Handbook of Distance Education

Second Edition

Michael Grahame Moore, William C. Diehl, Michael Grahame Moore, William C. Diehl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315296111
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Technology

The Handbook of Distance Education, 4th Edition is a comprehensive compendium of research in the field of distance education. The volume is divided into four sections covering the historical and theoretical foundations of distance education, attributes of teaching and learning using technology, management and administration, and different audiences and providers. Throughout, leading scholars address future research needs and directions based on current research, established practices, and recent changes to implementation, pedagogy, and policy.

PART 1
Historical and Theoretical Foundations

An Overview

William C. Diehl

As Michael Grahame Moore notes in the Preface of this handbook, the maturation and mainstreaming of the field has not only led to a growth of scholarship, but also to a fragmenting of areas of focus. Hype cycle after hype cycle, the field has been and will inevitably be swept forward by new technologies, and distance educators will need to react accordingly—as it has been from correspondence education via the postal service, to radio, to the telephone, to television, to satellites, to the Internet and World Wide Web, to mobile phones, and to virtual and augmented reality. The first section of this handbook is important because it provides historical and theoretical context for the contemporary work of students, scholars, and practitioners. It has been said many times, but having historical perspective is valuable, and looking back can often be as enlightening and enjoyable as looking forward to the next shiny object.

In Chapter 1, Linda M. Black introduces early research in the field and covers the evolution of early organizations that facilitated collaboration and research within the field. These early professional associations provided platforms for the first lectures, seminars, symposia, workshops, and conferences, and for the sharing of research findings and related publications that followed.

Chapter 2 focuses on several individuals who played a pivotal role in the development of research, theory development, and scholarship. William C. Diehl and Leslie Cano provide an overview of the innovation and leadership of Charles Wedemeyer, and of his collaborations with distance education theorists Börje Holmberg, Otto Peters, and Michael Grahame Moore. This chapter also provides an overview of the theories and scholarship of each of these pioneers, and it provides breadcrumbs that will lead to their original and foundational work. Prior to Wedemeyer’s work, as you will learn in Black’s chapter, most scholarship consisted of surveys and descriptions of the field. Moore dives deep into his theory of transactional distance in Chapter 3, and in doing so, includes the origins of the definition of distance education and even the state of the field in the 1970s and 1980s. Moore also provides insights into today’s popular topics (e.g., personalized learning, competency-based education, and artificial intelligence) as related to transactional distance. The reader will also find a review of the past six years of transactional distance-related doctoral dissertations. A natural transition from Moore’s chapter is Jon Dron’s Chapter 4 on independent learning, in which he covers this concept’s foundations along with the tensions that exist between dependence and independence in intentional learning. In the process, Dron relates the evolution of university teaching to these ideas, including pedagogical generations, and last, an overview and analysis of MOOCs as related to these ideas of dependence and independence. Building upon ideas covered in the first several chapters of the handbook, Martha Cleveland-Innes, Norman Vaughan, and D. Randy Garrison, present in Chapter 5 the foundations of the core and then an in-depth look at the Community of Inquiry (CoI) theoretical model. Readers will benefit from the analysis and description of social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence—and will find value in learning about the theoretical and practical implications of the CoI theoretical framework.

Edith Gnanadass and Amelia Y. Sanders, in Chapter 6, provide an historical overview of the role and relationship of women and the importance of paying attention to issues of gender in the field of distance education. Along with this background, they provide a contemporary review of gender and technology, gender and social presence, and communication (interaction). As we strive for equality in society, this chapter will remind readers that there is still much to be accomplished—and it will provide insights into how we can move forward. Finally, the first section closes with Chapter 7’s systematic review of research on distance education, online learning, and blended learning. Robert Bernard, Eugene Borokhovski, and Rana M. Tamim round out the foundations section with a chapter that sheds light on the past decade and a half of research in the field.

While all of these chapters offer value as stand-alone offerings, readers will gain even greater understanding from the ensemble in Part 1.

1
A History of Scholarship

Linda M.Black

This chapter reviews the history of the scholarship of distance education and is organized in seven parts. They are: (a) the pioneer researchers; (b) research centers; (c) trends in the late 20th century; (d) professional development of distance educators; (e) professional associations; (f ) lectures, seminars, symposia, workshops, and conferences; and (g) publications and other media.

Pioneer Research

Among the first people to undertake research in distance education was John S. Noffsinger, secretary of what became the National Home Studies Council, who, in 1926 recorded the first systematic description of American correspondence study (Moore, 1987a). Other early advocates for research were Gayle B. Childs of Kansas State University (Almeda, 1988) and Charles A. Wedemeyer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Moore, 1987b).

After he wrote his doctoral dissertation about correspondence education in public schools, Childs (1949) received a grant from the Ford Foundation (Wright, 1991, p. 43) to undertake one of the first studies of educational television. Urging the National University Extension Association (NUEA) to support more such research, Childs (1966) himself participated in a milestone study of correspondence education completion rates. The study gathered data on 42,068 college enrollments in 32 institutions and on 17,520 high school enrollments in 24 institutions.

During the 1960s, the Correspondence Study Division (CSD) of the NUEA and the National Home Study Council (NHSC) collaborated in the Correspondence Education Research Project (CERP), a national survey of correspondence study in higher education in the United States. CERP was the first study to report evidence that distance education in the form of correspondence instruction could be as effective as face-to-face classroom instruction (MacKenzie, Christensen, & Rigby, 1968, pp. 104–105).

