Czechoslovak National Conference on Distance Education, Prague, 30 May, 1991
When I first started my work in distance education in 1970, I quite often met the argument that distance education might have offered valuable contributions to the dissemination of education in the past, but that its future probably would be more modest. At that time, Norway was in the middle of an extensive reform period concerning all sectors of the education system. Compulsory education had been extended from 7 to 9 years, and new lower secondary schools had been established in almost every local community. Upper secondary schools had for a long time been the privilege of the urban population. In the 1960s and 1970s they spread at an extraordinary speed to a great number of small centres in the rural parts of the country as well. And even institutions on the postsecondary level was spread in a very decentralised pattern all over Norway in the 1970s and 1980s.
It was seen as one of the fundamental issues in a modern welfare society to ensure that all local communities as far as possible could offer equal educational opportunities. The priority given to the maintenance of a highquality, decentralised system of primary and secondary education was part of a policy to strengthen and develop local communities. Also the many regional institutions of higher education were based on a concern for local and regional development.
At that time we were not talking of distance education, but of correspondence education. The main technologies involved besides print and written communication, were audio cassettes, radio and television. Particularly television was regarded as a strong medium, and most people believed that it was an important role for distance education to fill the gap in educational opportunities between he generations. However, many politicians and educationists thought that in, say 20 years' time, when the school system had expanded and was able to offer equal opportunities on all levels of education and in almost all the local communities, the role of distance education would be a much more limited one. In the future, distance education would be needed to cater for some of the very remote and sparsely inhabited local communities, to serve some groups of disabled persons who could not take part in ordinary school activities, and perhaps also to disseminate effective updating of knowledge in some particular areas where the development would be too fast for the school system to keep up with by ordinary measures.
I can of course not be sure that the attitudes I have described from my country is representative for other countries in a similar phase of development. But I suspect that they are, may be with some modifications. The establishment of some distance teaching universities at that time, particularly the British Open University, may be a sign of a slightly more optimistic view of the future role of distance education. But it may also be looked at only as a powerful way of filling some gaps in a traditional system of higher education and securing equal opportunities for groups of the population which would otherwise not be able to enter the regular system.
Before leaving the discussion of attitudes to distance education20 years ago, I would like to mention a couple of driving forces that ought to have given another perspective, but did not change the views of the future of distance education within the education sector at that time.
First, we were in 1970 fully aware of the need of lifelong learning, permanent education or recurrent education those catchwords propagated by various international organisations at that time. Manifests and reports were produced, new legislation was introduced and money was set apart for adult education based on this perspective. However, it was either conceptualised as a system of recurrent education where people were supposed to go back to educational institutions for a short period of time, or as a new involvement of public institutions in evening classes for adults.
Secondly, we knew very well that in the future, new exciting development of technology would offer new possibilities of education, and particularly in distance education. But the educational community has always been reluctant towards new technology, and I do not think that most people would believe that new ways of handling information and electronic communication would really have much impact on education. And if it would have, that would certainly not be for the better!
Now, 20 years later, the attitudes have changed. In Norway, the Minister of Education has recently announced that the 1990s will be a period of educational reform. The ideals of equal opportunities are the same as twenty years ago. However, there is a much more critical attitude towards how things have been done and what we have achieved in our regular education system up to now. New achievements can no longer be obtained by the expansion of the number of institutions, and the level of public resources put into the education system can not be increased very much. There is a growing concern for the effective use of resources and for the quality of output from educational institutions.
A recent white paper on higher education has announced that there will not be established any new institutions in higher education. On the contrary, the Ministry wants to reduce the number of institutions from about 130 to about 30. This will be done by merging existing institutions. Even then, the institutions must cooperate much more, to draw on each others' specialties within a national network-based on division of labour. A proposal of extending teacher education from 3 to 4 years has been withdrawn. Instead of expanding the study time, the ministry wants to use the time more efficiently and to establish a system of continuing education for teachers. Similar concerns have been expressed regarding other levels of education.
At the same time we must realise that the regular education system has not been able to do what was expected concerning continuing education for the adult population be it due to tradition, other priorities, or lack of the necessary resources. While continuing and adult education twenty years ago was often seen from the angle of the right for the individual to learn throughout life, we are now increasingly aware that it is even more a question of competitiveness of the nation. In this respect we are also beginning to realise a new issue of crucial importance to our education system, that is the issue of internationalisation.
At a time when we have expanded and developed our education system to a degree that we could only imagine twenty years ago, we have started questioning its quality, its efficiency and its appropriateness for modern society.
In this situation, it seems to me that both politicians and educators are beginning to look at distance education in a slightly different way. For instance, the Norwegian white paper on higher education states that distance education, based on modern communication technology, will be a central element in the future policy of higher education, and particularly within continuing education.
