Is teaching like flying?
A total systems view of distance education

There are beliefs about learning and teaching that are shared by all distance educators. They include the premise that learning and teaching can occur in different places and at different times, and that teachers and learners can communicate effectively through electronic and print media. There is general agreement also that distance education is the only cost-effective way of distributing scarce expertise, and making it available on demand. Equality of access to good teaching resources is especially appealing to educators of children and university students. The ability of distance education to deliver instruction on demand is especially important for business and industry, which have to find ways of providing training and retraining round the year and on the job, in response to ever-changing market conditions. While there might be agreement about these benefits of distance education, there are two distinctly different perceptions about how resources should be organized to bring about these benefits. One ofhese views is very common, yet the future success of the field depends on a wider acceptance of the other.

The two perceptions concern how distance education courses should be designed and taught, which means they are, in part at least, differences regarding the role of the teacher. These different ideas about what a teacher can and cannot do affect views of how the educational institution should be organized and administered. While many educators now accept that there are benefits to be enjoyed from employing distance education techniques, most have not fully recognized how much change in the educational or training organization is necessary in order to enjoy those benefits.

The most widespread and popular perception is that the benefits can be obtained with little change in the ways that education is organized. In this view, it is the mere act of linking learners with teachers through a medium that results in effective teaching and learning. All that is needed is for schools and universities and training departments to buy new communications hardware. Then schoolteachers, university professors or corporate trainers can be transformed into distance teachers by moving them from a classroom to a studio, or by moving the cameras and microphones into their classrooms. Their classroom teaching can be transmitted to learners in other classrooms. In this view, once the educational or training organization has established a communications channel there is little more to be done except to let teachers get on with practicing their craft as they have always done. The teacher decides what to teach and prepares a lesson, behaves in a way similar to the conventional classroom, addressing the udents through a camera, telephone or computer, or one of various combinations of these. It is only the location of the students that is significantly different from conventional education. Many teachers consider the conventional classroom to be an ideal teaching-learning environment and they seek to reproduce it for their distant learners. It is natural for educators and administrators to hold this view of distance education, as they try to find ways to use communications media to extend teaching as they know it.

This view of distance education is the one that influences almost every article published in this journal, and other journals in the United States. However it is a very immature view and one that distance education must outgrow. It reflects the field in its infancy and has its parallel in the evolution of many other innovations. It is said that the first movie makers placed cameras in the pit of a theatre and filmed stage plays, until they perceived that they were allowing the structures of the older art form to limit their use of their new technology. The new technology required that they invent new ways of organizing their work, which then led to the development of a new art form and a new industry. Perhaps a better analogy for the potential of distance education is found in the airline industry. It is well within living memory that air passengers would be met by a pilot and one or two assistants on a grass strip runway, pay for their tickets, be walked with their bags to the airplane, and flown to their dtination. The industry used low technology, and was organized in ways not too different from the organization of the horse-driven stage line. The organization of today's airline depends on a sophisticated, computer generated information flow, a high degree of specialization of labor and capital. No individual, not even the pilot, is able to move the passenger without the contributions of thousands of other workers. The result of this organization is the provision of a high quality service at lower cost per passenger, with vastly more travelers than could have been imagined even thirty years ago.

When we compare the airline with the school or university (or even the training department of the airline itself, we arrive at the heart of our problem in distance education. It is not simply new hardware that makes the airline efficient and effective. Nor will hardware alone lead to good distance education. The future of distance education depends, as does the success of the modern airline, on new forms of organization, that are based on the application of principles of systems management. The crippling weakness in American distance education and training is failure to apply systems management principles. The more mature perspective of distance education, the second perspective, the perspective that must be acquired if distance education is to make its full contribution to solving the nation's educational and training problems, is distance education as a total system.

Mature distance education does not consist of adding new technology to old ways of organizing teaching and learning. It consists of organizing, or reorganizing, educational resources, into a total delivery system. At the present time we do not have any total distance education system in the United States. Some other countries do, although it is very important to recognize that their systems are dated, having been established to take advantage of the technologies of the 1970's. There should be no question of simply copying the systems of other countries, but of emulating their experiences in systematic program design and delivery.

Giving my vice-presidential report at the World Conference of the International Council for Distance Education in November 1992 I used the analogy of transportation to compare the organization of distance education in the United States with that of some of the other countries present. This is what I said:

"American distance education remains a highly heterogeneous business. Stated differently, the situation remains chaotic and confused. There is no national policy, nor anything approaching a consensus among educators of the value, the methodology, or even the concept of distance education. There is no national system nor any system of any kind. There is instead a plethora of activities on the part of thousands of organizations, most of which are attached to a single medium or limited range of media, from simple correspondence produced by desk-top publishing to networks of personal and mainframe computers, satellite, microwave, fiber-optic and video-disc; from courses written and taught by individuals with virtually no support to multi-million dollar integrated text/television/audio/computer conference/classroom projects. The American idea of "distance learning" remains a very limited one. It is usually seen as the addition of high technology communications media in otherwise conventionally organized and taughclasses. Because there is still a "craft" view of teaching, most distance education programs suffer from amateurishness and are under-resourced. Few educators, administrators or policy makers, have yet come to terms with the consequences for program design, for teaching, and for redistribution of educational resources if these media are to be used to anywhere near their maximum effectiveness.

