly ambiguous (and probably incorrectly defined) that many of us likely came up with a regurgitated answer before we really started to consider something original. Painful, painful epiphany…
September 2nd, 2007 at 9:34 am
I will agree that all education is just education and that we do need to answer the question of how to best communicate the information to the learner. We must also be able to see if they have learned it. Depending on the content, communication of any type will allow for feedback however, I still feel that in class education is the best way to teach some subjects…. and some learners learn best, face to face ….
September 2nd, 2007 at 11:26 am
I must admit that when I previously thought about distance education, I never thought about any of these concepts. After having it presented this way, I too agree that education is just education. That there truely is no distance education or that all education involves distance. The more I think on this I have to say that all education is distance education.
September 2nd, 2007 at 3:18 pm
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men,” Herman Melville. Melville is one of my favorite writers and I thought this quote was appropriate here because we are, in some ways, talking about our needs and abilities as teachers to bridge the distance between minds so that we can connect with our students and help them connect with each other.
Somehow, I don’t think Melville was thinking about fiber optic lines as he was writing, but in the 21st century, it might be possible to extend the connote the quote a little.
On a more serious note, this discussion has been very enlightening for me because I basically considered distance education a learning situation where the teacher and student were not in the same room and some form of high-tech tools had to be used to connect them.
February 7th, 2008 at 10:21 am
[...] On Distance Education was the wrap up post on the week devoted to looking at definitions and parameters of distance ed. [...]
August 26th, 2008 at 7:43 am
[...] Distance education is a redundant term. You can read my take on the subject in On Distance Education. [...]
August 26th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Over the past week I have definitely been taken out of my comfort zone. I have so much to learn. Taking classes and being deployed has been a blessing. Even though I can’t see or hear my instructors, I have full contact with them. Within minutes (sometimes) I can have answers to my questions. It is a great way to achieve our goals in education, in the classroom, or in a chat room.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Until our chat last night I had not considered distance education as being in my own classroom, other than having my students use computers to communicate with students around the world. I now look at the phrase in a much different way. When I am teaching 24 kids to read there is much distance between us. They have no clue how to learn to read and I have to bridge the gap between us. I think as educators it is important for us to be out of our comfort zones like we have been in the last week. Our students are out of theirs all the time.
Now I must go think about how I will redefine my definition of distance education….hmmm.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
I, like many of you, had always considered distance learning as internet classes or other environments that don’t allow you to be in the same room with your classmates or instructor. I thought of distance as physically being far away from something. I am beginning to see and understand that disctance learning doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with location.
Today someone asked me about the classes I am enrolled in this semester. So I went through the whole explanation. When I tried to explain to them that I was taking a distance learning course on distance learning, things became clearer to me and much LESS clear to them. Having my original frame of mind of distance learning, I can understand the confusion in my explanation. Now I see distance education as the gap between what I want my student to understand and what they actually understand. I thought that technology was the main ingredient in distance education. But now I realize it is just a really useful tool that helps us to bridge the gap.
August 27th, 2008 at 2:33 am
Dr. Lowell
After our chat last night I completley understand your definition of distance eduction. To be honest it sounds like something I heard in an phiolosophy class, and I imagine that you would have a tough time convincing a room full of teachers in a faculty meeting that they are all teaching at a distance. None the less I can see where people may get confused is the aparatus used to bridge the gap. When distance learning is discussed now, most teachers think of the internet and computers, that to them is technology. Most people do not recognize familiar objects as technology, in 2008 I imagaing many students and teachers alike would not consider landline teleophones to be technology, it is just autonomus to the them. Distance education in the past would have been correspondance by mail, but today it is most often internet based.
If people would increase the width of their definition of technolgy they would understand that all learning is distance education and that any tool used to bridge the gap betwwen student and teacher is technology.
August 27th, 2008 at 9:14 am
I agree with a lot of the other comments being made by my classmates. I have always thought of distance education of online classes. I based it on proximity. However, now I can see that distance education is occurring in the traditional classroom. Many people are not “at the same place at the same time” even if they are together in one room at the exact same moment. The lecture may be over the heads of some or many students may be thinking of what they will have for lunch.
This was a great observation to think about and I agree totally. No matter if we are face to face with our students or talking to them online we must bridge the gap of what they know and what they are trying to learn.