TRENDS, ISSUES AND DEVELOPMENTS IN
OPEN AND DISTANCE LEARNING
By
Prof. Dr. Felix Librero
Chancellor
University of the Philippines Open University
Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines
Email: flibrero@upou.org
Website: www.upou.org
Presented at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Open University convocation, Amado V. Hernandez Hall, Ninoy Aquino Learning Resources Center, Mabini Campus, 11 March 2006.
Introduction
In a comprehensive discussion of the trends, issues, and developments in open and distance learning, we must include the elements of the information society or the knowledge society. This is where the discussion can become confusing and dizzying because of the interrelationships among developments in multiple fronts. Indeed, today it is in education where the most recent developments in the technological front are converging, giving rise to the unprecedented creative approaches and innovations to learning the exponentially growing amount of new information and knowledge.
It is not simply a question of everyone wanting to learn an increasing volume of information and new knowledge because this simply is not possible. Rather, it is a question of making choices of what we need to learn and how we ought to learn what we choose to learn. In analyzing this apparently simple situation, I would like to bring to your attention some factors that I believe would influence how we learn in the knowledge-based society.
Environment for Learning New
Information and Knowledge
Without having to go through a hair-splitting discussion of the theoretical dichotomy between the information society and knowledge society, I would like to simply look at these two concepts as related and directly connected, one being a more sophisticated continuation of the other. Indeed, knowledge is a higher level order in relation to information. Viewed another way, a systematic collection of interrelated pieces of information leads to a certain type of knowledge.
Information is what fuels modern society, giving rise to the information society. What is the information society? Let’s just go by the technical definition provided in 1997 by the IBM Community Development Foundation which defined the information society as follows:
A society characterized by a high level of information intensity in the everyday life of its citizens, in most organizations and workplaces; by the use of common or compatible technology for a wide personal, social, educational, and business activities; and by the ability to transmit, receive and exchange data rapidly between places irrespective of distance.
Such definition, really, provides enough elbow room so that depending on how we look at it the information society would have different levels of maturity and sophistication. Almost four decades ago, taking off from the works of the economist Fristz Machulp beginning in 1933 and culminating with his book titled The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States published in 1962, Marc Porat reported his landmark analysis of historical events that he said clearly established what could have been referred to as the dawning of the information society. The information society, as we all know, is the precursor of what we call today as the knowledge society.
In a knowledge society, the growth of knowledge is exponential. This was observed in 1963 by Price who said that “if any sufficiently large segment of science is measured in any reasonable way, the normal mode of growth is exponential.” He was referring, of course, only to the growth of scientific knowledge, which was doubling every 15 years. If the number of scientific journals would be any indication at all, Martin (1981), the guru of telematics, calculated almost a quarter of a century ago that the number of scientific journals increased by a factor of 10 every 50 years. This put the number of scientific journals in the year 2000 at one million, and in the year 2050 at 10 million. But then again, Martin could not have factored in the publication of electronic journals 25 years ago. Hence, there must be many more journals today if we include the electronically published ones.
Martin also calculated that by year 2040, which is only 34 years from today, there will be 200 million different books published and storing these in a conventional library would require some 8,000 kilometers of bookshelves and about 750,000 drawers of the card catalogue cabinet. A dozen years ago, the card catalogue of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, which holds the most complete and comprehensive collection on rice science in the world, had only 576 drawers. Today, it can’t be more than 800.
If this is not enough for you, let me put it another way. Twenty-one years ago, an old friend, James Evans, said that if he were interested to read the one month entries into only one agricultural data base, the AGRICOLA (Agricultural Online Access System of the U.S. National Agricultural Library), he would have needed to set aside about 200 years, reading 8 hours everyday, 365 days a year. At that time, reading all entries of the AGRICOLA would have required some 24 centuries of reading. Twenty-one years ago, the growth of such information and knowledge was 14 percent annually. One wonders how much knowledge there is at this hour that we all need to learn because we require such knowledge to be reasonably productive in our respective academic disciplines.
“The knowledge society,” observed Peter Drucker (1994), the guru of modern management, “will inevitably become far more competitive than any society we have yet known for the simple reason that with knowledge being universally accessible there are no excuses for nonperformance. There will be no poor countries. There will only be ignorant countries.”
Drucker’s prescription in 1994 is as interesting to management experts as it is to distance education experts. An educated person, he had said, will be one who has learned to learn and will continue to learn throughout his or her life, especially in and out of the formal education system. This is continuing education. This is life long learning. He said, further:
. . . in the knowledge society, clearly more and more of knowledge, and especially of advanced knowledge, will be acquired well past the age of formal schooling, and increasingly, perhaps, in and through educational processes which do not center on the traditional school, e.g., systematic continuing education offered at the place of employment.
