TRANSCRIPT

ADTED 470: Introduction to Distance Education
ViewPoint
On the telephone with...
Sally Johnstone , Ph.D.
Executive Director
WCET
The Cooperative advancing the effective use of technology in higher education.
(recorded May 12, 2004)

We’re in an interesting little moment in time and I think there are about 6 forces that are pushing online education into some interesting directions. The first one is the proliferation of programs designed for online learners. They’re engaging the learner academically and within a community of other learners. There are more choices possible and it’s beginning to be a real consumers market. The second force are hybrid courses on campuses that look and feel and act more like what we thought of distance learning courses and we’re calling those things e-learning courses for lack of a better phrase. They require the same kinds of support services and the students are both on and off campuses. So in any class a student may be a resident on a campus or off. For instance, at a number of our member institutions, their reporting that up to 80% of their online learners are also full time on campus. The 3rd force is the cost of traditional higher education. As the costs go up, wise consumers find good deals. Rather than wait for a seat that required in a statistics class that they need for their degree, they can take it online. That online course may cost less but it’s going to keep the student on tract for graduation. The 4th one is really a political arena. And that has to do with the bill that was actually introduced last week in the house to reauthorize higher education. There is no bill in the senate yet and it’s hard to know how this will play out but the house bill is opening up funding for all distance learners so there is no 50% rule and it’s pushing the crediting associations to more carefully examine distance learning programs and it’s also trying to push institutions to be more outcomes oriented. I think that’s going to be an interesting event. The next one are really open educational resources and the grandfather or grandmother of those is MIT’s open courseware but there are others. Some that are coming into play right now are Utah State just having announced that its developing a very similar site that will focus on biological and irrigation engineering as well as 4-H kinds of courses and programs. There is also one called Sophia and that’s a project coming out of the foothills _______ or general education courses at the community college level. These are being sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation. The 6th one of these is really the use of all of these resources around the world. We know that a lot of these open courseware activities but also other forms of open resources like Rice University’s connections project, WCETs edutools and others are being fairly widely used in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe and it really is beginning to allow folks in developing countries to see what’s going on and to leapfrog over some of the errors or missteps, or experiments I guess would be a better way to put it, that we’ve played out in the U.S. I think all of this coming together is going to show us that in the near future we are going to see some real changes in the way that online learning is emerging.