The Canadian Association for Distance Education (CADE) held its annual conference this year in Vancouver, British Columbia, in early May. I was invited to serve on a panel for the Canadian Institute for Distance Education Research preconference seminar on research in distance education as part of the CADE meeting.
The panel topic was titled “Research Views from Over There” and was designed to provide participants with an international flavor of the challenges facing distance learning researchers and practitioners. The other invited panelists were internationally known in the field and included Christine von Prummer, Fernuni-versitat, Germany; Morten Paulsen, NKI, Norway; and Asha Kanwar, Commonwealth of Learning (COL), Vancouver (Canada).
The general charge to the panel was to provide a status report on distance learning research in our respective countries and to discuss challenges for future research. I was not sure how to approach the topic and presumed (incorrectly) that the diversity of the panel members from their respective countries would result in a panel discussion that accentuated the differences more than the similarities for distance learning researchers. So my first task was readily apparent . I needed to talk to some U.S. researchers and experts and find out just what challenges were facing researchers.
I called a number of my colleagues from across the United States and just took notes on their insights about research in the field. I next talked extensively with Dr. Michael Moore, director of The American Center for the Study of Distance Education and editor of The American Journal of Distance Education. The center and AJDE are housed at Penn State University, a leader in distance education nationally and internationally. There were many similarities among this group and the issues they identified around research in distance education. Finally, in my preparation, I had just finishing reviewing Reflections on Research, Faculty and Leadership in Distance Education by Dr. Michael F. Beau-doin for the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL).
I had done my homework, infused my own observations, gathered up my resources and headed for Vancouver to engage in this unique discussion of distance learning research with my international colleagues fully expecting that the similarities that emerged from my U.S. colleagues would give way to diverse and varied differences the day of the panel. The only thing I forgot was to heed my own advice, expect the unexpected.
The following is an annotated summary of the keys issues that I discussed in my presentation. Moreover, although there was some variance among panelists, the data I had gathered from my U.S. colleagues, and from Michael Beau-doin’s book, the common similarities from all three sources was illuminating.
Where Have All the Literature Reviews Gone?
Today’s researchers in the field need to seriously get back to basics. More fundamentally, they need to review the literature. There appears to be a growing indifference to connecting research with previous knowledge in the field derived from empirical inquiry. Beaudoin suggests in his book that today’s researchers view any research over five years old as obsolete. Paradoxically, the online revolution has also created a void in this process. There seems to be a predisposition by today’s researchers with “we get to redefine and start all over” because we are the Web generation which, in effect, is doing a disservice to our colleagues across the globe who have contributed to the theory, practice, research, and assessment of distance education. The current generation of researchers has a simplistic and irreverent view of previous work and research conducted in the field.
The Leadership Enigma
Visionary leadership is absent from the field. And, there is minimal research on leadership in the literature. There’s not just a void in the leadership continuum, but the field has failed to draw on the exponential research and practice on leadership in general to formulate guiding assumptions for leadership in distance education. Today, everyone and no one is a leader in distance education. In the absence of genuine leadership, people will listen to whoever will step up to the microphone, or in our case, the research journal, the next keynoter, or the next wordsmith who has a new version of an old concept such as “blended learning.” Distance learning, distance education, distributed learning, online learning, and the hits just keep on coming. We can’t even make up our minds what to call our field.
A Kodak Moment
The majority of distance learning research still focuses on “snapshot” approaches that study distance learning for a short period of time (e.g., academic quarter, 3-day training seminar, etc.). This, in and of itself, is not necessarily a limitation. The problem lies in overgeneraliz-ing the generalization of results. In other words, researchers are extrapolating their results from a mini-study and inferring these results to a broader macro view of distance education. This is perplexing given the inherent challenge of controlling all extraneous variables in a research design. Differences in delivery environments, attributes of faculty, different uses of technologies, and others make inferences from a short-term study limited at best.
This raises one more methodological issue. Given the preponderance of short-term, snapshot research, the field seems to have marginalized the importance of replication studies of previous research. These are powerful affirmations of our field and coupled with more longitudinal research designs would enhance the quality, precision, and generation of results of distance education research.
Distance Learning and Economic Development
The global marketplace is changing from a supply-driven to a demand-driven economy. For many developed and developing countries, distance education is becoming a global economic and political strategy. The exponential increase in the use of distance education to provide workforce training, deliver professional development, and educate and inform the masses accentuates this pivotal role for distance education. As this trend increases, the field will need more “models” for using distance learning as an economic development strategy that can be shared with nations developing their human and workforce potential.
Demystifying Face-to-Face Versus Distance Education
This somewhat adversarial, misguided approach to assure quality in distance education has run its course. We need to replace this obsolete message with a new message: face-to-face and distance learning are mutually reinforcing learning interventions. When misinformed politicians, resistant faculty, and institutional administrators who have not had a creative leadership idea of late approach distance learning, they simply fall back on the adage that distance learning is inferior teaching and learning compared to traditional, face-to-face instruction. Did they ever think that the quality and pedagogical effectiveness of what goes on in traditional classrooms might be pretty poor examples/models for aspiring teachers and trainers?
As the mainstreaming of campus and distance education continues across education globally, the gap between face-to-face and distance will disappear. As it does, it will be replaced with a simple message that we should have been focusing on 20 years ago: what constitutes effective teaching and learning regardless of where, how, through what technologies and at what pace it is delivered.
The Millennials and Multitasking
Today’s K-16 youth generation is technologically literate and technologically cultured. They view technology as common and natural as my generation viewed the typewriter and pencil. Moreover, they engage in multitasking (working on the computer, listening to music, talking on their mobile phones simultaneously) much more comfortably than do members of the baby-boomer generation.
We have very little research on the implications for effective learning influenced by multi-tasking. We know virtually nothing about the multi-tasking characteristics of distance learners or traditional face-to-face learners and, in fact, we know very little about the effects of multitasking on learning in general. This will be a growing area for future research and will have significant implications for how we organize, structure, communicate, and share information with the millennial generation.
In summary, here are some of the key issues for distance learning researchers and the field that were discussed in this panel, identified by my U.S. colleagues, and written about in Michael Beaudoin’s book.
Distance learning research needs to get back to basics. This includes more thorough and comprehensive literature reviews, more objective inferences about the generalization of results, and advocating the importance and credibility of replications studies.
Distance learning research needs to focus on leadership in all its enigmatic and varied forms. We need to develop and articulate visions for the field that cross boundaries and are not just the latest hot topic keynote. Moreover, we need more research on the attributes of effective distance education leaders including a serious look at leadership differences among women and men. Women have generally been very successful in the technology-related professions and we need further empirical studies on this phenomenon.
The field needs to dispense with the face-to-face versus distance education dichotomy, period. We must focus on what constitutes effective teaching and learning and focus less on technology.
The field needs practical models of how distance education is increasingly becoming a strategy and tool for economic development. This body of knowledge will provide developing nations with “alternatives” to consider for education and workforce initiatives.
What can the millennial generation teach us about teaching? What can they teach us about learning? What can they teach us about multi-tasking? More research, more research, and simply more research.
As this experience taught me, distance learning researchers and practitioners have a lot more in common and are facing many of the same challenges across the globe. Perhaps my own misperceptions contributed to my surprise at the similarities. Indeed, a funny thing did happen on the way to the research forum.
About the authors
