Flexible Delivery: The Globalisation of Lifelong Learning

Professor James C Taylor
University of Southern Queensland, Australia

Flexible delivery, based primarily on the application of distance education technologies and methodologies, is the key to the future of education and training. It could well be the only viable option to meet the escalating worldwide need for lifelong learning, for as Patry (1995) has pointed out, "Traditional education systems throughout the world have been stretched to the limit by the population explosion, scarcity of resources and expansion of knowledge". In the future, flexible delivery is likely to play a more significant role at all levels of education and training as globalisation becomes the norm. Because of its tradition and expertise in distance education, Australia is well placed to become a leader in flexible delivery.

Although distance education has been a reasonably significant element of Australia’s history, geography and culture since early this century, it was not until Blainey (1964) coined the phrase "the tyranny of distance" (which he used as the title of his book), that this phrase became part of the common vocabulary of Australians. In a sense, Australian distance educators responded to the notion of the tyranny of distance, and were motivated to embrace a wide range of new technologies. Since many distance educators were in the vanguard of such initiatives, a review of the developments in the application of new technologies in the distance education context could be a useful starting point for evaluating alternative modes of delivery and the emergence of the virtual campus.

Apart from the more traditional technologies such as print, broadcast television and radio, the following new technologies provide opportunities for enhancing the quality of teaching: audiotapes, videotapes, computer-based learning packages, interactive video, interactive multimedia (IMM), audio-teleconferencing, audiographic communication systems, videoconferencing, and video on demand (VOD). In recent times these technologies have been supplemented by the advent of the opportunities for interactivity and access to instructional resources provided by the computer communications networks popularly referred to as the "Internet", the "World Wide Web" (WWW) or the "Information Super Highway". As Swannell (1997) highlighted recently, flexible learning systems are based on a "philosophy of giving people what they want, where they want it, when they want it (WWW happens to be almost incidental)...." (p.17). A potentially useful framework (Table 1) for organising such a knowledge base is provided by the emergence of different generations of distance education (Taylor, 1995).

Table 1: Models of Distance Education and Associated Delivery Technologies

The Correspondence Model is widely regarded as the first generation of distance education. It has since been subsumed by the second generation Multi-media Model, which entails the use of highly-developed and refined teaching-learning resources, including printed study guides, selected readings, videotapes, audiotapes, and computer-based courseware, including computer managed learning (CML), computer assisted learning (CAL), and interactive video.

While many institutions have evolved from using the Correspondence Model to the Multi-media Model, another significant trend is the move towards the third generation Telelearning Model (Nipper, 1989; Pelton, 1991; Taylor, 1992). This third generation of distance education is based on the use of information technologies, including audio-teleconferencing, audiographic communication systems, video conferencing and broadcast television/radio with attendant audio-teleconferencing.

The emerging fourth generation of distance education, the Flexible Learning Model, promises to combine the benefits of high quality interactive multimedia (IMM), with access to an increasingly extensive range of teaching-learning resources and enhanced interactivity through computer mediated communication (CMC) offered by connection to the Internet.

Distance Education Technologies and Pedagogical Perspectives

As Bates (1991) has highlighted, there are two very different types of interactivity in learning: social and individual. Social interaction between learners and teachers needs to be balanced with the individual student’s interaction with teaching-learning resources, including textbooks, study guides, audiotapes, videotapes and computer assisted learning programs. He argues that the view that students in conventional institutions are engaged for the greater part of their time in meaningful, face to face interaction is a myth, and that: "for both conventional and distance education students, by far the largest part of their studying is done alone, interacting with textbooks and other learning media" (Bates, 1991, p.6). One of the strengths of the Multi-media Model of distance education is that it has concentrated efforts on improving the quality of the student’s individual interaction with learning materials, such as specially designed printed materials, audiotapes, videotapes and computer-based learning packages, aimed at teaching concepts and cognitive skills associated with clearly defined objectives in the context of a coherent curriculum.

