Apuntes sobre las fuentes de las obligaciones.

9.1. Demands on Distance-education Providers

Distance-education work as described differs radically from that of other types of education.

The organisation found practical in traditional schools and universities is only to a very limited extent suitable for distance education. To the functions that are special to distance education belong

 the development and production of course materials

 the selection and employment of writers, tutors, counsellors, media specialists, instructional designers and office staff

 the provision of a telematic network including a user-friendly system for electronic mail, computer conferencing and facilities for a ‘chat’ function as well as other media facilities (learning and content-management systems)  warehousing

 the distribution of course materials to students

 the handling of assignments submitted by students to be commented on by tutors and returned to students by post, e-mail or fax

 counselling in writing and on the telephone; mediated information on study arrangements, examination periods etc., conditions for and invitations to face-to-face sessions, if any

 registration of data from assignments and other communications with students.

This means, among other things,

 that combinations of research and editing offices are established

 that facilities for the organisation and distribution of non-contiguous tutoring tasks are built up

 that academic staff, editors, instructional designers and media specialists are brought together in a way facilitating their co-operation

 that arrangements are made for unimpeded co-operation between external course developers and internal staff

 that organised co-operation between course developers, tutors commenting on students’ work and administrators is brought about

To the functions listed could be added a number of other specific tasks, for instance intervention to help students over difficulties, constant study support and formative evaluation of all activities with a view to constantly improving the work.

What is required is different from ordinary school and university administration, from business and government. Units for the tasks listed above, each in its own way facilitating students’ learning by rational and helpful procedures serving the upkeep of the total supporting organisation, including such mundane things as finance, buildings and purchasing, have been experienced as necessary. Experience shows that every organisational unit must necessarily integrate its work with that of the other units for the common purpose of facilitating students’ learning. A student-friendly ethos must pervade the whole of the organisation. A single enthusiastic course writer, tutor or counsellor cannot do very much unless his/her support of students is part and parcel of a common endeavour. Many initiatives to start distance education, often in the form of e-learning, inspired around the turn of the century by the advances in technology and leading to a series of new schools/organisations, failed and caused negative views of technology- supported education. The reason for these failures was often simply ignorance of what had already been achieved and experienced by distance educators and lack of a proper organisation. Students could be given the opportunity to interact with tutors and send their assignment solutions by e-mail, but failing an effective office for running this communication it often happened that there was no tutor available or that the one or the ones available had too heavy a workload or too little insight into the situation of the individual distance student to be able to correct, comment on each student’s work and generally to interact with him/her in a personal and supportive way or to do so within a day or two. Delays of several days and even weeks, which deprived the e-mail interaction of its value as compared with postal communication, occurred and may still occur. Also other organisational-administrative shortages, for instance concerning the availability and distribution of learning materials, references to Web sites and literature, information about periods and conditions for face-to-face or computer seminars or for examinations, have caused delays, irritation, lack of confidence and failure. An effective organisation of the distance-education process is a sine qua non. (Compare Shearer , 2004, p. 5: ‘While there have been some corporate success stories, such as learning management system providers WebCT and Blackboard, there have also been a number of failures at the institutional level.’.)

There can be no doubt that the key to success is the commitment to supporting students that I described as ethos above, a commitment based on empathy that must animate not only the writers, tutors and counsellors but the whole of the staff of a distance-teaching organisation. The procedures for student support have been discussed in a number of studies, thus, e.g., in Rekkedal, 1972a and b; Thornton & Mitchell, 1978; Sewart, 1984; Mills & Tait, 1996; and Scheer &

Lockee, 2003, the last-mentioned contribution identifying the ‘wellness needs’ of online students (physical, emotional, spiritual, social, occupational and intellectual ‘wellness’ needs).

A basic question is who actually teaches in a distance-education situation. It would be a serious mistake to say that the course writer is the teacher and equally wrong to regard the tutor who comments on students’ contributions as the sole teacher. In distance education teaching is a shared responsibility. The course writer presents the learning matter in the best way possible, which in my view means applying a conversational approach; the tutor, who may be and occasionally is identical with the course writer, interacts with students on the basis of this presentation, trying to secure students’ knowledge by providing full and helpful explanations of things not completely understood, making them see how the new matter they are confronted with is related to what they have already learnt and supports them in other ways; the counsellor helps students by means of useful information and advice. Also the handling of learning materials, students’ assignments, telephone, postal and e-mail messages belong to the teaching in the sense that these activities must be carried out effectively and well to meet students’ requirements and in the insight that contacts must be friendly and helpful.

