Distance learning in higher education is not a new entity. It has existed much longer than you might think. In fact, one of the first experiences in distance education was in 1873 when the Anna Eliot Ticknor Society to Encourage Studies at Home was founded in Boston (Larreamendy-Joerns & Leinhardt, 2006). This school offered six programs, and communication between instructors and students took place utilizing the U.S. mail.
Throughout the years, distance education evolved from correspondence courses to television and videotape courses to online or e-learning courses. The term traditional course now refers to classes that are delivered in a face-to-face format. Distance education is defined as any course that is delivered to students that are not present in the same room as the instructor. E-learning describes learning that takes place by using electronically mediated or facilitated software (Tallent-Runnels et al., 2006).
E-learning is divided into categories based on the type of instructional delivery. Online classes are delivered completely using the Internet, hybrid or blended courses which combine use of the Internet with traditional courses, and webenhanced courses utilize a form of transaction software to deliver lectures or post material, or complete tests online (Jones, Chew, Jones, & Lau, 2009).
The distance education movement was born out of convenience for those students that live in remote geographic areas, but desired to further their education at a reputable higher learning institution. India and China are both in the forefront of distance education, having established programs since the mid-1960s. An editorial in the International Journal of Lifelong Education (“Editorial,” 2006) states that Indira Ghandhi University has its own satellite and delivers courses to 17 different countries, while Shanghai Television University has 350,000 students, making them leaders among the mega distance learning facilities in the world.
Another global example of distance education comes from the University of Maryland University College (UMUC). The school, which is a part of the system of the University of Maryland, began in 1947 as a result of the GI bill to educate members of the U.S. military stationed in Europe. It continues to thrive and is now the largest standalone public institution offering undergraduate and graduate degrees. UMUC has 90,000 global students, including 36,000 active-duty U.S. service members, and offers 130 undergraduate and graduate programs, 116 of which are completely online (Roach, 2009).
The Appalachian area within the United States is considered to be remote and poorly served by technology and transportation infrastructures (LeBaron & McFadden, 2008). Western Carolina University works with students and faculty to develop courses that meet the needs of the population. The challenge for them is working together as an organization to overcome the obstacles and meet learners’ demand for distance learning.
The distance learning trend continues to be fueled by student demand for courses that meet their needs. Students want to be able to schedule online or blended courses that allow them to work at their own pace to complete assignments. They request flexible learning environments where they can work online, where learning is achieved through self-discov-ery, and where instructors serve as facilitators rather than sages (Fish & Wickersham, 2009).
The Babson Survey Research Group in collaboration with the College Board conducts a yearly survey of more than 2,500 college and universities as a part of the Annual Survey of Colleges (Allen & Seaman, 2008). The 2008 annual report of the Sloan Consortium stated that 3.9 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall of 2007, a 12.9% growth rate from the previous year. These data translated into over 20% of all U.S. higher education students taking at least one online course in the fall of 2007 (Allen & Seaman, 2008). The report also found that undergraduate learners at large institutions comprised the greater number of online students and that larger institutions have had a more positive attitude toward online learning, mostly because larger institutions were among the first schools to offer online options. The outlook indicates that the trend of offering online learning opportunities will continue to increase due to student demand, higher fuel costs, and competition for online students.
The demand for distance learning is real and colleges and universities are working to accommodate students by offering more classes in online and blended formats. Institutions must implement programs that can compete with the online schools such as the University of Phoenix. The targeted market for online learning is nontraditional students, approximately 25 years of age or older, looking to change or advance their career, but with family obligations that make them less mobile (Roach, 2009). The recent poor economy has led some people who have lost their jobs to consider higher education as a path to a new career or a necessity to gain future employment.
Colleges and universities must look at the quality of online instruction and realize that change is necessary to implement distance education. Students may favor online instruction to meet the needs of their demanding lifestyles and careers; however, traditional courses cannot merely be transferred to an online format. Faculty must devote considerable time to the development of online courses in order to create quality learning communities and experiences (Fish & Wickersham, 2009). There must be a reorganization of the institution’s structure to accommodate the move to increased distance learning in higher education. Faculty members must think differently about teaching and learning, and must be trained in the technology that will be used, and they need assistance and support from the instructional technology staff and the administration.
Larger institutions have greater resources to establish distance and online learning programs, with the financial and human resources to offer programs that meet the needs of today’s learners. These colleges and universities can purchase the technology to service and support online programs, and employ a staff that is current in the field of instructional technology. They also have resources to conduct research concerning the latest technological advances and can attract personnel to implement such programs.