If the model of distance education in countries with Open Universities could be compared to a national railway or airline system, with a politically approved policy about priorities and objectives guiding a planned and integrated use of resources, the U.S. model would be more comparable to a road traffic system, with innumerable drivers using vehicles of all shapes and sizes and quality and efficiency, all deciding on their own travel plans, travelling in their own different directions, sometimes breaking down, and occasionally colliding with each other."

A Total Systems Perspective

What does a total system look like?

A total system has many parts; they are integrated, they interact with each other. A distance education system should be thought of as a network of knowledge sources, processors, managers, communication media, and learners. A total system generates and derives knowledge from schools, universities, corporations, public and private organizations and individuals; it provides for the planning of instructional programs, and produces and delivers them through a variety of communications media. The work of central located course designers and media experts is integrated with activities in learner groups and the activities of individual learners who are supported by experts in inter-personal interaction and learning, located in schools, colleges, workplaces, homes and elsewhere. While it is reasonable to describe and analyze each of these parts of the system, it is essential to recognize that all are integral parts of a whole. In other words, there is the same kind of division of labor, specialization, use of comput communications, as is characteristic of the airline. No person tries to do everything needed to bring about learning. No single medium is used. Instruction is no longer an individual's work, but the work of teams of specialists,-- media specialists, knowledge specialists, instructional design specialists, and learning specialists. Programs have to be prepared for distribution over large areas to large numbers of learners; this requires negotiation and agreements among several or many existing providers; large budgets are needed; long periods of design time are needed. Uniform, high quality is guaranteed, and with large numbers of users, average costs are lower than in conventional education, or in the current "horse and buggy" stage of distance education.

To illustrate an imaginary example from higher education.

Let's begin with any major university. Most four-year universities have the media and human resources needed to produce worldclass distance education programs. They have people experienced in writing and publishing study guides (usually in correspondence departments); they have television and audio recording facilities, and teleconference, audio, audiographic, video and computer networks. The university also has content experts as well as specialists in instructional design, learning and counseling.

The process in an American university would resemble the procedures followed by the total systems in other countries. These procedures are outlined in the following, imagined, example:

The University Distance Education Center calls for proposals from its faculties, and after reviewing these, it awards $3 million to its humanities faculty to produce a course, in art history. It is proposed to provide instruction that is intended to occupy the undergraduate student for 450 hours of work. The award provides for relief of three professors from teaching for two years, payment of consultants from two American and two foreign museums, salaries for two instructional designers, for television and audio producers, computer programmers, editors, secretarial and clerical staff. A course team chair is appointed to oversee the process of producing the course over a two-year period. One of this person's important responsibilities is to select state and regional partner institutions, and locally resident tutors. Institutions will provide facilities for, and tutors will give assistance to, learners in their localities once the course has been produced. Credit exchange arrangements are entered into, that inude agreement on the part of our university to accept courses from collaborating institutions in exchange for their supporting the art education course we propose to teach nation-wide.

The design process is long and extremely detailed, with frequent meetings of the course team and daily on-line sessions, during which the details of the content to be taught and the procedures of providing it are argued and agreed.

When the course is ready, and the University's marketing personnel have publicized it, about 4000 students register from throughout the United States, with several hundred in overseas cities. They pay a tuition fee of $500 for the equivalent of 12 credit hours of conventional instruction. (Melody I would like you to explore this with me to see I got it right) Each student is provided information by mail about a tutor who is located within local phone and travelling distance, and the location of a study center and also how to access information about the course on personal computer, on-line via modem. Each center is located within a local school, college or public library, where arrangements have been made for voluntary group meetings of the tutor's group of advisees. Tutors and students receive information about each other, as well as the study center, a schedule of activities, and a study guide. The study guide provides details regarding meetings at study centers; gives a calendar of study; gives direction garding readings; using audio and video tapes and computer discs and accessing on line bulletin boards and electronic mail. The course team has produced the study guide; an original text; eight new films of professional quality, filmed in museums throughout the country and overseas; audio-recorded interviews with the world's expert art historians, recorded on audiotapes. All these and more are distributed according to a planned schedule to students' homes, by mail, or in some cases delivered electronically by satellite and cable to work-stations at places of employment. (It is important that the communications channels that are used are ones that are available to most of the student body, which usually means selecting relatively simple media.)