There has been surprisingly little discussion about suitable administrative procedures. Much can still be learnt from Öster’s discussion of the organisation of a large correspondence school of 1965. Later presentations of relevance are Rumble (1986 and 1992) and, on a macro level, Beaudoin, (2004, pp. 61-101). As indicated above, learner support in distance-teaching organisations is being carefully looked into by several scholars, Tait and Mills (2003) and Brindley and Paul (2004) as well as other papers in Brindley, Walti and Zawacki-Richter (2004), among them.

We have reason to look further into some special organisational and administrative concerns.

9.2. Distribution of Learning Materials

In a truly liberal system which makes no attempt to pace the students but allows them to work entirely individually it makes no sense to distribute course materials on fixed dates, say once a month. Instead sending all the material before the study begins or in smaller batches as the individual students proceed in their study are choices to be considered. The former is a rational procedure, which has, however, caused some problems as has the distribution following a predecided plan. In both cases students have reason to complain that they are being intimidated by the mountain of course material piled up in front of them (as the first students of the German FernUniversität did; Bartels & Fritsch, 1976).

A practical solution is to send a reasonable amount of material at the outset of the study and then, together with each assignment commented on, send a course

unit roughly corresponding in size to the one finished by the assignment submitted. Office routines for this were practised very early, long before the use of computer administration (Öster, 1965), and cause no administrative problems. However, high postage costs for repeated dispatches of small batches of course materials as compared to sending all the material in one batch may make this procedure unattractive or even impossible.

9.3. The Administration of Course Development

Most distance courses are no doubt developed by a subject specialist co-operating with an editor, the latter of whom often also functions as an advisor, an instructional designer and a media specialist. A great number of successful courses have been created in co-operation of this kind. However, since the founding of the Open University in the UK in 1970 the creation of so-called course teams has been considered a most important and effective procedure to make sure that high- quality course materials are produced. Lord Perry, the first vice-chancellor of this university, illuminates the background as follows:

To produce the drafts of the various ‘course materials’ that would enable an adult, working in isolation, to reach a predetermined standard of performance in a given area of study, called for the combined skills of a number of groups of people. First we had to have not just one university teacher, with his thoughts and ideas about the objectives, contents and methods of presentation of the course, but several, because our courses were to be multi-disciplinary as well as multimedia in nature. This, in turn, meant that each teacher would have different and inevitably conflicting thoughts and ideas which would somehow have to be reconciled with each other to lead to an agreed final version. Second, since the university teachers that we could recruit would mostly be unfamiliar with the special problems both of educating adults and of teaching at a distance, we would need the advice of other experts, in particular educational technologists and television and radio producers, in order to determine the method of presentation of the course. (Perry, 1976, p. 77).

These considerations led to the institutionalisation of the course team at the Open University. Perry regards this as a very important innovation: ‘The concept of the course team is, I believe, the most important single contribution of the Open University to teaching practice at the tertiary level.’ (ibidem, p. 91). The co-operation of several specialists has without any doubt resulted in course materials of very high quality.

However, the course-team approach, which invariably causes tough scrutiny of drafts written by colleagues of the writer and hot discussions, has not been adopted without serious criticism and debate. In 1979 Michael Drake, a professor at the Open University, published an article entitled ‘The curse of the course team’,

in which he criticised the course team on several points, stating inter alia, that ‘it places more emphasis on content than on teaching’ (p. 52) and that the ‘course team format gives the articulate, the domineering and the thick-skinned an influence out of all proportion to their numbers or their merit’ (ibidem). This contribution gave rise to strong objections. Thus Andrew Blowers, then dean of the Open-University faculty of social sciences, rejected the idea that the ‘model of a corporate, co-operative approach to teaching and learning would be supplanted by the more individualistic, authoritarian approach adopted in traditional university teaching’ (Blowers, 1979, p. 56) and claimed that the course team ‘is a flexible instrument for change and provides the creativity and community on which our whole enterprise depends’ (p. 57). Considering the question twenty-five years after this discussion there can be little doubt that the course team has proved its worth.