Distance educators have also recognised the need to provide opportunities for social interaction to support effective learning. They have therefore tried to simulate face to face communication through the development of instructional systems based on technologies such as audio-teleconferencing, audiographic communication systems, videoconferencing and computer mediated communication (CMC). These technologies can support contiguous two-way communication between students and teachers. Alternatively, residential schools or local tutors have been used to provide the social interaction that can facilitate effective learning. It is worth noting that the necessary balance between social and individual interactivity will vary from course to course and will be a function of such variables as the subject matter, the specific objectives of the course, the structure and quality of the learning materials, and, very importantly, the student target audience.

In many contexts, including continuing professional education, the clientele for distance education consists mainly of part-time students in full-time employment. Distance educators have, therefore, had to provide teaching-learning resources (printed study guides, audiotapes, videotapes, computer-based courseware, etc) of high quality that could be used at a time and in a place convenient to each student. In effect, these "flexible access" technologies (Taylor, 1992) allow the student to turn "the teacher" on, or off, at will as lifestyle permits. Similarly, access to the Internet facilitates interactivity, without sacrificing the benefits of flexible access, since it can be used to support asynchronous communication. Such flexibility has a major pedagogical benefit - it allows students to progress at their own pace. Thus varying rates of individual progression can be accommodated, unlike in typical conventional educational practices where the whole class tends to progress at the same pace in synchronisation with the delivery of information through mass lectures and tutorials. Some of the characteristics of the various models of distance education that are relevant to the quality of teaching and learning are summarised in Table 2.

Table 2: Models of Distance Education: A Conceptual Framework

Three Other Tyrannies: Proximity, Futility and Eternity

While the models of distance education could reasonably be regarded as the distance educators response to the tyranny of distance, this evolution has been subject to the vagaries of at least three other tyrannies: the tyranny of proximity, the tyranny of futility and the tyranny of eternity.

In the first instance, on campus educators have largely ignored the new technologies, with the process of face-to-face conventional teaching regarded as being patently superior to all other forms of teaching. While distance educators have striven to overcome the perceived constraints associated with limited opportunities for face-to-face interaction, on-campus educators appear to be basically satisfied with traditional approaches. They have, therefore, tended to ignore the new technologies and have concentrated their energies on research and other forms of scholarly activity. "Such a state of affairs wherein teaching as a process is more-or-less taken for granted stems from "the tyranny of proximity", a frame of mind in which important issues are overlooked because they are so much an accepted part of day to day activities that they remain unchallenged and unquestioned" (Taylor, 1994, p.180). This tyranny of proximity has also generated another significant influence, "the tyranny of futility", which has also had a detrimental impact on the cost-effective development of distance education.

The widely held view that face-to-face teaching is inherently superior to other forms of teaching has spawned a major industry worldwide. It is difficult to believe that videoconferencing would have become such a major influence, especially in North America, without the intellectual complacency associated with the tyranny of proximity. The investment in videconferencing has been quite staggering despite the widely held view that the lecture is a process whereby the notes of the lecturer are transmitted to the notes of the student, without passing through the minds of either. As Bligh (1972) pointed out, the lecture is extremely ineffective and primarily a waste of time, as the majority of our own experience as students would testify.

The apparently unwavering enthusiasm for the proliferation of videoconferencing systems for the purpose of enhancing teaching and learning represents "the tyranny of futility". If most lectures are relatively futile from a pedagogical perspective, why spend vast sums of money promoting expensive futile exercises? A reasonable explanation is related to the rate of change, or lack thereof, in the educational context - a phenomenon known as "the tyranny of eternity". Educational paradigms tend to change direction with much the same agility as an ocean-going oil tanker.

Yet another widely held view (so revered, it approaches the status of a universal truth) is that "education never changes". One major reason that the lecture has been around for hundreds of years is that "it works". It is also cheap. The fact that it is ineffectual is irrelevant. It has become institutionalised. As the late Professor Ram Reddy, a former Vice-Chancellor of the Indira Ghandi National Open University, once said, "It doesn’t matter what you say, as long as it lasts for 45 minutes!" The total curriculum throughout the world of institutional education is a simple variation on this theme. Schools don’t change; colleges don’t change; and universities don’t change. Changing a university is like moving a graveyard. It is extremely difficult, and you don’t get much internal assistance.

