AMERICAN DISTANCE EDUCATION

A short literature review

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter a selection of articles from The American Journal of Distance Education will be used to illustrate some of the main directions of American research. Considerable space has been contributed to the reference list, which it is suggested be studied as a substantive part of this chapter; a good impression of the scope and nature of American research can be gleaned from a careful reading of the titles of the research articles listed.

In the United States there is no autonomous integrated multimedia delivery system such as those of the open universities in other countries. There are tens of thousands of instructional programmes for distant learners, provided by universities, colleges, schools, corporate training departments and the armed forces. Most of these are delivered by a single teacher using a particular medium. The vast majority of what claims to be research about distance education consists of descriptions of how one or more or these communications media have been used to link a classroom teacher to one or more distant classes.

The media used are: correspondence, broadcast and recorded video, audio, audio-graphic, video- and computer-conferencing.

About 250,000 Americans enrol annually in correspondence courses provided by over seventy members of the National University Continuing Education Association (NUCEA). There are some 500 private correspondence schools enrolling around 5 million students in technical and vocational courses. Each branch of the armed forces has its own correspondence school as do many government departments. Research on correspondence education goes back to the beginning of the century, but today there are only a few studies each year, since the method is overshadowed in the popular and academic imagination by distance teaching using electronic communications. Recent studies have focused on teaching (Holstein, 1992), design (Diehl, 1987), certain subject areas (for example, Martin, 1993), students' workload (Malan and Feller, 1992), course completion (Billings, 1988) and students' perspectives regarding effectiveness of instruction (St Pierre and Olsen, 1991) and student support services (Tallman, 1994).

College-level television courses, known as telecourses, are produced by universities, public broadcasting stations and, above all, by community colleges, such as Kirkwood, Dallas, Miami-Dade and Coastline Community Colleges. More than 1,000 post-secondary institutions sign on each year for courses broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service. A model was provided by The Annenberg/CPB Project which, between 1981 and 1990, provided funds, typically in the 2-3 million dollar range per course, for the production of over 170 high quality television-based university courses. Telecourses are bought by colleges and universities and distributed on video tape or by local cable networks. They usually have a printed study guide; tutoring and student support is given on campus, or through correspondence (Brock, 1987; Whittington, 1987; Anderson, 1987). The Annenberg/CPB Project stimulated much evaluation research in the design, use and effectiveness of telecourses.

The delivery method that has led to the explosion of interest in distance learning in the United States is the teleconference, provided either by two-way video, one-way video accompanied by two-way audio, by audio, audiographics, or computer network. One of the reasons for the growing acceptability of distance education by teleconferencing is that this family of media allows groups of distant learners to be taught in real-time by a classroom teacher. Teachers frequently believe they can thus teach at a distance while making few changes in their assumptions about teaching and learning, or even their teaching techniques. The assumptions about education of this 'candid camera' or 'hairy arm' approach are those of the traditional classroom, as are the techniques used in teaching, i.e. lecture and overhead notes (Gehlauf et al., 1991).

All major universities have satellite up -link hardware, production studios and personnel. Programmes are produced at undergraduate and postgraduate level, with a large proportion being for continuing professional education (Barker and Platten, 1988). Major and Shane (1991) describe satellite programmes for training nurses, Merkley and Hoy (1988) for teacher training, Anderson (1989) for training about use of natural resources. Satellite programming by community colleges is described by Kitchen (1988).

The National University Teleconference Network (NUTN) is a consortium of 260 organisations providing or receiving a range of over 100 college programmes by satellite. Another consortium, The National Technological University, consists of ninety-four engineering colleges; most courses are broadcast directly to workplaces. The Public Broadcasting National Narrowcast Service (NNS) transmits programmes by satellite to twenty-five affiliate stations who then redistribute them locally to schools or workplaces by Instructional Television Fixed Service (ITFS) and cable (Brock, 1987; Whittington, 1987; Anderson, 1987).

Satellite teleconferencing is used by most of America's big companies. Typical of these is IBM's Interactive Satellite Education Network (ISEN). This is a one-way video, two-way audio network, with originating studios in four cities, and receiver sites across the country. Corporations with similar programmes include: Federal Express, Kodak Corporation, Tandem Computers, AETNA Life and Casualty corporation. As well as private systems there are 'turn-key' organisations that produce and sell programmes or sell satellite time and production resources. Examples are American Management Association, Bankers TV Network, and The American Rehabilitation Educational Network. The Departinent of Defense has several educational satellite systems, such as the Army Logistics Management College's Satellite Education Network and the navy's Video Teletraining System (Maloy and Perry, 1991).

