Where did distance education go wrong?

Abstract

Distance education (DE) practices around the world use a wide range of audio‐visual technologies to overcome the lack of direct contact between teachers and students. These are not universally adopted by DE teachers, however, nor even encouraged by their institutions. This article discusses the organisational attitudes that can lead to outdated methods being maintained and successful ones abandoned, and it suggests that, just as educational television and programmed learning were supplanted in previous decades, so the World Wide Web could be abandoned as a viable education medium in the foreseeable future and replaced by more widely available media such as the cell phone. The article contrasts the learner‐centred philosophies underlying current DE approaches with the teacher‐centred philosophies of a generation ago. If these two philosophies are not united in a sensible middle ground, the article suggests, history may come to regard today’s DE as a Dark Age less enlightened than when Genghis Khan sent his arrow riders to deliver the mail in person across the Mongolian steppes, and when Lenin dispatched educational media experts to deliver DE materials by hand across the post‐revolutionary Soviet Union. The main losers in this scenario, the article concludes, will be the students of the developing world.

Keywords:

• appropriate technologies
• developing countries
• e‐learning
• open and distance learning
• open courseware

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the reviewers of this article for their constructive suggestions in helping him to maintain a balance between future‐gazing and present reality. He is also grateful to the International Development Research Centre (IDRC: http://www.idrc.ca) and to its PANdora project (http://www.pandora-asia.org) for enabling him to visit DE settings in 20 Asia‐Pacific nations (2005–2007), where he received an education that has shaken his ‘Western’ mentality to its core.