It is in this context of an apparent lack of significant change over many years, that the senior managers and leaders of educational institutions have been lulled into a false sense of security, "the tyranny of eternity". Why make a decision today, when you can put if off until tomorrow, next week, next year.......? Such an attitude is no longer tenable. The rate of change of technology with the potential to enhance teaching and learning is exponential. The world is shrinking. In effect, geography is history!

While geography was the primary factor in promoting distance education, it is increasingly, irrelevant. As Lowe (1992) highlighted recently, "The power of information technology lends a new dimension to the pace of change, as it allows the rapid transmission of new knowledge from one corner of the world to another" (p.10). The relative geographical remoteness and isolation of Australia is now largely irrelevant, since it takes an email from Queensland to Queenstown only marginally less time than one from Queensland to London. The changing scale and scope of technological change now means that the tyranny of eternity as a modus operandi for management is no longer sustainable.

The opportunity for institutional leaders to become proactive, and to ensure that flexible delivery technologies (the fourth generation/the virtual campus) become a structurally integrated part of the teaching-learning process has never been greater. However, while the trend towards "technology-mediated" flexible delivery is perhaps inexorable in a wide variety of education and training contexts, it is crucial to realise that the use of a range of instructional media does not automatically enhance the quality of teaching and learning. As has been pointed out, this does not come simply from invoking the tyranny of futility and replicating conventional face-to-face teaching, the challenge is to understand the technology and apply it "to create new and more effective learning situations" (Paulsen and Rekkedal, 1988, p.363). It is crucial to realise, however, that no technology will automatically improve learning to a significant extent.

Instructional Design and Technology

A detailed discussion of instructional design and technology is beyond the scope of the present paper. However, it is important to note that delivery technologies (printed materials, audiotapes, videotapes, computer-based instructional systems etc) simply package information and instruction to give students access to educational experiences. What really matters is the quality of the instructional message, rather than any inherent characteristics of the instructional medium. The need in education to differentiate clearly between the medium and the message was highlighted by Clark (1983), who made the point that educational technologies are "mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition" (p.445). It is entirely feasible to surround a teacher with a team of audio-visual technicians, graphic artists and computing specialists, to vary the style of the delivery of the educational message, without producing a significant increase in pedagogical efficacy.

The key process for improving the quality of teaching and learning is instructional design (Braden, 1996), which has received a significant boost from recent advances in instructional science (Anderson, 1982, 1985; Glaser, 1984, 1991; Kidd, 1987; Landa, 1976; Reigeluth, 1983; Winn, 1990). In the first instance, the process of instructional design entails a systematic fine-grained analysis of the knowledge base and associated cognitive skills that provide the foundation of professional expertise in a particular discipline. This approach entails the application of such techniques as cognitive task analysis (Ryder & Redding, 1993), novex analysis (Taylor, 1994) and concept mapping (Novak, 1990) in order to design a sequence of well-structured learning experiences, thereby significantly enhancing the efficacy of the teaching-learning process.

The rapid growth in the field of instructional design and technology has promoted a shift from a system wherein a single teacher is more or less solely responsible for the design, development, delivery and evaluation of education and training programs, to a multi-disciplinary team approach, wherein a wide range of specialist expertise is applied to the generation of training programs. The necessary range of expertise for the development of technologically sophisticated teaching and learning systems, tends to be beyond the capacity of individual teachers and appears to demand the deployment of an expert teaching team, with a wide range of specialist skills. The following example of a global flexible delivery initiative entailing the use of fourth generation distance education technologies would not have been feasible without pooling the expertise of a wide range of experts. These include specialists in instructional design, systems design, electronic information systems, database design, graphic design, student administration, electronic publishing and project management. And the discipline content experts!

