Trends and Futures of Education: Implications For Distance Education Free

School systems, particularly American K-12 public schools, are facing pressures to modernize and “technologize” their processes by establishing more predictable outputs and methods (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Although American public schools are the immediate focal point of discussion for this section, the following principles extend to any schooling or educational system.

The standards movement has resulted in a common set of learning outcomes that can be shared across districts, states, or an entire nation. These curriculum standards are presented in quasi-behavioral language, but at a fairly high level of generality to accommodate different teaching methods.

Standardized assessments are now being mandated throughout the United States and, of course, in many parts of the world. These assessments are part of an overall move to make schools more accountable to the public or to the government. Test scores are thus indicators of tax dollars and government resources being well spent.

Increasingly, operational funds are being tied to compliance with specific mandates and regulations. These mandates are made at levels beyond individual schools and are intended to bring schools into line with desired teaching and assessment practices.

Traditionally, teachers have enjoyed considerable autonomy in their classrooms, choosing teaching methods that fit their style while meeting curriculum expectations. Now, with increased emphasis on high-stakes testing, teachers are being asked to fit their teaching methods more closely to the larger system of goals and assessments. In many cases, methods are established and prescribed by schools, districts, and even states, leaving less room for professional judgment and variations in teaching style. This can also constrain teachers’ efforts to meet unique needs of diverse learners.

In a well-coordinated schooling system, an alignment exists between processes and outputs—in particular, between standardized outcomes, assessment measures, and acceptable teaching methods. This principle of alignment is well established as an instructional design principle but, until recently, has not been the norm within the American public school system.

Tighter alignment of processes and outputs has a definite impact on the teacher’s role. As suggested above, the teacher often assumes a technician’s role of implementing prescribed rules, as opposed to a professional’s role of exercising judgment.

The overall pull of these trends is in the direction of standardization, conformity, and efficiency. This is consistent with a factory or industrial model of schooling; i.e., given known inputs, the system applies predictable rules and processes, resulting in fairly standard and controllable outputs. I use the term “technologize” because it suggests the application of knowledge and technologies to the solution of a practical problem—in this case, the education of children in a responsible and efficient manner.

At the same time that schools are moving toward efficiency and control, the mood among many educators is definitely learnercentered. The constructivist movement in education stresses individual and collaborative construction of meaning. While many teachers wish they could teach in more learner-centered ways, the system can make it difficult. Teachers and trainers thus face a certain tension between efficiency and control on the one hand, and learner-centered flexibility on the other. The trends below relate to the treatment of students, but also to teachers and managers themselves. Both instructors and students are thus seen as end-users of learning resources.

Instead of students going to class, learning is coming to the student—in the workplace or at home. Just-in-time, just-in-place learning resources are increasingly available to learners in their normal living settings. This has always been a defining advantage of distance learning; the Web has only continued and improved upon this trend. Adult learners typically are seeking specific skills as opposed to general educational outcomes. The result is many adult learners are starting to look first to the Web and to locally available resources before committing to formal programs of study.

Constructivism is a psychologically-oriented approach to learning that emphasizes individual and collaborative meaning construction. While early theorists Vygotsky, Dewey, and Piaget paved the way 60-70 years ago, constructivism moved to the mainstream only in the 1990s. Constructivist teaching strategies give students complex and engaging projects and tasks to perform, with scaffolding and support available from colleagues or a teacher/facilitator. Learning happens via meaningful experiences and direct encounters. Examples include guided inquiry activities such as Webquests, or problem-based learning cases.

Many educators have become conscious of the limits of classroom learning, because it happens outside of natural and authentic contexts. This has led to greater appreciation for informal and field-based learning opportunities. Informal learning occurs by virtue of participation in some other valued activity (e.g., work or play). Field-based learning refers to semi-structured activities such as internships, practicum experiences, expeditions and trips, etc. These informal and field-based experiences are compatible with constructivist values and are learner-centered in the same sense; the emphasis is on individuals’ meaningful encounters with the world as opposed to direct instruction in controlled settings.

Many technology innovators maintain a dual focus in their dissemination efforts: providing advanced information tools coupled with high levels of personal support and connectivity among individuals (Naisbitt, 1982; Spitzer, 2001). The commitment to both high-tech and high-touch suggests a need to make tools people-centered rather than the reverse (Norman, 1993).

