wit1

Zentrales Institut für Fernstudienforschung
Central Institute for Distance Education Research - FernUniversität in Hagen line

2.März 1998

The Learning Witness

As long as schools have taught classes of learners, the notion existed that a student, while not interacting directly with the teacher might benefit in terms of learning from the interactions of others in the same setting. In modern elementary schooling group work (i.e. interaction among the learners without the constant control of a teacher) has grown in importance. Also in higher education student-student interaction has gained a respectable position in the discussion of possible settings.
Distance Teaching is one of the modern possible settings in higher education worldwide.
The question of this article is whether there are new implications to the learning process of students in terms of didactical considerations to be followed when the new electronic media are incorporated into the distance education setting. There already is a tradition in electronic mail, in listserves, and now since a couple of years in Web-teaching. Actually the terminology is misleading: People speak of virtual classes, or virtual seminars, indeed the expression „virtual education" is often heard. Is it not a class? is it not a seminar? Is it not education? I think the technological differences brought about by the new media in terms of the setting are by far not so important as the possibilities to structure, the need to plan ahead, the ease to evaluate that are kind of „built in" into the new technologies.
The object of research is a „virtual seminar for professional development" with 45 participants from all over the world. For such a professional development seminar it was thought to be important that the participants also had the chance to interact, get to know each other, plan projects etc. like in any other professional development seminar in higher education .
Now in virtual classes or virtual seminars this notion stays alive and we should expect that the proportion of student-student interaction is still gaining in importance.
This situation represents the idea that learning can be organized to happen not only by direct interaction (dyads) of teacher and learner (even if a fellow-student is pushed into the role of a teacher) but also by indirect learning possibilities of the witness - lets call it „witness learning"- the witness being mute but awake and „intellectually" following the other interactions in the setting.
The question is now whether this setting can be transported also into the framework of distance education. There are many forms of distance education throughout the world, very few indeed will be of a kind where dyads of learning interaction will be excluded: on the contrary, almost all distance education institutions will have provisions for such dyads - mostly student-tutor interaction of some kind, sometimes for classical seminars or summer schools in order to make up for something that is thought of being missing: autonomous learning, in remote, asynchronous interaction.
Theorists of Distance Education like Börje Holmberg, in claiming that the „proprium" of DE be the unique one to one relationship seem to insist on the incomparability of distance education with organized learning of any other kind. The big disadvantage of Holmbergs notion is that we still must calculate: DE is attractive to tax payers only if it promises the same results at less cost than the normal system.
Lets calculate then: In a normal daily class - lets say 30 learners and a teacher - there will be a net-contact-time of interaction among teacher and individual student of less than 10 minutes a week.
There is a ratio of 1:30 in direct one-to-one interaction, if it were not for the trust in witness-learning possibilities schools would have to close down.
The one-to one interaction Holmberg promotes for DE means, that, out of organizational reasons, this ratio will normally not be possible: Holmberg speaks of a 1:1 ratio! This means while the tutor interacts with one student no other student is learning from this interaction.
In correspondence education there normally was nothing like „witness-learning".
And, let me blunty state this, if every DE student was to build up a relationship with a paid tutor on this 1-1 basis, DE never would have worked: Successful tutorial contact, by telephone, writing, e-mail etc. only functioned because the 1-1 relationship will be asked for only by a very small proportion of students, the others either dropping out or learning successfully without a prescheduled one-to-one interaction; the question arises whether the successful DE institutions make a living on their drop-outs.
There are many successful DE students never having asked for individual support and still keeping the pace and sitting the exam and passing it. This must have been even the bigger proportion and it seems to represent the didactic quality of the material presented. It is this group of successful students working with elaborated didactic material which makes me think that the proprium of distance education cannot be the one-to-one relationship Holmberg talks about.
One-to-one relationship in DE is something we have to work for as a built-in-possibility, yet hoping that it never will become necessary for a majority of students!
When electronic discussions are offered, we find a new dimension in distance education: fellow-students might profit a lot again from witness learning just like in any traditional educational setting. So one of the evaluative questions for this seminar was, what participants think they have most learned from. We should expect that the learning material, in the case of the seminar the readings, would be the most important part and that own activities, such as communicative interaction either in messaging or in project work would be second: The results though coincide with the theoretical aspects just mentioned: Participants think that seminar readings on the web contributed most to their learning, but the second position is held by witnessing the message interactions - even more than actively participating in such interactions.
Message-interactions like in the Hyper-News system of this seminar are as a technical possibility not new to distance education : Theoretically this is a new dimension to traditional concepts of distance education: extensive use of mail, computers and even groupwise access to similar systems although known for years seem not to have been included properly into theory. We do have to re-think now about messaging systems on the internet as one of the more prominent structural elements of distance education: a lot of didactical work has to be done!