The Industrial Research and Development Advisory Committee of the Commission of the European Communities last year presented a report on skills shortages in Europe, the IRDAC report. This report advocates that "a large structural effort in distance and flexible learning is required in Europe", in order to improve the productivity of education and training.
This is in my opinion examples of a new appreciation of the role of distance education in modern society an appreciation which has emerged gradually in many countries over some years. Distance education is no longer looked upon as a vehicle for repairing some shortcomings of the education system at a particular stage of development. It is now conceived as a regular and necessary element of the education system and not only for some particular and rather marginal target groups, but for quite central functions within the education system, serving considerable parts of the adult population.
In my opinion, distance education has in fact had such a role most of the time since it started, about one hundred years ago. But it has taken one hundred years for the educational and political establishment to realise what roles there are for distance education to play in a modern society.
Two fundamental characteristics of a modern society are complexity and change. Together, these characteristics put increasing demands on the education needed for the citizens to cope with their life in the society. I will mention three fundamental demands:
1 General level and quality
There are increasing demands on the general level and quality of education. This is not only a question of the number of years spent in the initial education system, or the number of graduates in relation to the population. The initial education must establish a broad and general level of competence, relevant to modern society and sufficient to form the necessary basis for continuing learning activities during the whole lifespan.
2 Updating and retraining
Since modern societies require adaptability in many dimensions ,education and training must develop ways to cope with the increasing needs of updating and retraining, as well as the need of mastering completely new situations and developments. These needs will concern people regardless of previous education, age, job, and social situation.
The need for updating and retraining is reinforced by some well known demographic trends. I will show you three overheads from the IRDAC report, illustrating this point. The first one shows the distribution across agegroups in the twelve EC countries from 1965 to 2025, demonstrating a longterm decrease in the agegroups between 15 and 64 years. The consequences for the labour force is shown in the second overhead, assuming constant participation in the labour force within the relevantagegroups. This may mean that Europe in the next century may lose in competitive strength because of a lack of sufficient qualified manpower.
The third overhead is a forecast from the USA concerning future needs of employees with various levels of skills. To the left we see the existing distribution, with the highest skill levels in the bottom of the picture. To the right we can see the forecasted needs in the year 2000. If this is a true picture of a modern society, we may conclude that there will be considerable needs of updating the skill levels in order to meet the future demands from the labour market.
Particularly, many occupations will require increasingly specialised training and more frequent updating and retraining than before. This also means that training will have to be close to work, both in content and in pattern of organisation. This development brings forward a need for closer links between educational institutions and industry and business, both to match market demands and to keep teachers in touch with developments outside schools and universities.
3 Multiple competences and careers
People increasingly tend to develop multiple competences across traditional subjectoriented or occupational borderlines. Multiple careers also become usual and increase the demand of education regardless of age. In almost all modern societies there is a tendency that the average age of the student population in higher education is rising, and so is the proportion of parttime students with work experience. These students have other and more autonomous study habits, and require other forms of teaching than younger students. There is also a need for more flexibility and alternative organisation of study programmes.
As a result of the developments of our societies, new patterns of education and training will have to emerge, and the institutions of education on various levels will have to adapt to the new situation. I will present to you some forecasts of these new patterns.
More and more clearly, a pattern of lifelong learning will develop, with education and training activities dispersed more or less over the whole lifespan of the individual learner. Initial and continuing education will no longer be separate phenomena. In some cases the same programmes will be used as initial education by some students, as continuing education by others. In other cases programmes for continuing education will be organised differently to meet the needs of working adults. Learning as continuing education will also be integrated with other elements of organisation development in the workingplace, in order to increase the competence of organisations as such. This means a stronger integration of working and learning situations.
Universities and other educational institutions will prevail as centres of knowledge and research, but not necessarily as the place where students stay while they are taking advantage of these resources. More flexible forms of organising learning opportunities will develop and sooner or later these forms may be seen as normal forms to use when people want to develop their competence and knowledge, at least after the initial schooling age. Distance education will be at the centre of this new pattern of education.
As modern information technology penetrates our societies, new forms of technologybased learning will emerge. This will not mean that technological devices will replace teachers. But both learners and teachers will take advantage of new means of handling information and new means of communication. The development of educational technology will be closely linked with the development of everyday technology in homes and workingplaces. On the other hand, more sophisticated use of new technology for learning will be linked to the tendencies of internationalisation and of collaboration between educational institutions and industry.
Distance teaching and technologybased open learning will be explored and developed both by dedicated distance teaching institutions and within regular educational institutions. In the future, therefore, various forms of nonconventional education will develop, as well as combinations of different forms of study.
General education and vocational and professional training will be combined in new ways. Industry will want more cultural and general aspects included in company training. General education will prepare students for working life.
The lines between public and private institutions will be blurred. Government institutions will become more dependent on private sources of funding, and will be organised and run more like institutions in the private sector. Trusts and foundations will be established, based on collaboration between and resources from both public and private agencies, organisations and companies.
Many groups of adults will have new and common educational needs. For instance, basic functional skills will have to be achieved by some adult groups, like unemployed, immigrant workers, ethnic minorities etc. Other groups will be preparing for unpaid social work or cultural activities. For some groups, educational activities will represent an important consumption value as spare time and postwork time increase. Education for life enrichment and meaningful activities will be required by increasing numbers of people of all ages, and not least by an aging population.
In making these forecasts, I have drawn upon a report on longterm developments made by a working group within the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities, of which I was a member. However, they are quite common insights, shared by many working parties and individuals writing on the future demands on the education systems of modern societies.
There are several roles which distance education should fill in a modern education system. I will mention some of them.
1 Balance inequalities between agegroups
Most people will stay in the labour force about 40 years after their initial schooling. During this period of time there will be changes in the education system. For instance, I mentioned that the Norwegian compulsory education was extended from 7 to9 years in the 1960s. Now we are discussing the possibility of giving the young generation a right to 12 years of schooling before taking up a vocation. In such situations we suddenly make a gap in education between the generations. To some extent, this can be balanced through distance education. For instance, my institution has for almost 30 years been offering the two extra years of compulsory school to the adult population. Tens of thousands of people have used our courses to prepare for the examination.
2 Offer "second chance" upgrading
Many people leave the school system before completing an upper secondary school or taking a higher education degree. They want to get some work experience and are not sufficiently motivated for further study. After some years they start thinking of upgrading their education in order to compete for better jobs, for instance. However, they have established themselves with family, house, and so on. In this life situation, distance education is a much more flexible alternative than going to school again. It is also much less expensive for the society to organise "second chance" education through distance teaching institutions than to take people out of productive work and send them to regular schools. This is therefore one of the most important roles which distance education has had since the beginning of this century. Millions of people in Europe have used the "second chance", and will do so in the future as well.
3 Deal with information and education campaigns for large audiences
Distance education, particularly with the help of mass media, can be an effective way of organising information campaigns and shorter educational programmes when there is a need to educate large audiences. This can be the case when sudden changes takeplace in a society or when new legislation is introduced which will affect many people. Environment protection is another example of a subject of relevance to the whole population. In such cases it is appropriate to use strong mass media, and particularly television. A distance education component may be added to secure that actual learning takes place.
4 Speedy and efficient training of key target groups
For instance, when curriculum changes are introduced in the school system, it may be necessary to offer specific teacher training programmes to considerable numbers of teachers in very short time. An effective way of doing this is through distance education. When Sweden and Norway changed the curricula of mathematics in compulsory schools around 1970, distance education programmes were set up to train teachers to teach the new math's. Similar programmes may be used to reach other key targets groups when innovations are planned in any sector of society.
5 Education for otherwise neglected target groups
There are also many examples of distance teaching institutions offering programmes for target groups which tend to be neglected in the regular school system. For instance, my institute last year introduced a new programme for training of assistants in kindergartens. There are some 40 000 of them occupied in kindergartens all over the country, but they have never been offered any training to do their job. Now, both the assistants themselves and their employers in local communities are very eager to use this new programme.
6 Expand the capacity for education in new areas
The regular school system is often late in recognising new needs of education and expanding the capacity of offering regular programs. Distance education institutions are much more flexible and are able to enroll large numbers of students within a short time. Therefore, distance education often serves as an extra capacity to overcome bottlenecks in regular education.
7 Extend geographical access to education
Perhaps the most obvious role for distance education is to extend access to education not only from central and urban areas, but also for people who live in sparsely populated areas. Even a decentralised school system like the Norwegian cannot offer every stream of education in all local communities. People may of course move to central areas in order get an education they want. But it is often much better to move the educational opportunity to where the potential students live. Distance education can serve people everywhere.
8 Offer the combination of education with work and family life
In my experience, the most important characteristic of distance education is its flexibility of time. Even if they are able to choose, many adults prefer to continue in their work while they are studying. They can very often manage to put aside 1215hours a week for study, even when they have a family, and still continue in their job. To many of them, it is important that they can decide themselves which part of the week and of the day to study. They cannot always follow evening classes regularly. Distance education is a better opportunity.
9 Develop multiple competencies
One of the clear tendencies in modern society is that people tend to develop competence in more than one field, and also to change their occupation several times during the life-span. For instance, an engineer takes up a managerial position, a lawyer needs language training, a humanist wants to know something about database development, and so on. Competence in a second or third field have to be added after the initial education for the first career. Then, distance learning is an optimal way of developing the new competence. Distance education adds flexibility to the education system and helps people to meet new challenges in their personal career.
