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Fig. 8 - Guided didactic conversation (Holmberg)
The data presented in Volume 1 contain a listing of all the providers of distance training, as defined, in the European Union in 1997.
Most of these institutions are well established and many go back over 100 years.
The first European analyses of guides to good practise and indicators of possible success or failure, were published by Riechert in the, then, German Democratic Republic, in 1959, and by Holmberg in Sweden in 1960.
Since then the science of teaching at a distance has been developed and from the period 1980 to today, a considerable literature on distance training has been developed.
A listing of the literature can be viewed at the ICDL of the Open University of the United Kingdom site on the internet http://www-icdl.open.ac.uk/.
The literature is grouped under these areas of professional specialisation:
It is considered that they represent the distillation of guides to best practice from the 100 years of distance training in the EU
It is considered that they represent the best indicators of probable success or failure in this field, and are valid for the professional providers of this form of training, both public and private, in the 15 nations of the European Union.
It is crucial to study these didactical recommendations as the logistics of the distance training industry and the didactics of successful training at a distance, can differ markedly from face-to-face provision in the college or training centre, and can rest on categories that are not normally seen as characteristics of conventional provision:
Sir John Daniel (United Kingdom) Four criteria for
success of distance systems
Börje Holmberg (Sweden) Guided didactic conversation
Desmond Keegan (Ireland) The reintegration of the
teaching acts
Otto Peters (Germany) A more industrialised form of
teaching and learning.
Benedetto Vertecchi (Italy) Distance education as
the creation of an educational environment.
It is considered that an analysis of these five positions will provide planners and researchers with a framework within which to analyse the didactic structures of the training of European Union citizens at a distance.
In an often quoted and highly influential article entitled, The science of learning and the art of teaching Skinner, in 1964, wrote:
We are on the threshold of an exciting and revolutionary period in which the scientific study of man will be put to work in man's best interest. Education must play its part. It must accept the fact that a sweeping revision of educational practices is possible and inevitable. From this exciting prospect of an advancing science of learning it is a great shock to turn to that branch of technology which is most directly concerned with the learning process: education.
Skinner pointed out that the machine could free the teacher from custodial duties to begin to function through intellectual, cultural and emotional contacts of that distinctive sort which testify to the teacher's status as a human being. Programmed learning and teaching machines are part of an overall improvement in teaching techniques.
These statements have been reiterated frequently ever since. We are always on the threshold of 'an exciting period'. We are always on the threshold of 'a revolutionary period'. We are always in 'a crisis of education'. Technology is always the remedy for 'replacing teachers', whether it be in the form of programmed learning or other more recent teaching machines. These will always achieve 'an improvement in education'. Statements from the European Commission in recent years and from national government planning organisations have, apparently unwittingly, echoed Skinner's words, and at times quoted his theories and forecasts with almost verbal precision.
One of Europe's leading authorities on the use of technology in education, both conventional on-campus education and training at a distance, is Professor D G Hawkridge, Director of the Institute of Educational Technology and professor of Applied Educational Sciences at the Open University of the United Kingdom. In a major analysis published in 1976, with the striking title Next year Jerusalem: the rise of educational technology, Hawkridge shows how the 'Jerusalem' of improved education has been a hope of educationists for many decades. The Jerusalem of improved education, he states, is well worth hoping for and technology may be able to hasten the day when that goal is reached. On the other hand, educational technologists' hopes have been dashed many times, as his paper shows. There has been an incredible number of false starts, he claims.
Hawkridge goes on to show how, for the last fifty years, the use of technology in education has been proselytised widely for systems ranging from programmed instruction down to more recent uses of technology in education in the late 1990s. He claims that this field has been characterised by an overall impression of hectic activity. 'There was always a great deal of doing' he says.
Hawkridge shows how each new technological development has been supported by conferences and programme trials, surveys of outstanding programmes, reports from publishers of the programming boom, and messianic messages about revolutionising the school system. He quotes Goodman in 1962 on programmed learning and teaching machines as saying 'We are today on the verge of what promises to be a revolution in education' and the sentiment has continued right down to the late 1990s with the constant introduction of new technologies being characterised by
All easy to say. Rather harder to deliver. In my view the key to success will lie in genuine collaboration between our universities on each of these ingredients.