Smaller institutions are just the opposite, with less staff, faculty, and budgets. They rely on tuition and benefactors to accomplish their organizational goals, and may not receive funding from the state to manage operations. Small schools are often liberal arts colleges with different curriculum requirements for graduation and higher tuition and boarding costs. These colleges need to adopt distance learning options to attract students, particularly since these schools often have a large lifelong learner population, which are the very students that prefer the option of online and blended course offerings. The more flexible the program is, the better.
A great deal of research can be found concerning student satisfaction with distance learning, however, research is just beginning on faculty and administration satisfaction with distance education. Colleges and universities are in the service sector of the business world, providing a service to students, so naturally their needs and opinions should be held in high regard. Administrators often listen to student concerns to attract them to their schools because competition is fierce between public, private, and online institutions, especially in a tough economic climate.
Administrators need to walk a fine line in keeping students and faculty happy with the institution. Colleges and universities are organized in a mechanistic, topdown structure, as the vast majority of universities are still very much vertically integrated organizations (Annand, 2007). Decision making is centralized, and is usually handled by the president, the provost, and the chief financial officer. Each academic department has a chair, and he or she runs that department and its staff. Professors work separately to develop the courses they teach and specialize in within the department. Faculty meet as a body to make academic decisions that impact the entire campus, however, the ultimate deci-sion-making body is the board of trustees, since they often control the budget and policies. Competition is a force for change within an organization, and small colleges and universities are constantly striving to attain a competitive advantage in their geographic area and beyond (Jones, 2007). Therefore, planning to include distance education offerings in an institution’s strategic plan is a necessity for survival. The challenge for smaller colleges and universities is how to meet student demand for flexible class formats without taxing their organization, especially its finances, faculty and staff.
Mechanistic structures are often resistant to change (Jones, 2007) and academe is not known for being quick to change. One problem that administrators encounter is that many faculty members are resistant to change, and may oppose teaching online because they are content with their current methods. Groups may unite to preserve the current status of instructional delivery (Jones, 2007) and create a groupthink pattern using negative information to slow the process of change. Employing a thirdparty market research firm may help to illustrate the importance of moving in the direction of offering more distance learning options to the student body. An evolutionary change approach is suited to this situation because it will require sufficient planning to be successful; if an institution moves too quickly the reforms are likely to be unsuccessful and the faculty will become discouraged.
First-order changes that must take place in order to adopt more distance education options in higher learning are at the minimum, computers, networks, online student services, a course management system, faculty members to serve as instructors, and content experts with technology and multimedia experience to assist the instructor (Mitchell, 2009). Once these necessary components are acquired the courses may be offered and change can occur. Change will eventually have a ripple effect on the campus and lead to cultural or second-order changes. Once faculty members are comfortable with online course delivery, they may alter their beliefs about technology, teaching, and learning, and accept online education as a viable alternative to face-to-face instruction. As an instructor’s online teaching becomes more relaxed, paradigmatic shifts begin (Mitchell, 2009). Teachers may increase the amount of interaction between instructor and student by incorporating Web 2.0 tools. A positive teaching experience by a faculty member will spread to department meetings to department chair meetings to faculty meetings, and finally to the administration, subsequently creating a climate for change.
This is an example of how smaller institutions may gradually experience organizational change relative to increasing distance education offerings. The faculty must buy into the change for it to take place smoothly, and research indicates that faculty has many concerns related to incorporating additional distance education to the curriculum. David Annand (2007) found that faculty feared a sense of loss of craft, dislocation of students and faculty, and a breakdown in the bonds of the academic community, and that these concerns can result in a loss of control over the educative process. Anthony Pina (2008) surveyed professors and asked them to rank 30 factors associated with distance learning in order to acquire a sense of what faculty deemed important to make distance learning a positive experience. Pina found that faculty ranked infrastructure and technology support as the most important aspects of distance learning. In 2009, Kate Marek studied creating a culture of support for faculty teaching online and found that faculty desired a strong infrastructure in technology, incentive and reward programs for teaching online, training for implementing and developing online courses, and the full support of the administration.
