Distance Education:  
Prospects and Problems

National Forum--Phi Kappa Phi Journal
Winter 1999, Vol. 79, No. 1, pp. 40-43.

Although the term "distance education" is of relatively recent coinage, the concept of "learning at a distance" is not new at all.  For example, correspondence courses first appeared in Germany, England, and America in the mid-nineteenth century.  These courses were intended to provide vocational training to serve the demands of growing industrial economies, but the idea of learning on one's own proved so attractive that by the early twentieth century courses in every conceivable subject were offered by colleges, universities, and proprietary institutes.  

When radio (and later, television) was introduced, almost immediately the new technology was used to supplement traditional correspondence courses (the first educational radio license was issued in 1921, the first educational TV license in 1945).  Following the same pattern, two-way video and networked computing are rapidly being adapted to the needs of distance education.  The power and flexibility of the new technology makes it a natural choice for delivery of these courses, and most postsecondary institutions are developing distance programs using various combinations of audio, video, and computer technology.  Western Governor's University is probably the most widely publicized "virtual university" in the U.S., created by pooling resources from various colleges, universities, and corporations, and the Open University in England has also expanded vigorously into the Internet.  Many (perhaps most) postsecondary institutions in the U.S. have joined consortia to provide distance education courses.  For example, the Southern Regional Electronic Campus spans 15 states and includes almost 200 institutions, from community colleges to research universities.

Although Internet-based courses have received the most attention in the popular press, their expansion has not meant the abandonment of traditional distance education formats.  Both the Open University and Western Governor's University use a variety of formats and technologies, including mail, television, video and audio tape, videoconferencing, satellite broadcasts, and e-mail.  Indeed, the Open University defines itself as a "multiple-media distance learning system," and many of its courses are taught in traditional classrooms.  The University of Phoenix, a rapidly-expanding proprietary school, subscribes to the same philosophy, although its offerings are still primarily residential.  Clearly, the expansion of these "alternative institutions" is based less on advanced technology than on a reconceptualization of the entire enterprise of postsecondary education.  Their motto seems to be "Education--anytime, anywhere, at reasonable rates."  

Some of the people involved in developing these alternative institutions believe that all education in the future will be delivered via distance learning.  Peter Drucker, a well-known management consultant, expressed this view two years ago, confidently predicting the end of the university:

"Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics.  Universities won't survive.  It's as large a change as when we first got the printed book.  Do you realize that the cost of higher education has risen as fast as the cost of health care? . . . Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable.  Higher education is in deep crisis...  Already we are beginning to deliver more lectures and classes off campus via satellite or two-way video at a fraction of the cost.  The college won't survive as a residential institution."  (Forbes 10 Mar 97)

Predictions of this sort are, of course, very unsettling to academics and administrators at traditional institutions, but I believe that there are fundamental forces at work will insure the survival of traditional educational institutions.  Although some of these factors are economic or demographic, most are based on pedagogical principles--what we know about how people learn.

Traditional residential institutions are said to be pricing themselves out of the market because the cost of tuition is rising faster than inflation.  One set of statistics that seems to support this case is the percentage of median family income that is required to send a child to college.  The cost of sending a student to a public university has risen from 9% of median family income 15 years ago to 15% of median family income today (for private universities, the figure has increased from 20% to 40%).  However, these statistics hide the fact that postsecondary education is still affordable for most families.  According to a 1998 publication of The College Board, Trends in College Pricing: 

More than half of the students attending four-year institutions pay less than $4,000 in tuition and fees, and almost three-quarters face tuition charges of less than $8,000.  Only 6 percent attend institutions charging tuition of $20,000 or more per year.  For most Americans, college remains accessible, especially with the availability of more than $60 billion in financial aid.  (p. 3)

According to projections by the National Center for Educational Statistics, from 1995 to 2007 enrollment of persons under 25 will rise by 20 percent, but enrollments of persons 25 and over will increase only four per cent.  The over-25 group currently makes up the vast majority of students in distance learning programs, and there is no evidence that the under-25 group will prefer virtual learning to traditional classroom learning, so we might expect that traditional institutions will be expanding rather than shrinking.  

Virtual universities may also have a difficult time overcoming the perception that their undergraduate degrees are not as good as those from traditional institutions, especially since regional accrediting agencies are not rushing to certify them.  We know there is a "value hierarchy" for degrees, and the annual ratings of institutions by newsmagazines keep this hierarchy in the public eye.  Although it is possible to get a good education--or a poor one--at any institution, the perception of value largely drives the demand.  Of course, "prestige" may not be an important consideration for an employed adult who wants to earn a baccalaureate without quitting work, and virtual institutions are designed to serve this kind of student.  

Adult learners, who form the traditional market for distance education, differ from adolescent learners in many respects: motivation, purpose, learning styles and preferences, and intellectual skills, to name just a few.  The Web site for Western Governor's University (http://www.wgu.edu/) includes a "self-assessment quiz" that is very instructive in this regard.  After one takes the multiple-choice quiz, an explanation of the implications of different responses appears on the screen.  These comments include warnings that "if face-to-face interaction is very important to you, think carefully before enrolling in a distance-delivered class," and "because you won't be sitting in a classroom on a regular basis and won't have your instructor or classmates nearby to remind you of assignments, you must be fairly self-directed and conscientious about completing assignments to succeed in a distance-delivered class."  They also warn that "you may be dissatisfied with the amount of feedback you receive in a distance-delivered class . . . Because of the distance, and sometimes, time, separating you from your instructor, it can be difficult for instructors to provide feedback quickly and frequently."