On the first, the evidence indicates that producing good learning materials with the knowledge media demands more academic staff time than older technologies. We can hope that part of that extra investment will be recouped in more efficient student learning. But we would also be wise to try to amortise the added cost over more students in more universities.
Student feedback and support - or rather the absence of effective provision of them - are the Achilles heel of most distance education systems. If we could create an effective world wide support system for British providers of quality distance education we could leave the competition in the dust. Of our key competitors I observe that the Aussies are aggressive but uncoordinated and the Americans are enthusiastic but over-priced.
The idea of working together on a student support system carries over into logistics. So far, many UK universities that have developed boutique distance education programmes in particular areas of academic speciality are content to operate with small numbers. But it's a big world out there with exciting opportunities to scale things up.
Finally, what about scholarship? Walter Perry, the founding Vice-Chancellor of the OU, took the job because he saw it as an opportunity to improve what he saw as the desperately low standards of teaching in British universities. When he left the job ten years later he said that the most import innovation of the OU was the course team process which has created the revolution in teaching quality that is now recognised in the OU string of excellent ratings.
Other countries, when they offer distance education overseas, tend to package the prevailing academic orthodoxy. As my Canadian daughter would say: 'bor-ing'. If we could bring the intellectual vitality of the OU course team to our collaborative efforts within a world wide virtual university led from the UK we would excite the world.
Let us not forget that the academic mode of thinking, which I contrast to the ideological mode of thinking, is probably Europe's greatest gift to the world. If we can combine a deep commitment to the academic mode of thinking with the know-how that made the first generation of mega-universities so successful, then I believe that we can make the idea of a virtual mega-university real. If so, it will provide hope for millions in the 21 century.
Daniel has thus provided a clear-cut four-point measure for success or failure in distance training.
Holmberg bases his theory on his conviction that the only important thing in education is learning by individual students. Administration, counselling, teaching, group work, enrolment, evaluation are of importance only in so far as they support individual learning.
Distance education (Holmberg frequently used the term 'distance study' is particularly suitable for such individual learning because it is typically based on personal work by individual students more or less independent from the direct guidance of tutors. The distance student is placed in a situation where he has much greater chances than conventional students of individually selecting what he is to partake of and can in fact ignore, if he wants to, TV programmes, tutorial comments on assignments, face-to-face sessions. Study in a distance system is self-study but it is not private reading, for the student is not alone. He benefits from interaction with his tutors and other representatives of a supporting organisation. It is this relationship between the student and the supporting organisation which Holmberg characterises as guided didactic conversation.
This guided didactic conversation can be either real or simulated as the following diagram shows:
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Fig. 8 - Guided didactic conversation (Holmberg)
The presentation of course materials is one-way traffic only; activities such as counselling, didactic communication and communication at the initiative of students are, in addition, necessary for a distance system.
Holmberg gives seven bases for his theory which he presents as follows:
For developers of course materials it entails:
Keegan, Ireland
Desmond Keegan was head of distance training in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, and foundation chief executive of university level distance education in Italy in the 1980s, and is today managing director of Distance Education International in Dublin. Keegan has emphasised the importance of two logistical and administrative sub-systems in all distance training provision. These he labels the 'course development sub-system' and the 'student support sub-system' and he frequently emphasises the equality of importance of each sub-system, and the dangers of institutions focusing on the course development process, without paying equal attention to the other half of the system. He writes as follows:
A theoretical justification of distance education is to be found in the attempt to reintegrate the act of teaching which is divided by the nature of distance education. The intersubjectivity of teacher and learner, in which learning from teaching occurs, has to be artificially re-created. Over space and time a distance system seeks to reconstruct the moment in which the teaching-learning interaction occurs. The linking of learning materials to learning is central to this process. It may be represented schematically as in Figure 9.
In conventional education this linking is automatically set up. It may, of course, fail if students sleep or lack motivation, but the learner is placed in a privileged situation totally geared to learning. In distance systems the position is quite different as the link between materials and potential learning has to be artificially maintained.