In other words, put simply, learning all the knowledge available to us today will not take place in the confines of the classrooms alone. Much of the learning that shall happen in the knowledge society shall happen outside of the formal classrooms, in places where distance learners are. Much of what people will learn will also depend on what they will choose to learn, and how much and how quickly.
Some Basic Issues
Technology vs Mindset
I am tempted to refer to this as the learning divide, but we already have too many divides. So let me just explain this point briefly. We have here two concerns, one technological, the other psycho-intellectual or what I shall refer to as mindset. In the field of education, somehow the technical aspects always come before the content aspects. We have all these technologies that we can use but many of our educational policy and decision makers are not providing enough opportunities for our educators and learners to use them so they can become more effective and efficient facilitators and beneficiaries of the learning experience.
The more serious issue is changing of mindset. While those of us in open and distance education already have migrated to the learner-centered paradigm, many of our colleagues in the conventional system remain steeped in the teacher-centered learning environment. The crucial hurdle is the shift from a teacher-centered to a learner-centered learning environment. This may not always be the fault of the teacher since in many cases it is the learner who refuses to take responsibility for his or her own learning.
Of course, changing mindsets is not as easy as changing pieces of equipment. We have to deal with three serious gaps here.
First, we are wading through a pedagogical gap, the main feature of which is a reluctant acceptance of distance education by many senior educators and education managers and policy makers as a viable alternative system of delivering quality education. We need to be more creative in the application of methods and techniques of distance learning so that we can resolve the issues that non-believers are so concerned about such as the age-old issue of maintenance of standards and providing social interaction opportunities for open and distance learners.
Second, we have to contend with a technological gap. One thing is sure, though: many institutions and experts cannot seem to have enough of the gadgetry offered by the rapid technological advancements. Unfortunately, either the education providers and learners alike cannot afford the technology or they do not have easy access to it. We must use technology to the extent that it is accessible at reasonable cost. In fact, we should revisit old technologies especially if they still are able to provide solutions to our problems.
Finally, we have to deal squarely with the fact that it is difficult to migrate from a teacher-centered learning environment to a learner-centered learning environment. This may be the most crucial hurdle. We may not be able to overcome this anomaly overnight but as we try to solve it we should further quicken our pace in moving from the traditional learning environment within the confines of the physical classroom to learning in the virtual classroom.
Access to Technology
There are two levels of access that I have in mind at the moment: access to technology as hardware and access to technology as software. The former, generally referring to pieces of equipment and facilities, can easily be solved with appropriate allocation of financial resources, but the second is problematic. The software, i.e., computer program, itself may be easily affordable, but the associated issues involved are the problem. These are access to the software in terms of applicability and user friendliness in the context of the intended user’s circumstances. For example, where needed, are the software gender sensitive? What does it take to use a particular software so that one can access content? What skills are necessary and how might these skills be obtained? There are a lot more questions needing answers.
Expertise Factor
What we need today are specialists who are experts in hardware, software, and processes. These people, of course, are hard to find. This should be enough reason why there is an urgent need for human resources development effort in this area.
There is an associated issue here, which has something to do with people having specific skills to use for specific technologies. When we introduce new technology we naturally also provide people with the new skills to use the technology. We call this retooling, but some people claim that the term retooling sounds too mechanistic. It is as if technology dehumanizes people. We can call it re-skilling (which is providing people new skills) but this sounds too manipulistic. Now, what do we do with people who refuse to or cannot be retooled or re-skilled? The solution is an old technology – RETIRING.
Funding Squeeze
One major concern that I have as an administrator of a distance education institution operating in a poor country is the mad scramble for the use of top-of-the-line software and hardware. Changing your software, for example, does not always mean simply changing the software. It means, for the most part, redesign of content treatment and retooling of users. This is hardly cheap. And the financial resources that I have access to are being continuously depleted.
Funding problems could be resolved with an active partnership with private industry and other non-traditional funding sources such as the NGO sector.
Policy Issues
The policy environment would differ from country to country. Some are more advanced than others in terms of acceptance of open and distance education as an alternative system of delivering quality educational services. Furthermore, some are more experienced than others. There should, therefore, be a system where institutions are able to share ideas and experiences in order that we are able to provide the learning services in support of a developing knowledge society.
Some General Trends
In a UNESCO-sponsored post conference workshop during the 19th AAOU Annual Conference in Jakarta in 2005, Dato Prof. G. Dhanarajan, former President of the Commonwealth of Learning based in Vancouver, Canada, and now Vice Chancellor of the Wawasan Open University College in Penang, Malaysia, discussed the unmistakable worldwide trends in open learning and distance education. These may be categorized into five groups.
