O. Peters: Learning and Teaching in Distance Education

Learning and Teaching in Distance Education

Otto Peters

Whether a university is planned and developed from the very start exclusively for distance education (single mode), whether a traditional university also provides distance teaching (dual mode), or whether a university provides several forms of studying parallel to one another, and leaves it up to students to use these forms in accordance with their own needs and opportunities (mixed mode), these are all questions which are usually decided on criteria and factors to do with educational policies and planning, higher educational, institutional and professional policies, and organisations and logistics. Pedagogical advantages or disadvantages are treated as secondary factors. But the pedagogical structure of distance education is different in each of these three institutional types, and this, quite naturally, has an effect on the processes of learning and teaching.

In fact, specific questions relating to distance teaching pedagogics result from the different forms of the institutionalisation which must be borne in mind. Put simply, three very different attitudes towards distance education and towards the expected learning and teaching behaviour may be combined here.

Many students take part in single mode distance education as practised in large distance and open universities. In fact, some universities have hundred of thousands of students. Students are more or less left to their own devices because the counselling systems are insufficient. The type of distance students who work through their distance courses at home separated from the university and isolated from teachers and fellow students is the norm here. Guided self study is characteristic of this type of learning and teaching.

The learning and teaching behaviour at a dual mode university, such as those that have been developed in Australia, for example, is totally different. Here, only as many students are admitted to courses as can be taught in the respective classes. This means that the number of students is low. Their contact to the teachers who are responsible for them and to the university is closer and less likely to be broken off because they have to attend teaching events at the university on a regular basis. According to this concept, external students also 'attend' classes at the university, but at arms' length by making use of lecture notes, tapes and other teaching materials. The decisive pattern here is indirect attendance at teaching events in a traditional university. From the point of view of pedagogics, fundamentally this is a different concept.

Another form of distance education will be created in universities of the future, which will provide both face-to-face and distance teaching and make greater use of networked electronic information and communications media (mixed mode universities). This will be able to react extremely flexibly to the requirements of students, including adult students of any age. The dominant pedagogic pattern here will be autonomous, self-guided learning, in which students will decide whether they wish to make use of teaching offers available through various media and will use the considerable latitude on the basis of their own strategies - from intensive social contact in a small tutorial through to self-guided studies in a digital learning environment and the exchange of experience with other students using CMC and a network.

The task of distance teaching pedagogics would be to examine these structurally extremely different types of distance education to discover their advantages and disadvantages, to describe the pedagogic guiding principals, traditions, conventions and ideologies behind them, and to analyse and compare the respective dominant learning and teaching strategies. They should certainly not be presented in an abstract form and with a merely instrumental intention. On the contrary, it will be necessary to interpret them in their respective historical-cultural context. The results to be achieved here could act as a catalyst in the expected process of the integration of methods of traditional university teaching and distance teaching.

Commentary

Most authors who attempt to explain the phenomenon of distance education see the main characteristic as being the spatial separation of teachers and students and derive their fundamental concepts from this factor. This makes an infrastructural, and, therefore, fundamentally external, factor into the starting point of efforts to determine the nature of distance education. Here I have attempted to describe distance education using pedagogic categories. The results were the following decisive peculiarities which distinguish distance education from traditional university teaching:

'Written' teaching dominates in contrast to 'spoken' teaching. 'Reading' learning is stressed as against 'listening' learning.
As a result of the use of technical and electronic media, three distinct pedagogic structures have been formed which characterise learning and teaching.
The sociographic status of the students is quite different in decisive points.
Specific institutional and organisational preconditions are required for the development, control and evaluation of learning and teaching.

Those who maintain on the face of the above that there are no essential differences between distance education and traditional university teaching are not thinking pedagogically but following different agenda. As the five examples used and explained here show, distance teaching pedagogics must be concerned with solving problems of its own nature which are not found in other combinations of teaching and studying. From the point of view of pedagogics, distance education is in fact a form of learning and teaching sui generis. For this reason, solving outstanding problems of distance teaching pedagogics will have to be carried out with special theoretical approaches, interpretations, specific concepts and experience.