Carefully developed distance teaching materials often fail because they are developed for and dispatched to students who do not open them, or who open them but do not study them, or who study them but do not reciprocate in any way. In a similar way distance education television or radio programmes may go unwatched or unheard, at least by the students enrolled in the course for which they were designed. The link has not been achieved; the essential reciprocity of the teaching act, shattered by the nature of distance education, has not been recreated.
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Figure 9 Relationship of learning materials to learning in a distance
system
Distance education presents a cluster of educational efforts to replace these functions of interpersonal communication by printed, electronic, or computer-based interaction because the interpersonal communication of conventional education is, by definition, excluded except for occasional sessions or meetings.
Distance education has to attempt to compensate for the following differences from interpersonal communication:
Society has for some hundreds, if not thousands, of years provided itself with locations called 'schools' and higher-level locations called 'universities' at which this teaching-learning interaction takes place.
The question for the theorist is whether institutional learning per se is linked to the privileged places for institutional learning created by society. In doing this the theorist abstracts from questions of quality: the theorist regards the quality of learning in schools and universities as a given - it has always been of a given quality and will always be so. The theorist will also be cognizant of the enormous sacrifices that normal students make to go to school college. Students made these sacrifices to obtain an education a hundred years ago just as they do today: children are sent to boarding schools huge prices are paid for digs in university cities, families are broken up, lovers abandoned.
Distance education students choose to remain in employment, at home, with their families. They expect to be given the institutional learning at home and, more and more frequently in the 1990s university degrees at home. The ideals of von Humboldt or Arnold or Newman that the university is a place where scholars come together for the purposes of learning do not convince them to make the sacrifices required. Why does the distance student refuse to go to school? Is the question that confronts the theorist.
Much of the early research work on distance education was accomplished by Peters and in 1965 he published an authoritative survey of distance education at further education level throughout the world, and followed it in 1968 with a survey of distance education at higher education level.
His major contribution to the theory of distance education came in 1973 in a book published in German with the title The didactical structure of distance teaching. Investigations towards a more industrialized form of teaching and learning.
Peters starts out from the position that the analysis of teaching at a distance in terms of conventional instructional theory has proved unsuccessful and unproductive and that one must therefore seek for another basis of analysis.
His extensive research on distance education institutions of every kind in the 1960s led Peters to propose the hypothesis that distance education could best be analysed by comparison with the industrial production of goods. He proposed new categories for the analysis of distance education taken from economic and industrial theory.
Peters' applications of the categories of industrial theory to distance education led him to the conclusion that distance education was the most industrialized form of education and that the theory of industrialisation was the best explanation of it. It follows that he maintains that 'whoever is professionally concerned with education today must acknowledge that there exist two clearly differentiated forms of teaching: traditional face-to-face teaching based on interpersonal communication and industrialised teaching based on technical and prefabricated forms of communication.' (1973:310).
Peters bases his search for a new theory to explain distance education on the fact that it is a new form of education. At university level it commenced, he says writing in 1980, 90 years ago and, in its commercial further education form, 130 years ago.
It was no historical accident that distance education began at this time. It is intrinsically linked to the new forms of postal and transport services that commenced in the mid 19th century. The first correspondence school and the first railways started at the same time.
In the universities of the middle ages, the ancient rhetorical form of education was replaced by the lecture, the seminar and the lesson and these have remained permanent characteristics of traditional education ever since. The humanistic influence added the tutorial. These can all be regarded as pre-industrialized forms of educations in which the individual lecturer remains in close contact with the whole teaching process, just as an artisan does with his craft.
The new development of the industrial age is distance education and the traditional educational concepts are of only partial use in analysing and describing it. New categories for analysis must be found, and they can best be found from the sciences which analyse industrial processes.
All forms of human life have been heavily influenced by the industrial revolution. Only traditional forms of education in schools, colleges and universities have remained outside it - except for the phenomenon of education at a distance. Then Peters justifies his decision to compare distance education with the industrial production of goods as the most satisfactory way of explaining it. It should be realised that Peters does this only for what he calls heuristic reasons, that is for explanatory purposes. He finds some justifications for this in the fact that the production of learning materials for distance students, is in itself, an industrialized process and one that is quite different in its teaching procedures from book production. This is clear, he feels, in the case of commercial correspondence schools but is also valid for government colleges teaching at a distance.