How does distance education fit within these conflicting forces of standardization versus learner-centered values? Ironically, distance education can be seen to support both movements. A well-conceived distance education program can fit squarely within a strictly controlled standards-based curriculum. At the same time, some aspects of the distance learning experience are completely learner-centered, especially the access and convenience afforded students.

The research agenda of Dave Merrill and others has focused on how to make high-quality instruction happen more regularly and consistently. One way to do this is to create an expert system that will ensure adequate instructional quality, based on a defined theory of instruction. In this section, several trends are outlined that relate to making instructional-design processes more efficient and effective, either through improved tools or improved theories.

A basic precept of instructional design is known as the “conditions-of-learning” assumption (Ragan & Smith, 1996). Before producing instruction, it is necessary to determine what one needs to teach, as well as one’s audience and situation. Then and only then can good instructional strategies be determined. To make this assumption workable, designers use specific taxonomies of learning outcomes, matched with instructional strategies. Examples of this strategy-outcome coupling include Gagné’s nine events of instruction and Merrill’s component display theory. According to this view, rules connecting goals with instructional strategies become essential to the systematic practice of instructional design.

An automated version of this line of thinking seeks to make instructional development largely a data-driven activity. In theory, automated instructional design is an ambitious concept: just plug in data concerning learning outcomes, learners, and situation, and the rule system spits out—not only a set of recommended strategies—but draft instructional materials. A major advantage of an automated system like this would be the efficiency gains achieved through re-usability of data. For example, investment in content representation—depicting the facts, procedures, principles, and examples in a subject area—could yield some quickly developed instruction for different learners in different situations, according to the rules of the system. Learning objects are based on a similar idea, although perhaps not as theory-driven (Wiley, 2002). While research on automating instruction has continued over two decades, the agenda is still in its infancy and may prove increasingly viable in coming years.

In addition to rule-based taxonomies and instructional prescriptions, authoring tools have become more flexible and powerful. Rather than forcing designers into linear, topdown ways of thinking and producing, more powerful tools allow late and iterative changes in design, more in keeping with natural design thinking and envisioning. Examples include 3D modeling programs that allow for various uses once the model has been created; or authoring tools that allow prototyping and creation of dummy interfaces to test out concepts at early stages before investing in full-design development. These powerful tools are useful, not just to instructional design professionals, but to non-professionals seeking to engage in design activities.

The learning-objects movement examines reusing content to make efficiency gains in the instructional development process. Because digital content is “non-rival” in nature (i.e., copies of equal quality can be easily made from originals), reusability for various purposes, media, and occasions become an inviting possibility (Wiley, 2002). But the learningobjects movement is only one line of an overall effort to allow for modular re-usability of design components. The idea is that good instructional design is based on a very finite number of models, templates, and solutions, created while addressing earlier problems. The task is to adopt these available resources, reusing and appropriating wherever possible, to address the problem at hand. This modular attitude seems to draw from a workshop metaphor that sees designers as craftspersons re-using ideas and content for different clients and purposes, somewhere between factory and pure-artist metaphors of production. The IMMEX environment for problem-based learning lessons (http://www.immex.ucla.edu/) is a Web example of template use.

New technologies serve a number of functions: they empower people and open up new possibilities for action; they serve as metaphors for new ways of thinking about problems; and they eventually come to constrain our thinking and actions, especially after heavy investment in their use. Advances in information technologies over the last twenty years are so profound that they are affecting every area of our professional lives. I term this condition the “digital shift” because, as we convert our thinking, knowledge, and communication to digital and informational form, a whole new set of possibilities opens up (Brown, 2000; Brown & Duguid, 1996).

Digitized information is traceable and archivable. Exchanges and interactions are more easily captured, at least on a digital level.

Digital databases are searchable to a degree that we can often retrieve needed resources when solving problems in real time.

Because of their non-rival nature, digital resources can be copied and distributed an infinite number of times at zero or extremely low cost.

The hypertext structures of the Web draw heavily on the associative structures conceived by behaviorists and systems thinkers in the 1940s and 1950s (Hebb, 1949). Using webs of interconnecting information has become commonplace in the problem-solving practices of information workers.

Representation tools—everything from PowerPoint to 3-D animation to digital TV and beyond—are changing our notion of reality. These tools, coupled with sophisticated communications, have led to virtual worlds that, increasingly, allow for rich experience and interaction. We now need to match this growth with a better understanding of how to use the tools for good learning effect.