Distance Learning Trends
1. Lifelong learning is becoming a competitive necessity. There has been a continuous increase in the number of institutions offering educational programs in the distance mode. Even training institutions and ordinary organizations now have their programs geared toward lifelong learning, or the idea of continuing education as requirement for their personnel. Professionals are required to demonstrate that they have been engaged in continuing education activities when they renew their professional licenses.
2. More courses, degrees, and universities are teaching strategies that exploit the capabilities of technologies. Even conventional instruction has increasingly been using technologies of learning such as the use of ICTs. There are no instructional programs today that do not employ communication media. Learners are becoming more selective and would now prefer courses that are highly visual and interactive. This is perhaps one of the reasons why computer games are highly popular.
3. The Internet is becoming dominant among the other distance education media. The Internet could be the top of the line of educational technologies, especially in distance education. The technology requires high level of active participation by the learner, and practically all the resources of learning are within one’s fingertips.
4. There is a need for effective course management systems as Web services are growing. Just simply uploading course materials into the Web does not necessarily mean learning will easily occur. A lot of preparation, instructional design efforts, and multimedia production activities go into the formulation of a course that is delivered online. In fact, online learning exacts strict demands on the learner’s skills, time, motivation and self discipline. The learning facilitator has to prepare and schedule the resources that are needed in order for the learner to learn effectively and efficiently.
Academic Trends
1. Higher education is changing. Traditional campuses are being challenged on many fronts. For profit institutions are growing in number, and public and private institutions are beginning to merge. Education has truly become a commercial enterprise where the end-motive is profit rather than learning. Learning seems to have taken the back seat and has become a consequence rather than the end goal.
2. Phenomenal growth of knowledge and information requires a revisit of pedagogy. The main issue is, we have a much shorter time to learn a much more voluminous amount of information and new knowledge as a consequence of the information revolution and the knowledge society.
3. Education is becoming seamless between high schools, colleges, and further studies. More and more, the distinction between the levels of the educational ladder are becoming less and less distinct. In fact, there seems to be a very wide area of overlap from one education level to the next.
4. Institutions are becoming more learner-centered, non-linear, and self-directed. Educational institutions are becoming more concerned about heir students’ learning styles rather than their teachers’ teaching styles. Increasingly, teachers are becoming better facilitators of the learning process rather than mere dispensers of information.
5. Some advocate standardizing content through creating reusable learning objects. The perception is that well-prepared learning materials may be used across culture and learning situations. This may be correct for subjects that are not influenced by cultural situations such as mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry. Standard learning objects may be useful and practical when the subject taught is fundamental or basic.
6. There is a perceptible shift in organizational structure toward decentralization that is moving towards unbundling of efforts. There is a perceptible shift toward decentralizing instructional efforts, which may be demonstrated by the fact that teachers are pretty much independent when it comes to the design of instruction and learning activities. Centralized examinations, for example, are being less and less emphasized and individual evaluation of performance of learners seems to be highlighted.
7. There is a growing emphasis on academic accountability. The basic question is, who is responsible for learning, and who is responsible for providing a good learning environment? It is said that learning is the responsibility of the learner, while providing the resources to facilitate the learning process is the responsibility of the teacher. It is, however, the responsibility of the learning institution to provide the over-all environment for learning within which the teacher and the learner operates.
Student/Learner Trends
1. There is a crisis in the making. Higher education has been failing in the last 10 years to accommodate students. This could be a revisit to the world educational crisis in the 1960s. There is a continuous increase in the number of students, but there is no corresponding increase in the budgetary allocations for instruction. Clearly, the educational institutions are not able to provide the necessary learning environment that all those who want to learn require. There are not even enough classrooms on top of the fact that some teachers are ill-equipped to teach and students are not prepared for academic work.
2. Students are shopping for courses that meet their circumstances. The standard curricular program is probably on the way out. Learners are beginning to demand courses that they feel are needed in their individual circumstances. In other words, personalized or custom-made courses are becoming more popular. Learners are demanding specific content that they need in their specific work-related situations.
3. The profiles of learners are changing. More and more adult learners are coming into the picture. Retired individuals are demanding retooling courses for themselves because they want to continue being productive even in their years of retirement. In addition, more and more individuals are seeking second jobs and to be able to do so they are, on their own, seeking to retool themselves to satisfy the requirements of a different and perhaps even new work environment.