Satellite-delivered instruction in the schools has been stimulated by grants from the Federal Government for demonstration projects known as the Star Schools projects. A large proportion of teachers believe that satellite programming significantly improves their schools and their own professional development (Martin and Rainey, 1993). There is evidence that children's achievement and attitudes are both positively affected in these programmes. Especially important in the success of these programmes is the role of local site facilitators (Moore et al., 1991).

An example of distance education delivered by computer-conference is the Electronic University Network, in which member universities provide credit courses on floppy disks for home computers, augmented by e-mail and online data searching. An idea of the potential of the method is given by the Bangkok Project, which linked educational computer networks worldwide in a professional development activity for members of the distance education community (Anderson and Mason, 1993).

Conventional teaching institutions increasingly use computerconferencing to extend their classes, and to individualise their instruction. In the view of many, computer-conferencing shifts the emphasis away from the mass production model of distance education to one which is more responsive to the needs of individual learners, and is a medium that supports learner empowerment and autonomy (Davie and Wells, 1991).

Research in the area of computer-conferencing has focused on effectiveness, including cost-effectiveness (Phelps et al., 1991; Cheng et al., 1991), ehe instructors' role (Boston, 1992), the nature and usefulness of text-based dialogue, and the pedagogical value of the permanent transcript (Davie and Wells, 1991). There is evidence that computer-conferencing permits a higher quality of interaction among students and between students and instructor than conventional instructional environments (Lauzon, 1992).

Using the Telephone with microphones and amplifiers is technically the simplest teleconference medium, but often highly effective and certainly cost-effective, especially with well-educated students who work in a highly conceptual field (Burge and Howard, 1990).

A number of software packages support low-cost real-time transmission of graphics to accompany an audio-conference. Research so far indicates the practical difficulties that groups have in interacting graphically and point to the need for both training and substantial up-front design time to make the technique successful (Gunawardena, 1992). Wolcott (1993) undertook a qualitative study of the course planning procedures used by eleven instructors teaching by audio-graphic teleconference.

There are hundreds of one-shot case studies of the effects or effectiveness of particular communications media in bringing about learning. Since they focus on general effectiveness of learning in a particular programme, they add little to knowledge about the learning process itself. Their aim is to identify the general student variables that appear to interact favourably with instruction delivered by their particular medium with a view to making the programme more effective. In reality the focus is on the independent variable, the programme, rather than the dependent, the learner. Many of these studies focus on students who drop out or withdraw from study (Dille and Mezak, 1991). Perhaps inevitably in an educational culture that regards every student as a fee-paying customer who must above all else be satisfied, there are many studies of student satisfaction with courses and with such course features as organisation, content and instructor (Wilkes and Bumham, 1991; Egan et al., 1992; Biner et al., 1994).

One step in sophistication beyond the one-shot case descriptions referred to above, and next most common, is a genre of studies in which attempts are made to compare the results of teaching by two or more media. For an example using relatively good methodology, see Grimes et al. (1988), a study that compared the effectiveness of a telecourse with a lecture course. Similar studies include Beare's (1989) work on the comparative effectiveness of videotape, audiotape and telelecture in teacher education, Cheng et al.'s (1991) comparison of performance and attitude in traditional and computer-conferencing classes and Souder's (1993) comparison of traditional versus satellite-delivered management of technology courses. Although Dubin and Taveggia should have said the last word on the subject of which medium is more effective, when they wrote, as long ago as 1968, 'The results of this research are clear and unequivocal - no particular method of teaching is measurably to be preferred over another when evaluated by student examination purposes', there remains an apparantly insatiable appetite for this kind of comparative study.

Among the few areas of basic research with regard to distance learning is that of Atman (1987, 1988) who has investigated goal accomplishment style and the role of conation (striving) in being a distance learner. Reviews of literature have been provided by Cookson (1989) and Coggins (1988).

