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Accreditation, particularly at the regional
level, has thus far labored (through existing consortium arrangements) to
establish suitable criteria for institutional best practices and resources that
would offer public assurance of the institutional viability, legitimacy, and
fiscal probity of distance learning programs.
Although these issues are important, the major focus of public concern
with distance learning is less on these institutional resource questions than on
the academic quality and educational effectiveness of such programs as compared
to their conventional counterparts. This
is especially true in core liberal arts education: accreditation of new and
existing programs thus far has not been designed to address these
program-related questions in any detail. In
particular, while there is substantial evidence that technical and professional
subjects can be addressed adequately in an asynchronous, distance format,
scholars, government officials, and the general public have expressed doubt that
these claims of equivalence will automatically or unproblematically carry over
to those liberal arts and general education courses routinely required for any
accredited undergraduate degree program. Such
courses are thought to depend more upon direct, personal interaction among
teachers and students in the development of intellectual capacities and core
competencies than upon a simple mastery of course content.
Distance learning employing the latest available
technology has been a factor in higher education since the mail-distributed
correspondence course of the early 19th century.
In the 1870s, the University of London inaugurated the first
university-level program in general (liberal) education via telegraph and
diplomatic pouch for career civil servants throughout the British Empire.
The program aspired to offer a broad, classical "Oxbridge"
style education via readings, correspondence, and examination to a
geographically and ethnically diverse population whose liberal education was
deemed vital to the maintenance of the rule of law and an orderly civil society.
By some assessment measures, this initial experiment in asynchronous,
distance liberal education was a success: at the behest of his father (an Indian
merchant with an official civil service post), Mohandas K. Gandhi completed the
civil service and pre-law distance-learning courses of study with sufficient
distinction to permit his travel to London in order to enroll in the
University's law school in 1888.
What has changed in the interim is not the basic
concept or mission of broad public access to liberal education but the
tremendous increase in access and vastly enhanced interactivity that
contemporary technologies afford. As
CEO Earl Stafford of UNITECH (an information technology and distance learning
company) writes, where it once "took weeks for students to get access to
valuable feedback from instructors in distant places, enhanced technology now
delivers affordable, interactive educational opportunities instantaneously, on
demand, to a variety of underserved populations."
The challenge for contemporary distance learning
programs and institutions that aspire to offer something in addition to
technical or vocational certification is to provide a credible, online
undergraduate degree experience, complete with the core of general (liberal)
education requirements that define the broadly educated, intellectually
proficient undergraduate (regardless of the choice of major).
By convention, however, authentic liberal education demands of students
-- in addition to the mere assimilation of information -- both critical thinking
and the reflective habits of mind usually thought to develop gradually, through
peer discussion, personal faculty mentorship, and by wrestling with difficult
texts and profound ideas within the context of a living, "real time"
community of inquiry. Presumably,
this community cannot be easily simulated in e-mail exchanges, chat rooms, by
viewing videotaped lectures, reading lecture notes posted to the Internet, or
through other interactive technologies.
But it is by no means clear that this convention
or received opinion tells the entire story.
As Dr. Peter Ewell has observed, the one thing we do know, through
both extensive research and practitioner wisdom, is that what works well for one
learner does not necessarily work as well for another.
Thus, proponents of the individual and societal value of liberal
education ought to ask: what might work best to provide access to such education
for individuals who simply do not have the resources or the freedom to schedule
the fixed "seat time" that the conventional perspective on liberal
education seems to require, e.g., working parents, single parents, the disabled,
and those with unusually demanding or unpredictable work schedules?
Significantly, the higher education record is replete with examples of
students who actually gain more of the vital knowledge, intellectual and
moral competencies, and lifelong learning habits that comprise a liberal
education when it is made available to them in an alternative
"virtual" format.
The traditional classroom setting often relegates
otherwise bright and able students to the role of passive spectators rather than
active, engaged learners. Others
may be excluded from the conventional classroom setting altogether by
circumstances beyond their power to alter.
Online versions of the same course, however, dramatically change the
terms of participation. Not only
does distance learning enable such students to function as the active and
engaged learners they desire to be, their course work and their comparative
assessment of these alternative educational experiences often reveal that many
of these students performed better and learned more in the distance learning
setting than in a conventional classroom. There
is, thus, ample evidence that we should be prepared to alter our expectations
about the circumstantial constraints on liberal learning in light of experience,
even as we seek to extend a quality version of liberal education to such
non-traditional students.