4. The participation rate of adults, females, and minority groups of learners is increasing worldwide. Where before these groups have had limited access to educational opportunities, today they now have better access to educational opportunities and there is a steep increase in the number of adults, females, and minority groups seeking admission into the educational system, formal or otherwise.
5. Concerns regarding retention rates continues to be important. Retention of students in schools is becoming a serious concern because more and more are leaving school in order to seek employment. This may largely be due to prevailing economic problems.
Faculty Trends
1. There is an increasing serious challenge to the traditional roles of the faculty. What is clear today is that there is a shift in the demands on faculty members. We now require our teachers to be able to design dynamic instructional environments, interactive instructional materials, and highly dynamic curricular programs. We expect our teachers to be able to write individualized learning instructional modules, be proficient in the use of ICTs for instruction, and skillful in the use of computers and the Internet in the delivery of instruction.
2. There is an increasing awareness of the need for faculty development, support and training. As a result of the demands on the faculty for additional and new skills, management of educational institutions are increasing becoming aware of the need to provide professional development programs for teachers.
3. There is an increasing use of non-traditional faculty, such as those from the community and business. Where before, professionals working outside of the schools were not normally involved in teaching, today, highly experienced professionals are increasingly being co-opted to teach specialized courses in universities. To a large extent, this has proven to be advantageous because the schools and students alike have benefited from the wealth of experience of professionals.
4. There are still pockets of serious faculty resistance being encountered. Not all educationists agree that distance education is a good alternative. There are still some who disagree and do not believe that distance education can equal conventional instruction. The fact remains, however, that there is an increasing number of education experts who have changed their perceptions about distance education as an alternative means of delivering quality educational services in the face of the inability of the conventional institutions to provide the education needed by the learners
Technology Trends
1. Technological fluency is becoming a graduation requirement. For one thing, distance education students must master the use of ICTs and the Internet given that they are taking courses online. In today’s educational environment, every learner has to be able to manipulate the technologies employed in the delivery of educational services if they want to learn. Education today is really technology driven.
2. There is a huge growth in Internet usage for education. In the Philippines, the rate of penetration of the Internet in the countryside is less than 10%. However, the number of Internet users is increasing rapidly. In the next five years, it is likely that Internet penetration in the country would reach the 15-20 percent level.
3. Technological devices are becoming more ubiquitous, but are changing rapidly. The rapid developments in the technological front is really dizzying. Practically every year computers are upgraded, ICT devices are upgraded or changed, and then new devices are coming into the market as frequently. The ubiquity of ICT devices has changed the face of instruction worldwide.
Some Lessons Learned
Less Funds for Higher Education
With economic uncertainties, there are less fund resources for higher education. There is a continuing increase in the number of students getting into schools but there is no corresponding increase in the allocation of funds. This is likely to continue and there is now a need to identify alternative ways of delivering quality instruction at reasonable costs. Furthermore, it has become necessary for educational institutions to generate new revenues to fund improvements in their academic programs.
Learning is Essential Part of Daily Life
Learning is a lifelong commitment. We all learn on a continuing basis, whether or not we are aware of it.
Learning Providers Must Respond Learner Needs
One of the important tricks of the educational enterprise today is that educational institutions must become aware and respond quickly to the needs of their students and teacher alike.
Need to Adapt to Changing Demands
Changing demands is probably a mainstay in the educational enterprise. There is a continuing change in the demands of teachers particularly in terms of increased benefits and decreasing workloads. There, too, is an increasing demand from students for better services, access to resources of learning, and better facilities and learning environments. If educational institutions are unable to adapt accordingly, this would be immediately translated into decreasing enrollment and perhaps even teacher unrest. Certainly, this would translate into poorer instructional services.
Governments Must Provide Learning Infrastructures
This refers to the fact that the infrastructures of learning are not as advanced as they ought to be in the Philippines, for example. Of the more than 100 state universities and colleges, one can say with certainty that at least 60% of these do not have enough facilities for instruction in the areas that they have academic programs in. Save for a few, these institutions do not have enough computer laboratories even if they are offering degree programs in computer science. Their physical facilities are dilapidated. More seriously, their faculty profiles would show that their teachers should not be teaching what they are teaching. In other words, they lack appropriate credentials.
Concluding Statement
Let us gear up to an exponentially increasing amount of new knowledge to learn.
References
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Dhanarajan, G. 2005. A Community of Practice Approach to Open and Distance Learning. Workshop lecture, 19th AAOU Conference, Jakarta, Indonesia, September 17, 2005.
Drucker, Peter F. 1994. Knowledge, work and society: the social transformation of this century. The Edwin L. Goldkin Lecture, Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/ifactory/ksgpress/www/ksg_news/transcripts/drucklec.html. 3/25/2005.
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