Michael G. Moore needs little introduction to scholars in the field of distance education research. He published pioneering distance education theory, worked at the British Open University, founded the American Journal of Distance Education at Pennsylvania State University in 1986, started the American Centre for Study of Distance Education, and among many other achievements published over 100 articles and two books and presented around the world. Along with all this he taught for three years in Canada, the host country of this journal. He is probably best known for his development of Transactional Distance Theory, and for the multiple editions of the essential Handbook of Distance Education, now in its third edition.
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VOL. 32, No. 2 2016
Self-Directed Learning and Distance Education — in Retrospect
I am grateful to the editor for the privilege of contributing to this anniversary issue. This is one of only three such journals (together with Open Learning and Distance Education) that for the past thirty years I have looked upon as peers and companions to my own American Journal of Distance Education. Together, we four undertook the heavy lifting during the mid 1980s to establish distance education as a field of scholarly study, and I want to begin here by acknowledging this journal’s particular significance in the Canadian field, and to thank its editors of the past three decades for their friendship.
At a more mundane level I thank the editor also for sending me a copy of the article I wrote back in 1986! Until he did so I could only wrack my mind in trying to remember what I had written about, and having moved house after retirement from university teaching, finding a copy in my files proved impossible. I say this now because the article I wrote back then, in the mid-1980s that appeared in the mail was as if from a stranger, and I suppose in a sense the (relatively) young associate professor who wrote that article would be a stranger to this (relatively!) elderly Distinguished Professor Emeritus today. Reading it as a stranger has been interesting, and not least because it strikes me as, in part at least, not too bad; in fact, (again, in parts), I rather like it — (LOL, as they say nowadays).
Before saying more about what I like in the article — comments that I hope readers will consider as a starting point for some further thinking of their own — let me first dispose of what I am not so satisfied with. Put differently, if I were writing this article today I would probably not elaborate the topic in quite the same way as I did in 1986, and in particular I would not use as much of my allotted space to advocate a curriculum of non-formal and “life cycle learning”. These were still rather revolutionary ideas at the time, and although I was able to cite courses such as “The first years of life”, “Planning retirement”, and “Consumer decisions” from the UK Open University, there was a justification for attempting to push academia to look beyond the standard undergraduate and graduate curriculum, to apply new methods of distance education to this kind of adult curriculum. Indeed, even within the UK Open University such courses were regarded with disdain by the majority of academics, and establishing the Division of Continuing Education only came after an up-hill fight by a cluster of enthusiasts led by Nick Farnes. So, although the polemic about the curriculum was not inappropriate at the time, it would not deserve such strong advocacy in 2016.
Having explained what part of the article I now find less appealing, what is it that I find more interesting as I read this stranger’s piece today? Well, apart from the fact that the author is revealed as one of that very small group of academics who, at that time, was thinking that distance education could be discussed as a field of scholarly study, more significantly he appears as one of the even smaller number having a background in the pedagogical sciences. Consequently the article had little to say about the exciting new interactive technologies that were beginning to appear at that time, or the organizational structures being established around the world to support the application of those technologies as well as more traditional, such as television broadcasting. Nor did it have anything to say about the dominant type of research emanating from the recently established open universities, that might be described as social surveys. Instead, this article attempted to articulate some questions about the nature of learning itself, learning when the student was alone at home or workplace, away from the campus, the classroom, other students, and most critically, the teacher.
Such addressing the question about what was different under these conditions had led, just a few years before (see Boyd and Apps, 1980) to the concept of the relationship between teacher and learner as a coming-together, or as it was said, a “transaction” between the two independent actors, learner on the one side, teacher on the other, or indeed, “learning programs and teaching programs.” This concept of distance in distance education as a pedagogical system of teacher-learner transactions having an almost infinite range of intensities of both the “structure” of the teaching program, and the “dialogue” between teacher and learner became, after the mid 1980s, the fundamental underpinning theory that alone enables researchers and others to untangle those experiences that deserve our specialists’ attention (as distance educators) from the almost overwhelming universe of educational experiences in general.1 Many scholars consider it remains so to this day. Commenting on the significance of this, the distinguished German scholar Otto Peters wrote: “…by showing the transactional distance not as a fixed quantity but as a variable, which results from the respective changing interplay between dialogue, the structured nature of the teaching program being presented, and the autonomy of the students, it (the transactional distance theory) provides a convincing explanation of the enormous flexibility of this form of academic teaching. It also provides an insight into the pedagogical complexity of distance education” (Peters, 1998, p. 42).