Asynchronous, distance learning courses may, in
some cases, compensate for other, more common impediments to learning.
As every professor can attest, many students come to regularly scheduled
classes unprepared (and often sleep-deprived).
If so, the class session is almost certain to be a waste of time.
In an online course, by contrast, a student cannot get by without a
sufficient amount of preparation but has the luxury of not having to proceed
until fully attentive and prepared. Students
who are uncertain as to whether they have adequately prepared for an online
course can simply pause the course and review the homework again, thereby
getting the maximum benefit from the online class session.
For effective online liberal education to occur, it is also necessary to
orient faculty, accustomed to lecturing in "real time," to how they
might prompt genuine dialogue in an asynchronous environment (which the
University of Maryland University College is currently doing) and fully utilize
"groupware" to establish small, focused study groups despite the
"lag time" and the random login and logoff of learners.
Professors can and must give many more writing assignments and be willing
to offer more extensive feedback and evaluation of student writing than they are
willing or able to administer in a conventional course.
As a result, students and professors alike often report more intensive
interaction and instructional feedback in the asynchronous, virtual setting than
in the traditional classroom one. Finally,
the posing of questions that stimulate "problem-based learning" and
foster team exploration is extremely well suited to the distance learning
environment.
In principle, all students stand to benefit from
the wider availability of distance learning programs, and such programs may, in
some cases, provide an even more authentic liberal learning experience than
conventional, classroom-based courses. The
key issue for the providers is to settle upon some broad, common, fair, and
uniform standards of quality assurance to be upheld through accreditation.
Distance learning thus promises to transform
dramatically the landscape of American higher education.
Innovations in technology have helped increase access to undergraduate
degree programs, especially for individuals normally unable to participate in
these programs due to scheduling, travel, financial, or health restrictions.
But distance technology is in its infancy.
Although anticipation is high about the potential reach and benefit of
undergraduate distance education, there is an undercurrent of concern with the
quality that these programs are actually providing and with how course and
program quality can best be assessed in this new context.
These concerns center on the imbalance between program development and
efforts to standardize program quality. Despite
over 400 studies purporting to demonstrate the functional equivalent of courses
in conventional and asynchronous format, groups such as the American Association
of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) continue to deny the reliability of
data indicating whether distance learning programs provide an effective,
high-quality alternative to conventional courses and programs.
While in general education vast resources are being committed to the
development of educational programs that can take full advantage of this new,
but still evolving, technology, relatively little effort is being spent by the
accreditation community towards the development of quality assurance procedures
for liberal arts and general education programs.
In response to these concerns, regional
accreditors have responded promptly to monitoring the institutional
infrastructure of distance learning programs.
They have begun establishing agreement on best practices pertaining to
institutional accreditation in an effort to assure institutional authenticity
and integrity, fiscal probity and reliability, and the adequacy of institutional
resources for free-standing institutional programs of "cyber
universities." Western
Governors University (WGU) has just completed a rigorous accreditation review
conducted by the Inter-Regional Accreditation Committee (IRAC), an ad hoc consortium
of the three regional accreditors within whose regions WGU currently offers
associate's degrees and articulation credit.
In the spring of 1999, the largest of the regional accreditors, the North
Central Association (NCA), made national headlines by accrediting a completely
virtual, online university offering business communication and other
professional degree programs. NCA's
Executive Director, Steve Crow, commented that the accreditation of distance
learning programs raises issues that are, in the main, indistinguishable from
those customarily encountered in the accreditation of conventional institutions. At a recent meeting of regional and national accrediting
agencies convened by the American Academy for Liberal Education, Charles Cook of
the New England Association reported that a task force on distance learning
within the Council of Regional Accreditors has initiated the process of taking
up the common institutional and resource questions that the accreditation of
virtual universities poses. While
this Council is attempting to confront questions that require immediate
attention, its focus is necessarily broad and does not directly address the
issues of quality and effectiveness of liberal arts courses and programs that
are currently being made available online.