This team approach has been institutionalised at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) where it was first introduced in 1977 (Taylor, 1994). The organisational ethos generated by this multidisciplinary approach to teaching in a dual mode institution where distance education enrolment now constitute 73% of total enrolments has enabled USQ to move rapidly to introduce fourth generation distance education technology. USQ’s leadership in this field was recognised recently by its selection to participate in a "Showcase of Best Practice", organised to run concurrently with the Commonwealth Ministers of Education Conference held in Botswana in July, 1997. The course selected for the Showcase, the Graduate Certificate in Open and Distance Learning, is available only via the Internet, and appears to offer an appropriate prototype for lifelong professional education on a global scale.

A Global Prototype for Lifelong Professional Education

In a recent paper, Plater (1995) argued that faculty in all fields must know how to use the technology and be able to teach effectively through distant interactions with students and peers. One of the acknowledged difficulties, however, is the need to provide appropriate staff development opportunities for teachers to become familiar with new technologies and the associated pedagogical potential for the enhancement of teaching and learning. Thach (1995), for example, made the point that, " Faculty and instructors are often thrown into distance learning settings with little or no professional development and instructional design information to assist them in adapting to the new teaching environment" (p. 93). Given the rapidly growing influence of flexible delivery, stimulated by the exponential growth in access to the Internet, the need for continuing vocational education and training has never been greater in the teaching profession.

In response to this need, the USQ initiated a global faculty development program for teaching at a distance. The development of the courseware was initially supported by the Australian Government through its Committee for Staff Development, with a AU$100,000 grant. The AT&T Foundation provided a further US$50,000 (AU$67,000) to develop the international network. The project entails the development of an international network of institutions to support the offering of a Graduate Certificate in Open and Distance Learning (http://www.usq.edu.au/material/course/us59/).

The following institutions worked with the USQ to launch this initiative in 1996:

• Fundação Brasileira de Educação, Brazil
• Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei
• Open Learning Institute, Hong Kong
• Universiti Malaysia, Sarawak
• Institut Teknologi Mara, Malaysia
• Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico
• Rhodes University, South Africa
• Georgia Southern University, USA
• Solomon Islands College of Higher Education
• University of Manitoba, Canada.

The Grad Cert (ODL) is offered solely via electronic means. Participating students need to have access to appropriate hardware and software to communicate via electronic mail and to download materials through the Internet. The courseware that has been developed makes extensive use of existing electronic resources already available on the World Wide Web. A recent search of electronic materials revealed 31 electronic journals and magazines and 43 newsletters relevant to educational technology, as well as 12 electronic journals related to distance education, 29 electronic journals related to instructional technology, 28 associated electronic discussion groups and numerous databases all specifically related to the content of the course. Students gain access to these materials through the use of an Internet Browser such as Netscape.

Additionally, systems developed to support the AT&T project allow students to: (i) find out about the course by accessing an electronic brochure, (ii) enrol electronically, and (iii) submit assignments electronically. These initiatives underwent a formative evaluation phase during Semester 2 1996, with the first formal offer of the course initiated in Semester 1, 1997. During the formative evaluation phase, enrolments were restricted to a maximum of 25 with two or three faculty members from each of the participating institutions embarking on the course during the second semester of 1996. These faculty members may subsequently act as local tutors in their own regional contexts.

The design of the electronic teaching and learning environment, although developed independently by the USQ team, has much in common with the technological environment created by the Laboratoire d’Informatique Cognitive et Environments de Formation (LICEF) at the Télé-université in Montreal. Ricciardi-Rigault, Henri and Damphousse (1996) articulated the design and operation of a "pedagogical virtual space" to support a learning process that is non-linear, collaborative and interactive. The USQ approach embodies these principles.

Students are provided with an interactive study chart. This sets the broad parameters of the subject matter content to be investigated, and lists a number of exemplary references. References are both to traditional print-based materials that might be found in a local library and to electronic references which are hot linked via specific URLs. The lecturers were assisted in the task of locating relevant materials on the WWW by a research assistant, who surfed the Net for potentially useful materials according to lists of key words provided by the teaching staff. These materials were then bookmarked and made available for evaluation. As members of the teaching team assessed these materials, each electronic reference was annotated with a comment on the relevance of the content for particular modules of the course. Because of the transient nature of many web sites, any material which was evaluated as being essential, was cleared for copyright and stored on the local USQ server. This electronic database of courseware is referred to locally as the "AT&T Treasure Trove". As Owston (1997) highlighted, "What the Web can offer, that traditional media cannot, is information that is instantly available, often very up-to-date, worldwide in scope, and presented in a more motivating format for students to explore" (p.31).