In recent years, economies worldwide have moved toward greater linkages and interdependencies. This move is called the global economy or the global marketplace. I discuss below several aspects of this global trend, affecting the delivery of educational and learning resources (see also Collis & Gommer, 2001a and Collis & Gommer, 2001b for a helpful analysis on this general issue).

By virtue of the Web and the shift to online learning, markets for learning resources have shifted from local to global. Thus, a school in Australia may offer a course that attracts students from all over the world. A portal or Website may compete against an office of student services within a community college. These shifts in markets and audiences create new economies of scale—allowing larger investment and larger outreach—but they can also threaten locally developed providers.

A company based in India may hire an experienced Ph.D. at $3 an hour to facilitate a graduate-level computer science course. This, in turn, may force a competitive response by a local school or learning-resource provider. By simple virtue of the Web, salary scales and hiring practices for online resource providers are starting to become more globalized.

It can be difficult to put a price tag on residential school experiences. What is a Harvard MBA worth, and where does the value lie? Many graduates would place great value on non-traditional outcomes; e.g., the network of friends and contacts; the exposure to a company’s work practices via an internship; the rite-of-passage and developmental roles of schooling; the opportunity to take personal risks and test oneself. Online learning providers will need to somehow differentiate the valued outcomes of a schooling experience. Parsing out these valued outcomes will help to make sure the online experience can be designed specifically to include them. For example, if college graduates value the personal experimentation and growth accruing from going away to school, then online providers may want to design and encourage avenues for personal experimentation online; for example, through music or political involvement. Also, once valued outcomes are identified and understood, providers may be able to set up pricing schemes that differentiate among those outcomes. Credential costs, for example, may be priced separately from some learning costs.

As suggested earlier, instruction can be seen either as a mass-produced product or as a unique experience. Because online learning resources require more up-front development than typical classroom experiences, and because online instruction is still seen as an entrepreneurial enterprise, there is a tendency to see online instruction as a commodity. Once investment has been made in the product, providers often want to distribute that product as far as the market will allow. This could also be called a shift from a craft to an industrial model of production and delivery. A view of instruction as a commodity, of course, is compatible with viewing education in input-output terms.

As an industrial model of instruction is adopted, questions of ownership and control of distribution become more prominent, because a product is developed that, at least in principle, can be distributed readily (unlike the typical classroom experience). Publishers, concerned about losing their place in this changing environment, have introduced innovations such as the customizable textbook. To some extent, discussion of learning objects has been appropriated by publishers as part of an effort to maintain commercial control of content elements through proprietary standards.

Many enthusiasts are disheartened at the commercialization of the Web, but it was a predictable effect coincident with increasing choice and individual control. A similar tendency is seen in schools as greater choices and perspectives are accommodated through charter and private schools. Commercial investment can provide the needed stimulus to innovation and development, but it can also reduce innovation and variation, especially small-niche perspectives at the fringes. Commercial appropriation of learning can result in some confusion through blurring of boundaries between consumption and education, between entertainment and learning. In an open market, where satisfaction of desire plays a critical role, learning outcomes may suffer from neglect.

Early literature about the Internet was infused with optimism and idealism about universal sharing and access. The Web, indeed, can be an empowering force that gives information access to users who are physically remote from resources (Ryder, 1995).

At the same time, the Web, like so many other tools, reflects our own values and ideas. A divide still exists between the privileged and the disenfranchised, but the rules have changed somewhat. Principal barriers now include lack of access and lack of cultural or personal fit with the technology. Age can even be a barrier to empowerment, with younger people tending to have more time and familiarity with technology than do older generations.¹

The commercial model of technology advancement, exemplified in the software industry by Microsoft, is being challenged right now by the open-source movement. Linux, an operating system whose source code is open for the world to see and costs nothing to download and use, has become a major movement in the software development world. Open-source advocates are trying to create a world where software is freely available and a living is made through continuing relationships of service and support.

Open-source ideas may be applied to online learning and education, for example, by challenging commercial ownership through resources freely available, for example, on the Web. If communities of practice can be organized around openly available tools and resources, then the system can become selfsustaining and reinforcing to participants (Schrage, 2000).

Self-publishing is to knowledge management as open source is to Microsoft: an alternative to a hierarchically-controlled system. Instead of fixed search categories and a company-designed form, end users themselves can publish solutions and locally valued resources. The Web epitomizes this growing trend, to the occasional chagrin of copyright owners and librarians (Ryder & Wilson, 1997).