Not many students who have just graduated from high school are prepared to be "self-directed and conscientious about completing assignments," and most still require ample and timely feedback on their performance.  The demands that distance learning place on the learner make it unlikely that the vast majority of traditional-age college students will be able to succeed under this mode of instruction.  These demands may also provide a natural ceiling for the market for distance education, since not all adults possess the requisite characteristics for success, either.

Adult learners who do have sufficient motivation and perseverance to take distance learning courses may bring special problems of their own to the educational enterprise.  Stephen Brookfield, in his book Developing Critical Thinkers: Challenging Adults to Explore Alternative Ways of Thinking and Acting, writes that ". . . people cannot reach adulthood without bringing with them frameworks of understanding and sets of assumptions that undergird their decisions, judgments, and actions."  Brookfield says that critical thinking begins when they start to call into question or challenge the assumptions upon which they were built.  In the case of adolescent learners, we are faced with the task of training untrained minds; in the case of adult learners, we may be faced with requiring them unlearn thinking patterns of long standing.  

Even if we grant that the purpose of most adult/continuing education courses is to teach specialized knowledge, not how to think, the phenomenon that Brookfield describes has important consequences for learning.  For example, a rural physician in general practice needs to take continuing education courses to maintain his license, and distance learning technologies can provide a cheap and efficient way to do so.  If he takes an on-line course in pediatric medicine, we can assume that he already knows something about this field, practices it virtually every day, and will probably know how to apply the new techniques he learned in the course.  But if that same physician takes a course in alternative medicine, a subject that probably wasn't taught when he was in medical school, will he be willing (and able) to re-examine his attitudes and assumptions and actually apply the new principles?  

Proponents of virtual universities point out that networked computing permits us to replicate the classroom experience by creating "virtual groups" of students.  This feature promises to make distance learning more attractive to undergraduates and to overcome the problem of changing students' attitudes and assumptions (whether they are adult learners or of traditional college age).  The fundamental problem with this assumption is that the simple act of communication, whether face-to-face or in "virtual space," can have little to do with learning.  Any good teacher knows that class discussions can be productive or unproductive, depending on the students' attitudes and the facilitation skills of the instructor.  Moreover, although discussion boards, chat rooms, listservs, and e-mail certainly allow people to communicate, they are the electronic equivalent of passing paper notes to one another.  The "electronic curtain" that separates the participants constrains the dynamic that exists naturally when people are face-to-face.  Developing group identity, cohesion, and rapport among students is very difficult under these circumstances.  Also (judging by examples of course "discussions" on the Internet), it is difficult to find evidence that students are learning tolerance and acceptance of others, learning to entertain opposing views without reacting defensively, or learning to examine seriously the sources of their attitudes, beliefs, and values.  If one visits a typical course discussion board to read the student postings, one finds that they are not really having a discussion in the traditional sense of give-and-take, they are simply making sequential position statements.  Often, in response after response, students simply refine their initial position rather than modifying it in the light of what others have written.  In short, it is too easy, in an electronic environment, for students to escape the confrontations, challenges, and learning opportunities that are present in the classroom.  

Finally, if we assume that the primary purpose of traditional undergraduate education is to develop students' minds--to teach them how to think critically--we must be skeptical of the claims that virtual universities can replace residential programs.  A seminal work in the field of student development was published in 1970 by William Perry:  Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years.  He had conducted extensive interviews with male Harvard undergraduates to determine if there were developmental patterns in their intellectual and ethical growth during their college years.  As a result of this research, he developed a model of growth stages that has become one of the standards in the literature on teaching and learning.  

His model suggests nine positions through which students pass on their journey from basic duality through relativism to commitment.  The first stage is certainly familiar to any teacher of freshmen:  

The student sees the world in polar terms of we-right-good versus other-wrong-bad.  Right Answers for everything exist in the Absolute, known to Authority, whose role is to teach the answers.  Knowledge and goodness are perceived as quantitative accretions of discrete rightnesses to be collected by hard work and obedience.  (p. 9)

As educators, our duty is to help students move beyond this primitive stage and develop into critical thinkers, both for their future career success and for their role as responsible citizens in a democracy.  That task is extremely difficult, even when you face them in class every day because, (as Perry reminds us) learning is an ego-threatening task.  He writes about the complex, personal, and delicate nature of the intellectual changes that students undergo in this process and points out the losses, the grieving, and the costs of this kind of growth.  It is extremely doubtful that the social and intellectual support necessary for the successful navigation of these changes can be provided in a "virtual environment."  It is therefore unlikely that any virtual university can replicate the kind of learning that occurs in a good undergraduate program.  I think this point is illustrated by a course available at one of the new "virtual institutions" on the World Wide Web: "Ethics: Theory and Practice."  The final exam is a 110-item multiple-choice test.

It is clear that the market for distance education will continue to expand in the next century.  Jobs will change more rapidly, and people will switch jobs more often, so the demand for training and re-training will grow exponentially.  However, we should be aware of the limitations of distance education, especially in its electronic manifestations, and use it appropriately.