Regulators, providers and vendors:
the fingers in the dyke

The tradition of the "amateurs and tough guys" so memorably documented by Von Pittman in his description of the sleazy side of the correspondence course industry (Von Pittman 1992) lives on in the electronic age. It is the responsibility of officials in state Departments of Higher Education to monitor higher education offerings and to protect consumers against fraudulent and low quality providers of distance education programs. There seem to be at least two types of problems.

One is presented by the predatory for-profit organization that seeks to exploit a demand that is more common than many educators would like to admit, which is for credentials and certification that can be bought in the shortest time and with the least effort. Of course consumers need help in recognizing such institutions, but their numbers are relatively small, and state regulators are able to control them. What might be a more difficult problem is whether and how to regulate the growth that can be expected in offerings by reputable instutions that want to use electronic media to transmit their programs across state borders. If a professor at a nationally recognised, fully accredited, university who offers a course within the state by means of audio, audio-graphic, computer or video conference, receives a request from a student in an adjacent state to join the conference, should the professor refuse, or should the professor submit a formal application to the regulators of that state to receive permission to teach? What if there is one student in each of five or ten, or fifty states? And what if the professor's colleagues in the department are also offering courses to distant locations. Are there to be multiple sets of applications?

It is hard to see how regulators can hope to control the quality of such offerings, or influence the individual who want to purchase them since the program is received through telephone, modem and personal computer by the student at home. All the evidence is that with the accelerating development of fiber optic a ISDN the extent and frequency of in-home interactive information delivery services will increase to a degree that will confound any attempts at control.

And yet what guarantee of quality can be given? What standards and evaluation criteria are to be applied, and who is to pass judgement? Few faculty have the training to design and develop good distance education, and few have the time or resources to do so, so there is no doubt that many programs, even from reputable institutions will be amateurish, until new structures for systematically designing and delivering programs on a large scale replace the craft forms of teaching we now have.

Two articles in this journal that have addressed these issues in considerable depth are Olcott's "Policy issues in statewide delivery of university programs by telecommunications" (Olcott 1992) and Reilly and Gulliver's "Interstate authorization of distance higher education via telecommunications: the developing national consensus in policy and practice (Reilly and Gulliver 1992). Olcott addresses the need for traditional universities to develop new course review and approval mechanisms that are suitable for controlling the quality of telecommunications based distance education programs. While the focus of his article is mainly on the issues surrounding the approval of external degrees by telecommunications, rather than specific courses as I have introduced the problem above, the conclusion is one I would agree with, namely, that the first and primary review of quality should lie with the university faculty; for the faculty to do this work, administration must provide adequate structures and procedures to alw for the systematic review of distance education course proposals.

Olcott goes on to advocate the idea of integrating the offerings of several institutions into a total system, introducing the idea of "lead institutions". He states "The success of this approach is based on one apparantly simple and yet complex premise: system institutions must function as a system rather than as a group of autonomous entities". The lead institution in such a total system has responsibility for program quality and academic standards in the limited area that the particular institution specialises in. (Olcott 1992: 22-3)

Reilly and Gulliver began their discussion with reference to project ALLTELL, the Project on Assessing Long Distance Learning via Telecommunications, that recommended, in 1985, that states and accrediting bodies should coordinate reviews of distance education by telecommunications. The ALLTELL strategy places primary responsibility for ensuring the quality of a course on the home state's authorizing agency. Th principle of reciprocity has not been widely effected so far, but Reilly and Gulliver report progress as a result of the 1990 symposium "Emerging critical issues in distance higher education"; (see report in AJDE......). "The meeting resulted in a number of recommendations ranging from ensuring that quality in all education be measured on outcomes rather than inputs, to developing a set of principles of good practice for distance education." (Reilly and Gulliver p13).

It appears that the movement toward establishing reciprocity of standards and towards establishing a set of principles of good practice is making progress. In September 1992 the states of Connecticut, Kentucky, Illinois, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and Virginia agreed on a common form of information that is to be required for approving telecommunicated instruction at degree level in all the states. A draft statement of Principles of Good Practice for Distance Higher Education has been prepared by a Steering Group convened by the University of New York. The draft Principles of Good Practice contains criteria that could be used to guide discussion and planning a distance education program, or its evaluation. The principles of good practice are organized under the heads: Mission statement, Personnel, Learning Outcomes, Learning experiences, Assessment of student learning, Student services, Program administration, and Program evaluation.