Autonomy and Interdependence

When I began to write about learner autonomy, the potential of distant learners to participate in the determination of their learning objectives, the implementation of their programs of study, and the evaluation of their learning, it was at a time when teaching at a distance was heavily dominated by the ideas of behavioral psychology. Since distant learners were beyond the immediated environment of the teacher, the main problem of distance education was considered to be how to optimally control them. Instructors were urged to identify their goals in very specific behavioral terms, to prescribe a regime of presentation, practice, and reward, and to test and measure achievement of all students according to the precise standards built into the objectives. The challenge for the educator was to produce a perfect set of objectives, techniques and testing devices, one that would fit every learner, in large numbers, at a distance so that no one would deviate, no one would fall between the cracks.

While there were, and remain, many useful design techniques in the behaviorist approach, a correction was called for that regarded the idiosyncracies and independence of learners as a valuable resource rather than a distracting nuisance. In place of a model in which passive subjects, the learners, were trained by irresistably elegant instructional tools, it was necessary to conceptualise distance education as a more open partnership of teachers and self-directing learners, in which individual learners decided, conducted, and controlled much of the learning process.

My 1972 presentation to the conference of International Council for Correspondence Education, (the predecessor of International Council for Distance Education) was called "Learner Autonomy: the Second Dimension of Independent Study." In that presentation I suggested that learners had different capacities for making decisions regarding their own learning. I suggested that designers of what we would now call distance education programs should take into account those abilities, and work with them. The ability of a learner to develop a personal learning plan, in some ways different from others, or the ability to find resources for study in one's own work or community environment, or the ability to decide for oneself when progress was satisfactory, should not be treated as extraneous and regrettable noise in a smooth running, instructor controlled system, but rather should be seen as powerful energy to be engaged by the instructional designers. Further, learner autonomy should be a goal of distance education. Wehould consider it good for learners to be self-directing and try to devise ways of encouraging and supporting them. That does not mean that all learners are self directing, but since each has an ability and a potential to be self-directing, the educational program should attempt to identify and build on their abilities. There is no doubt that it is even more difficult to devise a program that supports learners' self-direction than it is to produce one that controls.

In the years since I wrote about learner autonomy we have experienced the telecommunications revolution in distance education as well as the Open University movement. Because of these technical and also organizational inventions, distance learning is not , or need not be always the individual, lonely activity it used to be. The Open Universities have invented study centres; they have built networks of tutor-counsellors and learner self-help groups, which are organizational structures that provide for peer group activities. A similar effect is obtained in North America by the development of audio, audio-graphic, computer and video conferencing. These technologies give us the ability to link instructors with groups of learners as well as with individuals, and to link individual learners into virtual groups. It is still a very important challenge to distance educators to engage with individual students in ways that build on and develop the learner's personal learning autonomy.

A new and equally exciting issue is how to develop and engage the interdependence of individuals in distant groups, how to develop the interdependence of groups within a total system, and how to develop the autonomy of the distant group. The problems concern curriculum, instruction and interpersonal dynamics. (I assume that technologies work!). In a typical U.S. course that uses teleconferencing technologies to link, let us say six sites, the curriculum problem is how to bring the local interests and needs as well as the local knowledge that lies at each site into the content to be taught. The instructional problem is how to involve each distant site in determining objectives and implementing them. I have not yet heard any better strategy than to devise local group projects. In teaching my courses I depend heavily on having each local group decide on a topic or task for presentation to the larger group, i.e. the virtual "class".

In teaching research for example, I have each group decide on a research questi to develop locally and present to the "class". In teaching design I have each group design a module that they "teach" to the rest of the "class." Simple though this sounds, a great deal of care must go into managing the process, as distant groups struggle, sometimes flounder, and eventually become organized to accomplish their goals. Generally I have had happy results with this strategy. People acquire insights into the distilled wisdom of the literature from the experience of working on their tasks, and they become attached to each other as a group as a result of the effort of the mutual struggle. What is interesting though is that the predictors of which groups will be more successful seem to have little to do with what I have done as an instructional designer. The likelihood of a local site becoming a successful learning group is primarily a result of the personalities, the learner autonomy of the members of the group and the interpersonal dynamics within the local group.

Given identical assignments, some groups respond with an extraordinarily high degree of competence, commitment, energy, and creativity while others do not. The former give time far in excess of what should be expected, are task oriented, productive and continue to communicate informally by e-mail and in other ways, seeming to have fun working together. Surely there can be no better indication that a virtual class has succeeded than the students do not want to dissolve it when the course ends. I have a class of nine sites that has petitioned to keep its computer bulletin board active during the summer break because the members wish to continue their interdependent, peer instruction informally during the vacation period. As an instructor it would be nice to claim this creative environment is part of the plan, but what needs to be explained is why the local environment is much more positive in some sites than in others of the same "class".

To a large extent it seems to depend on the personalities of the group mbers, and in particular the degree of personal autonomy of the individuals. In the successful groups there seems to be a high degree of interdependence of relatively autonomous individuals. In many groups the interdependent members cluster around an informal leader. These leaders seem to act as local chairpersons, guiding discussion and decision making, in an environment characterised by a high degree of participation, division of labor and collaboration. Sometimes there are no particular leaders, but members of groups devise ways to share leadership responsibilities. Being relatively autonomous learners, the members of the successful group are likely to have sufficient understanding of the instructional process to be good collaborators with the distant instructor. Where problems occur it seems that someone wants a leadership role and is rejected, or two or more people compete for leadership, or the level of autonomy of all or most of the group members is so low that no one is able to lead the decision maki process. If there are individuals who have difficulty in collaborating with others, or instead of accepting informal local leadership look for control from the distant instructor, the situation might become volatile.

The interdependence of the instructor's role and that of the learners is nowhere more evident than in the working of local study groups. The distant instructor can do everything possible to design and encourage an environment that allows for productive activities locally, but in the end it will be the responsibility of students to make the environment for themselves work. Much research is needed to find out more about the characteristics of successful distant learning groups, so that eventually we will be able to train both instructors and students in the knowledge and skills needed to make such groups successful.

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At the end of every "virtual class" we experience the bitter sweet emotion of separation from people we have communicated with very intensely, perhaps emotionally, for many weeks. This is perhaps suprising to those who think that distance education is impersonal, when in fact the very opposite is often true. At the end of a recent course one of the participants expressed his thoughts, on the Bulletin Board, in the form of a poem. I hope you will agree that it is worth sharing with a wider audience than his "classmates".