Other bases for his analysis he finds in the following:
One can see a parallel in the process that has led from individual labour, to manufacture, to mass production. Another parallel is the development from tools, to mechanisation, to automation. Industrialisation has the following consequences which have their parallels in distance education: the importance of the planning phase; success due to scientific planning; formalisation of procedures and normalisation of product; objectivisation of processes; mechanisation introduces functional change; centralisation and monopoly lead to elimination of small operations.
Rationalisation is defined as all methodological measures which have the goal to produce procedures with a comparatively (when compared with previous) more efficient resource, time and cost input. It is now new in education, and any organisation of content and objectives in teaching is characterised by it. In distance education it has the following characteristics according to Peters:
Teaching procedures are divided up and separated from the person of a single teacher. teaching is not dependent on an individual's subjective reaction to a classroom atmosphere but is objectively planned to be made available to all who enrol. Once teaching has been objectivised it can, by means of reproduction, mechanisation and transports, systems, be brought in the same quality to a theoretically unlimited number of students.
Peters sees distance education, therefore, as a solution in which quality of education can be preserved when the number of students in a state or country wish to study in much greater numbers than the numbers of teachers.
In the Voctade project Professor B. Vertecchi elaborates a theory of distance education as an educational environment which must be composed of certain necessary elements in order for the didactic process to succeed.
In the diagram below, Vertecchi includes the constituents of the educational environment for both classroom and distance teaching. As will be seen, not all of these factors are essential for the didactic process to take place, but there are some elements necessary which must be present in both distance and face-to-face models. The job of the distance educator is to re-create this environment and preserve these elements without unity of time and space.
Vertecchi highlights the caveat that:
Distance teaching should be seen as a continuation of (and a supplement to) traditional schooling but not as a substitute for it. Educators engaged in distance teaching should therefore not accept, even implicitly, the thesis held by 'de-schoolers' according to which traditional schooling can be replaced by information distribution networks.
Figure 10: Features of distance and classroom teaching. All of the elements, except unity of time and space, are in common
The unity of time and space are no longer necessary, given the vast changes in the modes of communication characterizing modern society -- modes capable of extending the limits of space beyond what students see before them, and of conserving and distributing educational messages upon request. The remaining features listed above, on the other hand, are still to be considered essential to defining 'schooling', whatever form it takes.
The absence of face-to-face teacher means performing the implicit constituents of education must be contained in a distance 'education environment'.
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Figure 11 Explicit and implicit functions of didactic analysis
We may summarize the entire monitoring process, aiming at guaranteeing the functionality of both teaching and learning, under three headings, which indicate the kind of data the control process needs and the operation to be carried out with that data:
It is important to persuade students to provide some kind of evidence so that it becomes clear whether or not the message transmitted up to that point has been able to fulfil individual learning needs. Persuading students to produce evidence means simply to create situations which solicit coherent answers to stimuli directly linked with the learning objective. This is how the interaction at the basis of the teaching artifice is triggered off.
Vertecchi then sees the didactic process as containing implicit and explicit functions. Distance educators must incorporate the implicit functions of the didactic process into the organization of courses in order to allow for the proper functioning of these courses. Vertecchhi suggests that the process of monitoring and evaluation must carry out the implicit functions of the didactic process and as such these processes demand particular attention.
Very many distance learning projects, and open and distance learning grants, seem to over-estimate the importance of the development of materials for learning and the replacement of the teachers with machines of various kinds. The didactic analyses presented here present a useful corrective to this approach.
The crucial question is whether these theories and practical presentations of strategies for success and failure in teaching students at a distance in the European Union mainly for individual distance training systems, will be applicable to group-based systems based on electronic technologies developed in the United States and will they be accepted seamlessly for the Web-based education in the future?
A priori it appears that theories developed for teaching students at a distance, non-electronically, should be accepted mutatis mutandis for teaching students electronically on the Web.
Should it prove true that these strategies for success in distance training are also strategies for the presentation of distance training in a Web based situation, then much of the practice in the 1990s has gone astray apparently proceeding with new models with little basis in the history, the literature, the theory or the practice of teaching students at a distance in European Union training centres in the past.