The Napster phenomenon taught us that downloading from central servers is not the only way to perpetuate an online enterprise. Peer-to-peer networking refers to individual users sharing resources by opening up their hard drives to each other. The core concept is even more radical than Napster’s because, once out of the bag and in the hands of end users, true peer-to-peer usage cannot be controlled or shut down. In this way, peer-to-peer networking constitutes a classic form of selforganizing system, using the technology to bypass every form of central control.

Peer-to-peer connectivity is the extreme end of self-organizing on the Web, but there are other forms. Interest groups, listservs, support groups of all kinds; each of these is a selforganizing system that draws on distributed energy and participation for its survival. An interesting example is slashdot.org, a news and discussion group for open-source and technical geeks. Run by a group of about a dozen editors, slashdot.org allows thousands of readers to participate at multiple levels by contributing stories, discussing the stories, rating the comments, and even rating the ratings. Together, these carefully crafted forms of participation result in a finely tuned environment for learning about news and technology—In short, it is a very successful informal learning environment exhibiting both designed and self-organizing qualities (Wiley & Edwards, 2002). And contrary to threaded discussions typical of online courses, the slashdot experience gets better with more students involved. It seems inevitable that educational institutions will see an advantage in exploiting these tools for more formal learning purposes. I can imagine, for example, a consortium of graduate programs sponsoring participation in a discussion forum like slashlearn.org, currently run by David Wiley. Slashlearn.org uses slashdot source code, with the conversation directed toward instructional technology issues (Irving, 2001).

To stay in business, educational institutions must maintain the value of their credentialing processes. The college graduate must hold some kind of advantage over the non-degreed person. The basis for accreditation and credentialing historically has been seat time: students live in residence and accumulate seat time until a requisite number of classes (with proper grades) is attained.

An alternative to seat time is demonstrated mastery of competencies. Professionally certified tests are an example of this approach. Competency-based alternatives have been only partially successful in their challenge of seat-time credentialing, partly because of technical and quality problems with competency measures. Also, it is argued, something unique happens in the experience of schooling. It is not just about the competency, critics argue, it is about the learning experience itself. There is something in going to school that is irreducible down to a competency exam.

In recent years, however, competencybased approaches are enjoying a comeback, thanks largely to growth in online and selfdirected learning. For-profit outreach institutions like the University of Phoenix, once ridiculed for giving credit for “life experience,” continue to gain market share against residential institutions. Despite reliability problems, professional portfolios are used increasingly for competency demonstration and evaluation. Online learning, where seat time loses much of its meaning, continues to improve its services and learning outcomes, along with its market share. These “disruptive technologies” and accompanying competency-based tools truly are threatening the status quo.

The challenge to seat-time credentialing is formidable. The fast-growing home schooling movement, for example, is increasingly dependent on online resources and interest groups, and has been fairly successful in demonstrating learning outcomes. Many working professionals are opting for narrower and shorter training certificates instead of full degrees, often with credit given for previously acquired competencies.

Email exchanges and projects linking students from different parts of the world are not the only curricular impact of global connectivity. “Global education” refers to a new philosophy of learning that seeks to create responsible citizens of the world. Transcending national interests, the global education curriculum takes broadly-based positions on issues of non-violence and conflict resolution, sustainable growth policies, treatment of rich and poor, and protection of the global environment (McEneaney, Kolker, & Ustinova, 1998).

The fields of education, psychology, and instructional design continue to contribute to the professional environment within which distance education is practiced. And, of course, no professional field is a static state; rather, we each contribute to constant changes in the disciplines and fields in which we participate. This section is a highly personal slant on how professional paradigms in instructional design have been changing in recent years and where they are likely to continue changing.

Instructional designers talk about strategies that are used or applied in various situations. Merriam-Webster Online provides a first definition of “strategy” that relates to war and peace. The second definition is:

A strategy, then, seems to refer to a preexisting plan or method that can be deployed to address an immediate problem. From what we know about human cognition, however, much of our behavior, including the solving of complex problems, involves more than applying plans or methods. Our intentional behavior, constrained by a number of situational conditions and purposes, is sometimes methodical and strategic and other times more ad hoc.