In due course, students will also contribute to this database, which will be highly amenable to efficient searching because of its inherent structure and selective nature. Naturally, the students are free to surf the Net for teaching-learning resources that meet their specific needs. They are also able to download assignments, with those of sufficient quality being added to the database for reference by future students. The interaction with courseware materials is, however, only one element of the interactivity built into the USQ pedagogical approach.

Interaction with other students, teaching staff and other experts, who act as mentors, is achieved through the use of computer mediated communication (CMC), using the Web-based conferencing system, "About", or "Netscape Newsgroups". Students are encouraged to communicate through various electronic conferences, established for specific content areas as well as for informal social interaction through the "Coffee Chat" Conference. It is worth noting that there is a qualitative difference between traditional tutorial (real-time verbal) and computer conferencing (asynchronous written communication), with the reflective and precise nature of the latter being very different from the spontaneous and less structured nature of oral discourse in either a face-to-face, video or audio teleconference context. "The reflective and explicit nature of the written word is a disciplined and rigorous form of thinking and communicating ....... it allows time for reflection and, thereby, facilitates learners making connections amongst ideas and constructing coherent knowledge structures" (Garrison, 1997, p.5). Computer conferencing is not just another technology, its capacity to rehumanise distance education represents a qualitative shift which has the potential not only to reshape learning at a distance, but also to pervade conventional education systems.

Time zones and local infrastructure permitting, the socio-cognitive dimension of learning in the Grad Cert (ODL) is also being enhanced through the periodic use of audiographic communication, videoconferencing and the use of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) systems. Since the current cohort of students comes from 12 countries covering seven time zones, this use of synchronous communication is limited and supplementary, with the primary mode of communication being asynchronous, thus maintaining flexible access for students.

At a more specific level, some members of the teaching team are exploring different styles of interaction, including the use of reflections as a basis for collaborative learning (Naidu & McAleese, 1996), which tends to demand a controlled sequence of learning activities. Others are emphasising independent learning with permits greater choice of learning sequence and style for individual students. Further, another member of the team (Ross, 1997) is basing his pedagogical approach on the simulation of a company involved in the design, development and marketing of multimedia products. This subject unit, "Creating Interactive Multimedia", entails a number of innovative features, including the design and development of multimedia products using software available via the WWW, collaboration between students through the running of production team meetings via Internet Relay Chat, supplemented by real audio.

These approaches are supplemented by a mentoring system in which each student has access to a mentor through email in an effort to provide individual support and advice. Each of these pedagogical variations is being systematically evaluated through the use of an online evaluation system, which will lay the foundation for continuous improvement. It is planned that the results of such action research will lay the foundation for a series of experimental research studies in the future. Initial indications are, however, that the quality of student learning outcomes is extremely high and in some respects quite exceptional. For instance, the student project generated through collaboration among 18 students in 11 countries, who were learning to use multimedia, was superior to that of the same unit taught on campus -

(http://www.connect.usq.edu.au/students/d9710775/con1.html).

Conclusion

The USQ AT&T project appears to provide an appropriate prototype for the flexible delivery of continuing professional education and training on a global scale. Although focussed primarily on the teaching profession, and those employed in industrial training roles, it could well act as a prototype for continuous professional education in many professions. The approach has the flexibility to meet the needs of busy professionals in full-time employment, irrespective of their geographical location. Further, it has the interactivity to engender efficacious learning outcomes in a time efficient manner. The immediate access to current materials and associated professional discussion with colleagues from around the world creates a socio-cognitive learning environment from which all who participate will surely benefit. Indeed, the professional networking which is likely to emanate from such approaches to flexible delivery seems likely to engender genuine lifelong learning.

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