This is roughly how the system appears from a student's perspective:

The student who reads of the course is excited at the opportunity of obtaining a substantial part of the college credit requirement from a prestigious university, working mainly at home, in spare time. The advance information explains that agreements have been reached with most major universities for credit transfer. The attractive printed materials that accompany the registration documents give promise that this will be a very well produced course that will give access to the world's greatest authorities, yet also give access to a local tutor and tutorial group where personal assistance and personal exchanges of ideas should occur. After registering and receiving a preliminary package of materials, other packages arrive each two months for forty-eight weeks. Each package contains a study guide, a video and audio tape a computer disc, a packet of readings and photographs, and a written assignment to be answered and returned to the university by mail or by electronic mail. Video, text, computer and every otheitem in the package is tightly integrated with every other; there is emphasis on learner activities, numerous exercises and projects. For example the computer assignment may be undertaken alone or in conjunction with other students at the local study center or by e-mail. The video is a lavishly produced program shot in museums in several countries as well as in universities around the country where great art historians address the students of this course. The audio tape carries a discussion between two of the university's own faculty and a panel of museum directors, and conveys the professors' enthusiasm for research in this field as well as a sense of relating to the students who have joined this course. The professors' names also appear in the book of readings that are part of the course materials; their ideas are also summarized and questions are asked about them in the study guide. The study guide directs the students' attention to what is to be learned, explains relationships between ideas in text videond audio. It points to exercises to be done on the computer, and the assignment to be mailed and uploaded. With the study guide is a list of study center locations and times and dates for interactive tutorial sessions.

Attending at a study center the student finds a group meeting and is welcomed by the Study Center Adviser, as well as an Art History tutor. It turns out this person is also the one who received and graded and commented on the student's written assignment. A satellite delivered videoconference begins, in which there is a presentation on the topic of the current module of the course, given by a professor who is recognizable from both the videotape and the text. The talk is being transmitted to 200 sites across the country and lasts only 20 minutes. Then each local group is turned over to the local tutor who has a list of questions based on the professor's talk. The group is guided by the tutor in a discussion of these questions and prepares a response to one of them. After half an hour the teleconference is resumed and a facilitator in the studio, sitting beside the professor skillfully extracts reports from various sites, that are transmitted by audio conference microphones. Speakers are encouraged to comparend contrast their answers and from time to time the professor is called on to comment.

When the student returns home she begins work on the assignment given in the study guide, which requires a communication with four other students in the group she met that day. They must decide on a paper that they will prepare online with their personal computers, which will be uploaded for their instructor's comments. In preparation for the next module there is a chapter of text to read and a written exercise to return to the instructor. The next module begins with a videotape, a reading, and an audio tape with another teleconference scheduled for two weeks time. Knowing she has a hospital appointment that day, the student calls the local study center and speaks to the Adviser who authorizes her absence and discusses how she can receive a videotape of the teleconference.

 This course is offered to 4000 students and has a planned life before revision of 5 years. Total tuition income is therefore 20,000 times the tuition fee, or, in this imagined model, $10 million. After allowing for the variable costs of tutor payments, telecommunications and administration, substantial money remains for investment in further courses and for introducing newer technologies, especially CDRAM, video disc, and on line date base applications. Other income is possible. It is in the interests of the providing university to enter arrangements with more universities, including foreign universities, so that there is increasing exchange of courses and students. This has the effect not only of increasing the cost effectiveness of each course, but releases faculty to do more work on their areas of research. Since the cost of producing more copies of teaching materials is a small proportion of the total cost, any addition of students will lead to lowering of average costs, even allowing for the higher expeitures on local tutoring, advising and administration.

In attempting to describe what is very complex, it is inevitable that I have oversimplified and perhaps given some wrong impressions as a result. Perhaps more writing, or discussion on DEOS or even in person discussions are needed to further explore the idea of the Total System. Perhaps some readers will feel that what I have described is very obvious; in particular it does not deal with any technology that we are not using already. Others might feel it describes a process that is disturbing in being mechanical or inhuman process. It should not be inhuman, indeed it must not be so. The point of the system is to use available technology, and to organize it according to principles of specialization and division of labor and rationalization of resources, so that the technology will do the work that can be done more efficiently by technology, and releases people to be creative and to provide intense human interaction and support where such human contact is most rewarding and most valuable.

A total system can be developed by almost any university, school district or corporation, or by a consortium of such institutions. The reward will be the provision of higher quality instruction to larger numbers of consumers at lower average costs than before, and national and international leadership in the chosen areas of specialization. The alternative to "thinking big" is pettiness; it means overworked staff, underachievement of learners, frustration, and the delusion or the dishonesty that says that distance education of this kind is the best we are capable of. It is an acceptance of failure to maximize the power of communications media and the accumulated knowledge regarding distance learning. The challenge for American distance education is not to produce more technologybecause the communications industry will take care of that; it is not even to develop techniques of teaching through technology and to train educators in these techniques... though we are very foolish to allow the communications indust to take care of that; the challenge is to change our view of distance education, to learn to think big, to change the culture of our institutions regarding the role of the teacher, to learn to give up some fields and to specialize in others; to learn to cooperate with other institutions; in short, to learn to make education look more like NASA or United Airlines; to turn the development and provision of education into a total system.