Embracing distance education in a blended learning model: challenges and prospects

Abstract

Distance education reaches out to non-traditional students in geographically dispersed locations, who are unable to attend face-to-face classes. Contact institutions have been quick to realise the many advantages of distance (online) learning, such as easy access to learning materials, interactive activities, assessment and communication tools. However, the path to anything approaching dual-mode provision has not been without obstacles. In South Africa in the early 2000s, the Council on Higher Education reinforced the mandate of distance education universities and decreed that contact institutions should not encroach on this territory. Subsequently, various frameworks and guidelines emerged which can inform current consideration of dual-mode provision. This practitioner report presents two case studies (University of Pretoria, South Africa; and University of Oxford, United Kingdom) which explore the implications for contact institutions in expanding their provision to include distance education.

Keywords:

• Technology-enhanced learning
• online learning
• distance education

Notes

1. Note the phrase ‘expanding their provision’ – the institutions concerned are not necessarily considering moving to become dual-mode providers.

2. The elements represented in these three levels are not intended to be exhaustive or a unique representation – they simply convey the idea of extending the use of an online platform in various ways. The levels are also not intended to imply that more is better – each level may be suitable and desirable in its own right, for different learning contexts.

3. Note that these figures do not include those courses offered by the – primarily paper-based – Distance Education Unit at the University of Pretoria.

4. Those studies did not consider quality issues pertaining to cost, student access to study programmes, retention or success rates.

5. That department later changed its name to the Department for Education Innovation. For ease of reference it is referred to hereafter by the more generic name ‘TEL unit’.

6. So-called next generation digital learning environments (NGDLEs) offer the potential to capture these possibilities in the form of a slimmed-down LMS as part of a flexible learning ecosystem (Brown, Dehoney, & Millichap, 2015).

7. This was a constraint of the particular institutional LMS in use, and would not necessarily be a problem in other LMS platforms.

8. Student feedback showed that the lecture-style video is at least preferable to a talking head: ‘Each week included video lectures, delivered to an unseen/unheard class (maybe; it might have just been production crew or even an empty room, but it was convincing and served the purpose) rather than read-to-camera, a technique more mooc (sic) teams should consider’ (Carlson, 2017, p. 5).