There are those instructors who choose to teach for online universities or hold positions in traditional institutions but teach completely online, and they do so for greater flexibility in personal scheduling. The term for this type of position is telecommuter, and there are a larger number of women who prefer to telework (Ng, 2006). Ng found that telecommuters often expressed frustration with the demands of home and work and did not have a higher job satisfaction than their office-based counterparts. There is a comfort to working at home; however, the respondents divulged feelings of isolation and disconnect to the college campus. In some cases, telecommuters may never meet their students face-to-face and rarely see their colleagues. An additional drawback is the initial expense to establish and furnish a home office, and update home technology to insure compatibility with campus technology. These are just some of the negative aspects of teaching strictly distance courses. Faculty interviews indicated that the isolation aspects of telecommuting could be solved by monthly social events to bring remote instructors on campus for interaction with their associates.
While faculty are essential to making the change to increased distance education at an institution, the order for the change comes from the administration. The administration must be willing to assume a supportive role to the faculty and instructional technology department staff. Faculty request release time and monetary bonuses for teaching online due to the perception that online courses are more time intensive, and these requests must be addressed by the administration of the institution. The initial expense of moving to a program with more distance education components is steep, and administrators often hope to recoup the outlay quickly without weighing the consequences.
One way administrations try to balance the cost-benefit relationship is to remove the class size restriction for online classes. Instructors argue that class size is important in online courses as research has shown that students learn more when the class has a high level of interaction. Professors say that an unlimited class size increases the demand on their workload, negating a quality classroom experience. Administrators feel that since there are no physical restrictions for the class such as desks per classroom, there should be no limit on class size (Orellana, 2006). Orellana developed and conducted a survey, titled the Class Size and Interaction Questionnaire, and discovered that instructors felt that the optimal class size for online learning should be 18.9 students. This figure was smaller than the respondents’ actual average class size of 22.8 students. The instructors stated that a smaller class size allowed for more interaction, however, no statistical relationship was found by Orellana between optimal class size and the level of interaction. More research is suggested to determine the appropriate class size from both instructors and administrators perspectives.
Administrators also seek statistical data on the question of distance education requiring more work for instructors. There are a number of studies that show faculty perception of online teaching adding to their workload; however, several researchers have found no increase in time and effort in distance education. The National Education Association conducted a survey in 2000 and found that class size was not related to the amount of teaching time devoted to online teaching (Orellana, 2006). Orellana also cited studies by DiBiase in 2000 that concluded that normalized teaching time per student was not greater than in a traditional course and Visser, also in 2000, who conducted an experimental case study and reported that online teaching took more time if the instructor had little or no experience in teaching online and a low level of institutional support. In 2003, Hislop and Ellis found no significant difference in the total teaching time spent teaching online versus face-to-face (as cited in Orellana, 2006).
Besides release time and monetary compensation, faculty frequently petition administrators for training in current distance education pedagogy and technology. Administrators must be willing to allow faculty and instructional technology staff this time and provide reimbursement for training and professional development. Smaller institutions need appropriate training for all personnel in order to gain ground in the competition for distance learners. Administrators should encourage those involved in the development and implementation of distance education options to attend workshops and conferences that demonstrate new techniques and technological systems. Instructional technology systems change at an unimaginable speed and schools that make the commitment to distance education must realize that staying current is part of the financial challenge.
I spent the past summer developing an online course, and while I have enjoyed the work tremendously, it has taken quite a bit of time. I will say that it did take longer than a face-to-face course, but once I became comfortable with the technology that was needed for the course, my timing improved. After researching this topic, I wanted to make the course as interactive as possible. I will be anxious to see how the course unfolds this semester and what the student feedback will be.
Distance education, or more accurately, online education, has become a current issue for survival in higher education. Smaller colleges and universities are struggling in this tough economic climate. Online education is a current issue in higher education since students demand flexible class offerings such as hybrid and online courses, and future generations of college students are being termed “digital natives” (Mitrano, 2010, as cited in Laster, 2010) due to their familiarity and comfort with the Internet. Administrations must include distance education in their strategic plans to compete for students. Students, especially lifelong learning students, have expressed satisfaction with distance learning because it meets their needs for completing their degree while managing family and career. Faculty attitudes toward distance education are shifting from resistance to acceptance with the support of administrators who hear their concerns about additional workload, training, and professional development (LeBaron & McFadden, 2006). The support of the administration of an institution is critical to the success of the change brought about by increasing online course offerings (Owen & Demb, 2004). Smaller colleges and universities will arrive in the distance education market, but the road the organization follows will determine the success of the trip.
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