This does not mean that the course team is accepted without reservations. There is a danger that the product of co-operative work gets an impersonal character. The ways of address that I recommend for distance education (I suggest you should …) may not be felt to be a natural outcome of this co-operation. It can be, however, if an editor is entrusted with wording a course text in this way. Monika Weingartz in a thought-provoking study of 1990, regrettably available in German only, provides data and arguments which may make us query whether the course-team model may impede personal approaches and contribute to knowledge being presented more as a finished, ‘ready-made’ product than as a complex of problems under development. On the dichotomy problem learning vs. ready-made systems identified by her see Weingartz (1991) and above under 4.3.

Whether course teams of the Open-University type are relied on for the development of learning materials or less sophisticated procedures are applied, any distance-education organisation, school or university, must make arrangements for co-operation between subject specialists and distance educators. A step-by- step co-operation has proved more successful than complete drafts being delivered for revising. A survey of course-development procedures used in distance education was presented by Kevin Smith in 1980 and commented on by me in 1995 (pp. 136-138).

9.4. The Organisation of Communication

9.4.1. Student-tutor Interaction

Only in extremely small operations, or when the whole of the interaction between students and tutors takes place as online group discussions, is it possible to leave the organisation and administration of the interaction to individual tutors. Normally, there must be staff who keep lists of tutors available for each subject taught, who see to it that the right tutors receive the assignments of his/her students, who register dates for the arrival of each students assignment and its

return, marks given and notes made. That this is necessary in really big organisations, in which a million assignments per year or more are handled is evident, but even small organisations with less than a thousand students have to build up administrative units for this work. It is an administrative concern, but cannot be left to administrators only.

Academically responsible staff have to recruit competent tutors for each subject, divide and co-ordinate the work when more than one tutor teaches the same course, which is almost invariably the case. Monitoring the work of tutors is necessary in the interest of students who all have the right to be properly taught at a distance, to receive full and helpful comments on their work without unnecessary delay etc. While some subject specialist manage this well, others do not and must be given support and advice so that they reach an acceptable standard. If not, they have to be replaced. Arrangements must also be made to facilitate spontaneous contact between students and tutors online and on the telephone.

9.4.2. Student-student Interaction

Online conferences and seminars offer excellent opportunities for student-student interaction as discussed above. This, however, requires administrative preparation and handling. In wholly individual distance education students can interact with other students on condition that they permit the distance-teaching organisation to disclose their names and postal and/or e-mail addresses and telephone numbers to their fellow-students and make computer chats possible.

9.5. Typologies of Distance-education Organisations

The above presentation has discussed the organisation and administration of distance education mainly from the points of view of specialised distance- education providers (like the distance-teaching universities and correspondence schools). As made clear from the beginning of this book distance education is also in many parts of the world provided by traditional universities and schools as a form of teaching and learning supplementing on-campus study. These are described as dual-mode institutions. (See 3.3. above.) It is in Australia that the ‘philosophy’ of this dual-mode approach was first developed (Sheath, 1972; Smith, 1984).

The single-mode organisations like the distance-teaching universities and the American and European correspondence schools with their successors can also be described as large-scale bodies. They develop and run courses for hundreds and thousands of students. The course development is, as discussed above, often carried out by special course teams, while a group of tutors, who may or may not have taken part in the course development, comment on students’ work and generally guide their study. In small-scale organisations on the other hand individual teachers usually develop courses for their own students only, perhaps

less than 40 altogether. In the latter case the course writer is, as a rule, identical with the tutor, guides the study and often also teaches face to face during residential periods, which are usually but not always optional. The Australian University of New England in Armidale, N.S.W., is usually regarded as the prototype of the small-scale, dual-mode organisation.

Apart from these actively teaching organisations we have to count with networking bodies, which coordinate and supplement the work of the former. Examples are Norsk Fjernundervisning in Norway and the Mauritius College of the Air, on which see Jenkins (1997).

Contributions to an organisational typology are presented by Keegan (1990). A remarkable classification based on educational criteria was developed by Schuemer (1988). It is an empirical study which, in a statistically manageable way, identifies a student-friendliness concept including the recognition of the importance of student-tutor interaction and the need for student support, a flexibility concept (regarding individual choices of submission frequency vs. imposed pacing, e.g.), an autonomy concept, the place (use and role) of supplementary face-to-face sessions and similar characteristics. This results in a classification of distance- education organisations in six fairly homogeneous groups listed with relevant data.