There are now twelve American graduate Schools of Education that provide courses in distance education (Dillon, 1992). In spite of this, the vast majority of research is atheoretical, and consequently of limited value. In this land of unbounded free speech, where every opinion is as weighty as any other, there remains a propensity for individuals to engage in ad hoc theorising, to offer fresh, naive descriptions in place of the more demanding work of filling in the theoretical spaces that have, over twenty years become apparent. Of major importance, given the emergence of the new media, is the need to study course structures, dialogic procedures and learner behaviours when teleconferencing, is used, with a view to refining or redefining the relationships between these variables that were established before these highly interactive media appeared. One author who has made an important contribution in this regard is Saba, who has expanded the concept of transactional distance and produced a model of the dynamic relationship between dialogue and structure by using integrated system dynamics (Saba, 1988; Saba and Shearer, 1994). Garrison and Baynton (1987) and Baynton (1992) have furthered understanding about learner autonomy, even if indirectly, as they conceptualise and investigate the idea of learner and teacher control. Oxford and Florini (1990) led a discussion about the relationship of distance education to certain other disciplines. One of these discussions, led by Wagner (1990), about the conceptual relationship of distance education and educational technology has generated particular interest.

The most common questions about teaching are how to modify normal classroom teaching to be effective in the 'candid classroom'. Clark (1993) provides an excellent study of attitudes of faculty in a sample of fifty-seven higher education institutions. The question of faculty attitudes seems especially important since negative attitudes are seen by many administrators as the main obstacle to change. In reality, it seems that most instructors who have taught by teleconference like it, but they fear that their colleagues and their administrators do not perceive their distance teaching as favourably as they do (Dillon and Walsh, 1992). When asked how they can be helped to become effective distance educators, most faculty ask for more resources, especially of time and for in-service training programmes that deal with how to teach at a distance, not merely how to manipulate new technology.

A rare view of teaching in a total systems approach is that of Beaudoin (1990) who described the roles of a teacher who facilitates learning from prepared study materials rather than transmitting information in person. There is much interest in the theory and practice of interaction. Wagner (1994) has reviewed several models and related them to contexts of instructional delivery, instructional design, instructional theory and learning theory in an attempt to establish conceptual parameters for the function of interaction. Hillman et al. (1994) have attempted to add to Moore's (1989) typology of interaction, which they call learner-interface interaction.

A growing number of agencies are trying to take advantage of the technological developments that have made it possible to deliver academic programmes to learners off-campuses, across the state, nationally and internationally, and the growth in this activity is causing a welter of problems. Among the most serious are the issues arising from the conflict between delivery across state borders and the traditional, indeed constitutionally protected, rights of individual states to regulate education. A specially difficult problem concerns approval requirements. An institution that wants to operate nationally can face as many state assessments as there are states (Reilly and Gulliver, 1992). Other policy issues include questions regarding the use of state money that might be used for such instruction; how to monitor and control the quality of out-of-state programmes; interinstitutional resource-sharing and programme articulation; integration of alternative instructional delivery systems; programme prioritisation; programme curricular review and approval; academic residency; establishment of fee structures; and support services (Olcott, 1992; England, 1987).

The above review has described some of the main trends in distance education research in the United States. There are two trends that have not emerged in this account that should be noted in concluding this review. One of these trends is the merging of computer and video technologies and the proliferation of highly interactive, low-cost, desktop computer-based communications media. The other trend is the homogenisation and globalisation of the communications environment as a result of satellitedelivered programming. The former of these technologies is leading to greater individual control of learning and the second to the continuance of group-based instruction. The former might be seen as stimulating greater learner autonomy with a concomitant risk of administrative chaos, while the latter gives greater stability to the educational programme with control held by the teaching institution, with an accompanying risk of control by other socially conservative, perhaps reactionary agencies. The former is leading to the breakdown of established institutional and administrative arrangements, and the development of the 'virtual university', while the latter tends to reinforce the influence of traditional agencies. The forner might be seen as breaking the social, if not economic, control of poorer countries by the technologically advanced countries, and the latter as perpetuating it. Some needs for research that arise from these trends include the following:

• What teaching arrangements are optimum when learners can access instruction and inforrnation from a wide range of sources?
• How can individual learners be assisted so they do not become isolated learners and develop the skills of negotiating the information resources available to them?
• What preparatory support and counselling arrangements are appropriate in an environment marked by such distributed teaching sources?
• What teaching is 'appropriate in the group arrangements so that homogenisation is avoided and learners obtain maximum benefit according to individual talents?
• What accreditation, certification and quality control mechanisms are appropriate for the 'virtual university'?
• What are the trends and needs for faculty development?
• What policy-making structures and procedures are needed to promote better quality distance education?
• What are the international obligations regarding distance education of the technically advanced countries?

(All references are to The American Journal of Distance Education, with one exception, for which the full citation is given.)