All participants in the dialogue agree that
significant issues of educational effectiveness remain unaddressed, and this
silence provides fuel for controversy. Shortly
after North Central's decision to accredit Jones International University, for
example, the accreditation committee chairman of the American Association of
University Professors (AAUP) denounced NCA's decision, characterizing it as an
attempt to "define any kind of institution as a higher-education
institution." Months later,
the U.S. Department of Education's National Advisory Committee on Institutional
Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) provoked further controversy by questioning
whether a recognized accreditor's experience evaluating conventional academic
programs automatically justifies its authority to accredit distance learning
programs. Most recently in her
newly-released monograph, "Core Academic Values, Quality, and Regional
Accreditation: The Challenge of Distance Learning," Judith Eaton, President
of CHEA, listed six challenges to six core values of higher education posed by
distance learning, among which she cited "general education" as the
area posing perhaps the most important but also the most intractable and, thus
far, least addressed of the difficulties posed for quality assurance and
accreditation.
In his keynote address to the American Academy
meeting of accreditors just mentioned, Assistant Secretary of Education Lee
Fritschler cited the challenge of "Cyber U." to "Site-Based
U." in the delivery of core liberal education courses as the single-most
outstanding challenge facing the accreditation community in this decade and
urged this new body to add this challenge to its current agenda on the
assessment of educational effectiveness within conventional, site-based
institutions. According to
Fritschler, when asked about course and program quality, institutions offering
distance learning programs routinely and confidently assert, "Our
accreditor is handling that," implying that quality assurance questions are
completely under control. The wider public (including the accreditors themselves)
continue to express concern that all is not entirely well, that they do not yet
have the conceptual tools in place to address such questions, and even that the
proposal to put assessment criteria at the head of the accreditation agenda for
distance learning programs might establish an unfair "double standard"
(since assessment of educational effectiveness at the conventional, site-based
institutions does not always play a determining role in their accreditation).
Approaches to distance learning derived from
conventional institutional accreditation seem to beg an important question.
While a certain number of new "cyber universities" (e.g., the
new Open University operation headquartered in Delaware and Kentucky
Commonwealth Virtual University) make their appearance each year, the majority
of new distance learning programs are not being developed or offered as new,
freestanding organizations requiring full institutional review.
Rather, the majority of such programs are offered as expanded programs
within institutions already fully accredited by their appropriate regional
agency. The kinds of questions
raised repeatedly by a skeptical professoriate, congressional critics, and
others concerned with these new developments in higher education are thus not
primarily institutional questions about legitimacy, viability, or institutional
resources but focus instead upon the academic quality of the courses and
programs offered. Distance learning
is often offered as an alternative (and presumably equivalent) path to an
institution's already-accredited degree program, thereby escaping independent
scrutiny. The University of
Maryland's venerable University College states that despite its internal focus
on the rigorous learning outcomes assessment of each of its courses and
programs, it is presently required only to report inputs (curriculum offerings,
course syllabi, and descriptions) to the Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC).
Neither MHEC nor the Commission of Higher Education of the Middle States
Association, the University of Maryland's regional accreditor, at this point
requires specific evidence of education effectiveness or learning outcomes
assessment of these alternative-format programs (since these are offered within
the already-accredited university).
In sum, public quality assurance is less likely
to concern questions of institutional integrity or the adequacy of institutional
resources than questions about the academic excellence of core undergraduate
courses and programs. In April
1999, for example, the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) released a
detailed report challenging what they characterized as the selective and
anecdotal quality of much of the assessment research on distance learning.
IHEP charged that the bulk of this research has not been disinterested
but has been undertaken to support the unregulated expansion of distance
education by suggesting that there is "no significant difference"
between courses and degrees delivered in such programs when compared to
conventional, institutional-based programs involving scheduled classroom seat
time. Since then, the Chronicle
of Higher Education and leading national newspapers have featured an
unending stream of articles and reports disputing the program quality and
educational effectiveness of distance learning courses and programs.
Dr. Peter Ewell, however, argues that the
technical shortcomings of current research on the learning effectiveness of
distance learning programs in fact apply equally well to "published
research about virtually every method of instructional delivery
including, quite noticeably, the classroom-based ones we presently use" (Change,
May/June 1999, p. 4). The point is not automatically to distrust or denigrate the
effectiveness of merely the newest forms of instructional delivery but to
acknowledge that we have had a longstanding problem with evaluating and assuring
the uniformity and effectiveness (particularly through accreditation) of our existing
conventional forms of education. We
can logically expect, therefore, to encounter problems and the consequent need
to address them whenever new forms of educational delivery arise.
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