Thoughts from the conference, part 1

Tena koutou -

Welcome to the first email in a regular series about my experiences from the International Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, August 4-7 at Madison, Wisconsin The city of Madison is about the same size as Wellington, but inland and by the side of four lakes. It has a relaxed, liberal feel and is home to a well respected university. It also has a wonderful crumbling old 1920s movie palace called the Orpheum, which even though I was the only person in the auditorium, played a movie for me – on two occasions - at The Orpheum Theatre Madison is also very proud of its cheese and my hotel was next to a great little shop called Fromagination, where you could buy chocolate dipped bacon strips.

The conference itself was in a Frank Lloyd Wright designed building on one of the rivers, which was an unexpected pleasure, called Monona Terrace, and worth looking at if you are a FLW admirer, as I am . The conference was organized to have a number of keynote speakers and then choices of dozens of workshops, down a parade of meetings rooms called The Hall of Ideas, as well as exhibition stalls to browse, chat and buy. They had an interesting display of quotations on posters, such as:

“ Non-traditional learning works for thousands of learners because they link it to their needs, concerns, problems and aspirations” – Charles A. Wedemeyer (1981)

“ I think the most exciting thing, looking at the next twenty five years, is going to be the way distance learning changes as a result of social networking and the whole social turn in culture world wide” – Gary Greenberg (2008)

“Educators who establish clear expectations as to how threaded discussions are used, or who ask specific questions in response to student postings, can expect to encourage rich dialogue amongst their students” – Alan Roper (2007)

These quotes seemed to define many of the workshops and speeches. Big themes around getting students to reduce their isolation ( rather than their distance ) by being social and collaborative, and being assessed on the quality of not just their work, but their contribution and participation, and how they work with others. This is very relevant to our new New Zealand curriculum. So I knew I was in the right place ! But our challenge at TCS is to give students the means to do this, when currently they have little contact with each other, and therefore little opportunity to develop these competencies.

The opening keynote speaker was Dr Michael Moore ( no, not that one ) who spoke about “The Scholarship of Distance Education” . It was basically a history of how distance education has been studied and researched. He started with the fact that in 1926, more Americans were enrolled in distance learning for their trade, than were in face to face training organisations. By 1933, the first distance education council was established, but it wasn’t until 1982 that the first University ( Chicago ) offered distance courses. The 1960s first saw the use of media such as television to deliver distance education ( known as “articulated instructional media experiments” ) but these experiments started academics looking at how learning is done through distance education, not just teaching.

Researchers and academics stopped talking about ‘correspondence’ ways of distance education in the early 1960s ( oops ), to develop new theories called “guided didactic conversation” ( Halmburg, 1960 ) or “ independent study” ( Wedemeyer, 1971 ) and “transactional distance” ( Moore, 1972 ). Despite their grand titles, they still contain much reference to what we deal with today – how do we help create independent learners who have a goal for their learning, and enjoy exchanges with their teachers ?

In 1980 a professor called Keegan developed what he called four principles of distance education :

1. Separation of the teacher and student

2. The organization influences what is taught and how

3. The teaching follows an industrial production model

4. There is possible and occasional face to face contact

This was quite interesting for me, as these principles were developed in the year that I started training to be teacher. I reflected yet again on : How much do we base our practices on this, still? How much are we moving away from this? What is our thinking about the future and developing other principles? What is our resistance to a future with different principles?

The history of the study of distance education also has an international flavour. The first world conference was in 1938, although there had been conferences across Europe and the USA since 1891 on “Extension Education” . By 1962 there was the first world conference on using ‘new media’ such as television.

Being accredited by distance education organisations has a later history, as it wasn’t until 1970 that the first University offered a diploma course, and not until 1991 that a Masters level course was made available by a cooperation between universities in the USA and Germany. Academic studies saw 20 doctorates awarded in 1932- 1976 for “Correspondence “ teaching & learning ( oops, again ) around the world, but from 1981- 2001 over 1200 doctoral studies looked at distance education.

Nowadays, distance education now features in the studies and work of UNESCO and the World Bank, both of whom offer funding and development to emerging countries as part of an overall education improvement plan. The first Distance Education Museum is about to open ( online only, visited by your second life character ! ) and the museum organisers are calling for artifacts, submissions and studies to be posted online. If you are interested in this project on behalf of The Correspondence School in New Zealand, please let me know.

My next emails over this term and next term will follow up on other workshops I attended. The themes will include :

- Creating online students and keeping them online

- Professional development frameworks for online course teachers

- Change management in distance education organisations

- ePortfoilos : designing new systems for assessing learning

- Recruitment and retention of online course teachers

- Social and cognitive presence for students : how to teach it and how to teach yourself to teach it

I hope you’ve enjoyed this message and look out for the next one. For your viewing pleasure, I share with you a short animation from one of John Henry’s students called Grace, on her pumpkin ride ( with not a handsome Prince in sight ! ).

Naku noa, na

BP