My point is this: instructional design models often carry a strong bias toward rational planning and adoption of a fixed set of strategies, whereas instructional design practice is much more interesting than that. Designers do apply plans and strategies, but they also respond very directly to environments, colleagues, and tasks at hand. The formal plans and strategies get more attention in the literature than the in-context problem-solving activities. Activity theory presents a framework for analyzing situations with a focus on participants and their intentions, tools, and culture (Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999; Ryder, 2001b). When I think of good instructional design practice, I now tend to think less in terms of strategy deployment and more in terms of activity; what are people actually doing (concrete), rather than what strategy (abstraction) are they applying?

Throughout the 1990s, some of the major innovations in psychology came from movements in situated cognition and the social construction of meaning. This is somewhat ironic, as psychology’s entire stance is predicated on individual behavior and cognition. In fact, the situated cognition movement is a tacit acknowledgement of the need for something more than individual cognition.

Social and cultural levels of understanding human behavior lead naturally to questions of value: What is it that people want? What should people want? What is right and fair? How can we get people to work together better? We run up against a fairly dead end, however, when we ask our psychology-derived theories to help us with value questions.

For tools to identify the multiple meanings and values inherent in our materials, we can turn to critical and hermeneutical approaches that seek to understand and interpret situations the way a critic would understand a text. These approaches, while not scientific in method or purpose, are better equipped to identify and highlight contrasting values and perspectives, while not imposing a specific value system. Critical approaches can thus serve a needed role in the design of distance-education resources as they help us examine the various meanings implicit in our messages, and determine if that is what we really want to say.

Designers of distance education programs need more inclusive, holistic models that can inform simultaneously at different levels of context: individual cognition, cultures and communities, and political and value dimensions. Presently, theorists at these specific levels are fairly defensive and protective of their terrain. Practitioners are forced to cobble together inclusive perspectives by combining contradictory and incommensurate theories on their own. Frankly, I have not found models in the educational or social science literature that successfully integrate these levels of scale, but activity theory comes close (Wilson & Myers, 2000).

Future models of instructional design must stop looking simplistically for linear cause- and-effect relationships outside of systemic interactions. Rather than ask questions such as: “Which is better—distance education or traditional delivery?”, we must closely examine local, dynamic, and systemic interactions. Systems theory, especially complexity theory, has received recent attention in the literature, and this seems likely to continue in the future.

How do these various trends add up? I hope the reader engages in some reflection and conversation about that question. What follows is my best effort at generalizing upon the trends. Rather than paint a specific scenario, I highlight a few principles suggestive of how the trends may combine.

Each of the trends listed above will continue to play a role in future developments of education and training, where distance technologies will play an expanding role. The trends may compete with one another, or sometimes cancel each other out. But they all represent significant aspects of the problem space within which distance education of the future will take shape.

This is my way of saying that learners and communities will find a way to appropriate emerging tools and technologies, rather than the reverse. I have a bias that believes that open systems (self-directed learners, self-organizing groups of learners and workers) constitute the most vital and thriving unit for understanding human actions and choices (cf. Hill, 1999). Process efficiencies and mass-produced tutorials can be appropriated and put into service by these learners and groups, and that is good. Where a group can appropriate a tool or technology and use it to learn from, let it do so. Where the technology breaks down, the group will adapt and make do.

This is not a Utopian faith in the goodness of people; rather, it is an acknowledgement of the power and priority of groups that identify us and guide our behavior. Schools as collectivized learning institutions will not go away. Teachers or guides, responsible for the growth of novices, will not go away. Collective learning in real time will not go away. These practices are in place, not because we lack alternatives, but because we are social beings who invest considerable time and resources toward local interactions and support. I am confident that the same groups—schools, classrooms, families, workgroups, professional organizations—will find ways for distance education resources to work in their service.

Through technologies and new ideas, we are always in the process of re-inventing ourselves. Technologies serve as mirrors of our values and aspirations, as well as our weaknesses and intractable problems. This truth about technologies underscores the importance of subjecting our plans to continuing scrutiny. Whenever possible, we want our technologies to reflect our best selves and our highest ambitions.

Historians of technology tell us that a technology, often based on the best thinking available, in turn stimulates new thinking and new possibilities. This is certainly true of the Web and networked information systems. A huge spike of promising ideas, models, and research and development efforts has accompanied the new technology. When these new efforts are seen as artifacts themselves, we see how one technology prompts the development of another, and how the cycle repeats itself through new iterations of technology, design, theorizing, and practice. Thus, we can be sure that, as technology continues its onward march, new models and ideas will surely follow and, in some cases, precede the technology itself. As John Dewey said more than 70 years ago: