As we wrap up the week on Definition and History, here’s my take on the definition of distance ed:
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There isn’t a valid one because the construct of “distance education” is meaningless. Sure, Keegan has a nice list of diagnostic characteristics. Kearsley avoids the question. The Commission on Colleges Southern Association of Colleges and Schools defines it “for the purposes of accreditation review, as a formal educational process in which the majority of the instruction occurs when student and instructor are not in the same place. Instruction may be synchronous or asynchronous. Distance education may employ correspondence study, or audio, video, or computer technologies (see Morehead’s statement).” But each of the definitions is flawed by one basic assumption — that there is a distinction between distance and non-distance education.
The purpose of defining it in order to suggest what technologies might be available is a valid one. It’s useful to know if the course is “online” or “correspondence” or “compressed video” but to suggest that using the subsets of technologies available in those “labels of convenience” as somehow different than “real education” is misguided and inappropriate.
August 31st, 2008 at 12:26 am
Dr. Lowell.
I beleive the issue we have here when trying to define distance education is the purpose of the definition. For example in our class discussion we are looking at distance education in an almost philisopical way, we breaking it down to the very root. Whereas most schools and I could post links to dozens of distance learning pages all with similar definitions, are utilizing a working definition to suit their purpose. Schools are trying to market a service, to market that service they must define distance education by whatever service they offer. for example if college XYZ offers written correspondence courses, then their advertisement would read our distance education department offers coursework via correspsondence. Whereas MSU and others that offer, compressed video, tv broadcasts, online courses etc, define their courses as distance learning as well, because that is what they are trying to sell.
As educators it is good to have both a philisophical and working definition. One example I might use to demonstrate that we should have a working or more common definition is that I recently was at a school where they were starting a distance eduation program. Had I tried to explain your defintion to them they would have laughed and said as far as they was concerned their definition took precedence. Myself on the other hand having taken many educational courses and philosophy courses beleive that definitions need exploration and can change, but for practical purposes it is good to atleast realize what most people have in mind when discussing the definition of any particular idea.
On another note this discussion made me think of the idea of Plato’s form, where as we all know a flower or tree when we see it, even though there are hundreds of variats there is something that we all just know makes them flowers or trees.
August 31st, 2008 at 8:04 am
These are good points. Yes, we are breaking it down to a “philosophical” basic. I prefer to think of it as a theoretical foundation. Until we understand what these terms actually represent, it’ll be very difficult to deal with how to accomplish the processes they describe.
As for the marketing aspect of the field, yea, I’m aware that most people use the terms incorrectly. This course, for example, is named Principles of Distance Education. If it were named “Principles of Technological Integration” it would be more accurate, but the people outside the field — and many IN it — would not understand.
My issue is this. There are lots of places where the terminology will be used incorrectly, but in an educational technology course, we darn well better be working to get it right, hence my insistence that we deal with the theoretical foundations of the terms.
There’s another reason that addresses the issues of research and practice. As long as it’s possible to paint courses where the teacher and learner are separated by time or space greater than that represented by a classroom, the institutional forces will continue to fight the adoption of these technologies by demonizing them — pointing to dreadful implementations and claiming a generalizability to all similar courses — and demanding special and impossibly rigorous validation in order to justify including those courses as part of “real education.”
As long as the forces representing the status quo can describe courses like this one as, somehow, “different” they can argue that we need to prove that courses delivered online, or with compressed video, or even correspondence, are “as good as the classroom.” It’s time the field moved beyond that and acknowledged the theoretical foundations of technological mediation so we can have a theoretical frame work to discuss the application of the full range of technological applications in education.
August 31st, 2008 at 9:37 am
[...] an interesting comment under that last post about the importance of having common definitions — what I’ve [...]