10 Offer transnational programmes
Until recently, distance education institutions have in general been operating on a national level. The last two or three years we have seen the establishment of a few transnational distance education programmes and institutions in Europe, like EuroPACE, Eurostep and Channel E. There are also several examples of transnational networks and projects offering education and training services based on computermediated communication. There are also schemes where an institution in one country serves as a local resource and support centre for students who are studying with distance teaching institutions in other countries. The function of such a study centre may cover a range of activities, like information, counseling, exam arrangement, tuition and adaptation to local needs. I believe that this transnational role of distance education will grow in importance in the future.
I said earlier that one of the driving forces behind the expanded role of distance education in modern society is the technological development. I stress this point with a certain hesitation, because there is a tendency to associate distance education only with the more advanced types of technology. In my opinion, this is a dangerous tendency. Our fascination aroused by technological visions and possibilities may prevent us from designing distance education systems and programmes in a way that can enable distance education to play its fundamental roles. In distance education as in other sectors we need appropriate technology more than visions of the future.
On the other hand, modern information and communication technologies have given us a broader range of options than we had some years ago, and new options will certainly arrive in the future. But this fact does not always make the old technologies obsolete. Books, correspondence tuition, radio and television, audio cassettes, telephone they are all quite old media, and will nevertheless survive into the next century. Fax, video cassettes, optical storing media, electronic mail, computer conferencing and video teleconferencing they are all here at the moment, but they will need many years still to attain a dominant position in distance education, if they ever will. Most of them will not replace the old media, but supplement them and enrich the total range of information and communication media available in distance education.
Every time we introduce a new technology in a distance education system, we run the risk of introducing a new barrier to participation and learning. Therefore, we will often have to wait for years while the technology penetrates the society and spreads to all the working places and homes where distance learning programmes must be available for individual use.
In order to avoid any misunderstandings, you should know that my institution, NKS, has had a continuous research and development programme on the use of new technology in distance education since1984. No other institution in Norway has actually used various kinds of technology in distance education to the same extent as we have. We run for instance one of the bigger electronic colleges in Europe, with more than 500 students active in computer conferencing. I am convinced that new technologies will be very important for distance education in the years to come. Still, more than 90%of our activities and programmes are based on quite traditional technologies, and I am sure most of them will be for the rest of this century. The reason is simple: The new technologies are not yet available, they are too inconvenient to use or too expensive for our students.
You have to choose technology according to the nature and the situation of the target groups you are aiming at and the educational objectives of the programmes you are going to offer. Very often, a simple solution is more effective than a complicated one.
I have tried in this lecture to argue that in modern society, characterised above all by change and complexity, distance education has several particular roles to play. I have not said much about the organisation of distance education systems and their relation to the regular education system. That is an issue in itself, and it is difficult to discuss it appropriately without reference to the particular educational traditions of the society in question.
Personally, I believe that distance education involves very specialised knowledge and competence in a variety of fields such as curriculum development and the development and production of educational material, communication skills related to media, information, marketing and counseling of students, study support and tuition, distribution and delivery of material and organisation of teaching activities, often in collaboration with local partners. In orderto cater for all these functions, which differ significantly from the parallel functions in a regular school or university, there is a need for specialisation in dedicated institutions or departments.
On the other hand, I believe that distance teaching institutions need contact and collaboration with regular institutions. It is often wise to mix distance learning with elements of direct tuition in seminars or summer schools, particularly in programmes with long duration. It is also a common experience that when teachers get some experience from distance education, they learn the importance of careful planning of teaching activities, and this will often prove beneficial also to their regular students. Distance education may therefore have positive effects on the quality of teaching in regular institutions.
I mention this in order to underline that the quality of both regular education and distance education in my opinion will benefit from co-operation and collaboration between the two sectors. We who work mainly in distance education, should not isolate ourselves from the mainstream. And the regular education system should not leave distance education to develop in isolation. We are all serving the population in our society, and we need to increase both the flexibility and the quality of education towards the next century.
My final remark on this occasion a Czechoslovakian National Conference on distance education will remind you of the vision of education presented more than 300 years ago by Jan Amos Komensky. He told us that to prepare man for life would be to prepare him for universal peace and brotherhood in this world, and eventually for the world to come. In this perspective, it is of the utmost importance, he said, not only to teach everybody every knowledge but also not to prevent anybody from being educated.
Nothing could be more worth while for a distance educator than to make all efforts to develop distance education as education for everybody and as education for brotherhood. This is a real challenge in our modern society, a challenge which we have in common with other parts of the education system. It is not less important today than it was 300 years ago.
(An adapted version of this paper has been published in Open Learning, 7, 2, 1992)
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