Charles Wedemeyer, as director of correspondence study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during the 1960s, conceived and implemented the Articulated Instructional Media Project (AIM) at the university. In this project, he demonstrated that by deconstructing the teaching process into specialties, employing specialists to work as members of teaching teams, and connecting (i.e., “articulating”) a variety of communications media, the teaching programs were of higher quality than programs produced by individuals working alone, or any programs produced and delivered by only one communications medium (Wedemeyer & Najem, 1969). Of monumental historical importance, Wedemeyer’s ideas were incorporated into the design of the then-revolutionary Open University of the United Kingdom (OUUK), the first publicly funded, national autonomous degree-granting distance teaching university. Refer to Chapter 2 and Diehl (2011) for further coverage of Wedemeyer’s importance to open and distance education.

In Europe, early scholarly writing based on empirical, systematic research is associated with two pioneers: Börje Holmberg in Sweden and Otto Peters in Germany. Holmberg’s (1960) “On the Methods of Teaching by Correspondence” was described by Larsson (1992), as having initiated the first European awareness of correspondence study as a pedagogical methodology (p. x). Peters, first a researcher at the Education Center of Berlin and later at the German Institute for Distance Education Research (DIFF) at the University of Tübingen, inventoried distance education institutions in more than 30 countries and analyzed their systems. His research resulted in the development of a theory that compared distance education to “industrialized education” (Peters, 1967, 1973; Keegan, 1994). In the previous edition of the Handbook, Moore (2007b) includes chapters about Peters’ ideas about “The Most Industrialized Form of Education” and Holmberg’s conceptualization of “A Theory of Teaching-Learning Conversations.”

In the U. S, during the decade of the 1970s, Wedemeyer pressed for a new concept of “independent study” to replace the label of correspondence education (1971). Influenced by Wedemeyer’s (and also Gleason’s) ideas, Michael G. Moore (1972) published his research leading to a theory of “learner autonomy” and incorporated it in his 1976 dissertation about self-directed learners who use correspondence study. By the 1980s Moore’s work evolved into the well-known theory of “transactional distance” (Moore, 2007). The reader may refer to Black’s (2004) dissertation and to Diehl and Cano’ (2018) chapter in this Handbook for more descriptions of Wedemeyer’s influence on theorists Holmberg, Moore, and Peters; and also refer to Bernath and Vidal (2007).

Emergence of Organized Research Centers

The second half of the 20th century saw a number of phenomena that led to growing interest in research; these included favorable experience and research findings about the effectiveness of distance education; the implementation of educational reforms and socio-economic justification for distance education, especially in developing countries; increased funding for research; and the birth of large single-mode distance institutions employing specialist academic researchers. All this resulted in the growth of many centers for distance education research, some of the most important being the University of Wisconsin Extension Department, United States; the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) at the OUUK; the Education Center of Berlin in collaboration with the DIFF at Tübingen; the Central Institute for Distance Education Research (ZIFF) at the FernUniversität, Hagen, Germany; the Centre for Distance Education (CDE) at Athabasca University, Canada; and the American Center for the Study of Distance Education (ACSDE) at the Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Most early research topics in the United States continued to be comparison studies of results of conventional face-to-face classroom instruction compared with mediated distance delivery, and comparisons of the effectiveness of different technologies and media. Popular topics, internationally, went beyond comparison studies, with a major focus on survey research. For example, OUUK’s research arm investigated students’ characteristics and attrition rates, under-representation of society’s disadvantaged segments, and resistance to distance education as well as instructional effectiveness (McIntosh, Calder, & Swift, 1976; Glatter & Wedell, 1971).

In 1988, the First American Symposium on Research in Distance Education, sponsored by the ACSDE, brought together by invitation 50 American distance education leaders, and aimed to set a national research agenda for the United States. The symposium’s results were showcased in Moore’s (1990) book, Contemporary Issues in American Distance Education which, carried edited papers from the symposium, and provided the first compilation of American scholarly articles reflecting the state of American distance education research at that time. With the focus on international research, a similar 1990 event, “Research in Distance Education: Setting a Global Agenda for the Nineties” was held in Caracas, Venezuela, organized by the ACSDE in collaboration with the International Council of Correspondence Education (ICCE). Representatives from five continents proposed a global research agenda highlighting the need for: (a) research on computer conferencing; (b) meta-analyses of researchers’ values and assumptions; (c) comparative institutional studies; (d) analyses of students’ life experiences; (e) methods and technologies of small island countries; (f ) representation of women in distance education materials; and (g) influences of planning and personal, institutional, instructional contexts on student performance (Paulsen & Pinder, 1990, pp. 83–84).

Beginning in 1995, a number of factors—including a decline in funding, the retirement of some of the founding pioneers, the co-opting of distance education research questions by a wider population of academic specialists such as computer scientists and information technologists—impacted the research centers. The DIFF reorganized to become a broad-based education research center and donated its distance education materials to the ZIFF (Black, 2004). In 2005, the ZIFF closed and its personnel were assigned quality control tasks (www.fernuni-hagen.de/ZIFF/index.htm). The IET was directed to manage the OUUK’s Jennie Lee Research Laboratories (http://www8.open.ac.uk/iet/main/core-services/jennie-lee-research-labs) and partnered with the United Kingdom’s Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology (CREET). The ACSDE began to wind down after its founder, Moore, left as director in 2002.

The early centers listed here are important for their part in establishing distance education as a field of study, and new centers soon sprang up to carry on the work. Prominent among these were: the ...