"Workplace-bound employees of the future may never have
to leave their desks, much less enter a classroom to receive
training."
-- The Virtual University & Educational Opportunity,
p. 12
"Much of the commercial hype and hope about distance
learning is based on a very unidirectional conception of instruction, where
teaching is merely presentation, and learning is merely absorption. The Open
University's experience with two million students over 25 years suggests
that such an impoverished notion of distance education will fail -- or at
least have massive drop-out problems."
-- Sir John Daniel, Vice Chancellor, The Open University
I. Introduction - Why (and why not) to be interested
in "distance learning"... for adults
Half of all U.S. households have at least one computer; the
number of e-mail users in this country exceeds 80 million. Nearly a
half of the courses offered at the college level now use e-mail as at
least one mode of communication between teacher and student. Nearly a half
of today's undergraduates use the Internet at least once a day.
And each of these measures of penetration is changing rapidly.
Distance learning is an old idea, but its potential has been
transformed by the explosive take up of digital technology. As the College
Board report (see side panel) notes:
[It is now possible] to transcend barriers of time and space in ways
unimagined only a few years ago. Almost anything - text, data, images, video,
audio - can be delivered electronically, almost anywhere in the world, almost
any time and in real time, over the Internet. Imaging and Web-based technologies
are also constantly enhancing the potential for two-way communications between
and among teachers and students in remote locations.
Some viewing these developments imagine or worry about substitution
- using the new technologies to substitute less costly alternatives
for "conventional classroom instruction." But judging from
the past, the new technology is more likely to supplement than substitute
in conventional education settings and therefore to add costs rather than
reduce them. So far that has been true with campus-based
education.
With forms of content delivery and communication that are so heedless
of time and distance, the challenge for many educational institutions is
less "How can we do what we have done more cost-effectively?" but rather
"What else is now possible?" Freed of the need to do so much of our teaching
by gathering teacher and student in the same place at the same time:
-
Can we reach new students?
-
Can we draw upon teachers previously unavailable?
-
Can we do a better job of meeting the learning needs of diverse
students?
-
Can we offer educational program that is more closely matched in
time and place to the situation that prompts the learner's desire to
learn?
And so on.
II. Publishing as a form of distance education (distance
learning on demand)
Technology shapes the categories we use to discuss and think
about human activity. The set of activities we think of as "education" and
those we refer to as "research or information gathering" may well blur
together as they converge on the same set of new technologies.
The successful providers of continuing professional education
in law have increasingly become publishers of print materials, audio and
video tapes to the point that most provide more "education" in this form
than through live programs. These materials share the characteristic that
they allow the learner to choose the time, place, and topic.
III. Approaching distance education
incrementally
Many of the players now rushing into distance learning are being drawn
by the technology. They can be understood as asking "What problem can this
solve?" or "How can this be used to generate new revenue?"
Others appear to be paralyzed by the technology, viewing the costs
and the expertise required to be a serious player in distance learning to
be out of their reach.
For most educators an approach that might be termed "attentive
incrementalism" may be the wisest approach. "Attentive" suggests the necessity
to become and stay aware of what others are doing with digital technology.
Those one must attend to include both competitors and one's students. "Attentive"
also calls for identifying future infrastructure or support needs.
"Incrementalism" suggests adding accessible distance elements to current
programs. If Web-based conferencing is not currently available within a unit,
that doesn't mean that e-mail or a list can't be used to develop an understanding
of how current offerings might be improved through these very similar
means and to build a familiarity among faculty with the pedagogical
value of asychronous electronic exchange. Course Web pages don't have to
be "designer" pages to do the job. One advantage of going incremental and
lower tech is that it is likely to provide better access to greater numbers.
Because LII's distance learning course (see below) used low-end video
conferencing technology students at law schools that lacked a dedicated facility
were able to participate.
IV. The LII's experience with distance learning
A. Distance learning on demand
As an electronic publisher of legal materials - Supreme
Court decisions, the U.S. Code, introductory commentary on law topics from
admiralty to workers compensation- the Legal Information Institute has since
its establishment in 1992 moved Cornell Law School into an
educational relationship with a vast and diverse new clientele. Each
time the U.S. Supreme Court hands down a decision, the LII's e-mail
bulletin summarizing it carries the word to over 18,000 individuals
and institutitions. Currently, the LII's web servers are relied on by
some 40,000 users a day. Every day the LII provides at least a small
measure of legal information (education?) to nearly three times the number
of people who have graduated from the school since its
founding.
B. Copyright and Digital Works
In 1996-97 LII undertook to explore how digital technology
might be used by law schools to reach students (and involve faculty) remote
from their campuses. Using the Internet, it offered a law course, for credit,
to students of four participating law schools -- Cornell plus Chicago-Kent,
Colorado, and Kansas. That course has just finished its third year. Some
key elements of this initial LII distance learning venture include:
-
digital course materials (distributed via the Internet)
-
e-mail and Web-based written exchange as a continuous
(asynchronous) means of teacher-student, student-student, and
student-teacher exchange [using WebBoard, see side panel], and
-
once a week Internet-based video conference for "face to face" class
discussion (scheduled across four school class schedules and academic calendars
and three time zones) [using CU-Seeme, see side panel]
Educational institutions are embarking upon "distance learning"
for many different reasons and consequently the phenomenon takes many forms.
The underlying aim of this particular project (shared by all the participating
schools) has been to discover ways that network communication, with its ability
to nullify barriers imposed by distance and advantages provided by proximity,
can be used to give resident students wider educational options, and permit
faculty members to teach in areas of special interest and expertise
that draw insufficient student enrollments in their home institutions.
Questionnaire
In order to make best use of next Friday's short session
I would like to find out more about the experience and concerns you
bring to an exploration of "distance learning." To that end I've prepared
a short questionnaire. Would you kindly
click here and fill it out.
Suggestions or Comments?
This collection of material on distance learning is a
work in progress. If you have suggestions of additional material or sources,
comments, or feedback of any kind, please
email the author!
Prepared by Peter W. Martin for the Legal Information
Institute
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