Peters’ reference to “the respective changing interplay between dialogue, the structured nature of the teaching program being presented, and the autonomy of the students” leads us now to the central question in the 1986 article, which was consideration of the extent that the student might exercise control, self-direction, or autonomy (all terms used synonymously) in the teaching-learning transaction. It would be inappropriate to cite here the authorities that were referred to in the article, except to say about them that, in retrospect, I see very little that was cited then that would not be enormously beneficial for every student of education to read today. It is a sad consequence (perhaps “disastrous” would be a better description) of the contemporary student’s dependence on online resources that many of the seminal publications in our field are no longer studied; in the present context I would point to, especially, the work of Canadian scholar Alan Tough, as well as Malcolm Knowles and Robert Boyd and the so-called humanist psychologists, among others cited in the 1986 article. It should be unbelievable that the majority of faculty trying to teach at a distance today have no idea about the work and writings of even founding fathers Charles Wedemeyer and Otto Peters, but such, sadly, is the case. It used to be said that economics was the dismal science, but surely education isn’t far behind, as thousands of professors teach with minimal training or (if they haven’t read even those authors mentioned) no real understanding of the history, philosophy and theory of distance education.
To return to the core theme of the 1986 article! Of course, the technologies have changed, but that key question about the proper role of distance learners in the teaching-learning transaction, specifically how far they might engage in the planning, carrying out and evaluation of their learning is surely as important today as it was thirty years ago. In fact, when we consider how vast is the repository of resources the student can now access (I need only mention Wikipedia, learning objects and MOOCS) it should be clear that the opportunities as well as the challenges for self-managed learning are significantly greater than they were at the time of the article. It is a subject that has received far too little attention from researchers, and is far too little represented in our leading distance education journals as a result of that neglect.
Why does the subject of learner autonomy, self-direction, control, remain unexplored and rather unpopular as a topic even today? I think the answer is not hard to find. In our contemporary world that is so dominated in everyday life by technologies that facilitate so-called social interaction, the many hundreds of thousands of academics who now aspire to join the movement for distance education, have found in those social networking technologies the perfect vehicle for both benefitting from engagement in their institution’s jumping on the distance education bandwagon, while they also are able to cling on to old, familiar pedagogical values and teaching methods of the campus classroom. Most academics still consider the ideal teaching environment to be the face-to-face class, and their idea of distance education is to imitate as far as possible that ideal, whether as a “virtual” class, a “flipped classroom” or a “blended” class, in all of which they use the same old teaching methods, with much interest on the part of researchers in the “social presence” of teacher and co-learners that imitates online the perceived benefits of the traditional classrooms.
Further, this idea that distance learning online should mirror the conventional class is reinforced by popular trends in educational theory, most notably the theories of constructivism and connectivism, what I think of as “collectivist” theories because they assume an inherent value in learning in groups, inter-student interaction, collaborative learning, and the formation of learning communities.
Helpful though this might be, up to a point, it also has the unfortunate effect of diverting attention from the alternative view of the student that has been traditional in distance education. This is the student as a lone learner or what was called an independent learner. This, older traditional view of the distance learner had its roots not in the classroom, but in the tutorial, the one-on-one relationship that the privileged student enjoyed with a tutor in the elite Ivy League colleges. The idea in early distance education was that a similar, although of course different, type of one-on-one relationship could be emulated — and extended to ordinary people — by means of correspondence through the mail, and later by electronic technologies.
For that reason, distance education was for many decades called “independent study”. Wedemeyer himself defined independent study as: “teaching-learning arrangements in which teachers and learners carry out their essential tasks and responsibilities apart from one another, communicating in a variety of ways for the purpose of freeing internal learners from inappropriate class pacings or patterns, of providing external learners with opportunities to continue learning in their own environments, and of developing in all learners the capacity to carry on self‑directed learning” (Wedemeyer, 1971).
And so we return our attention to the concept of transactional distance in distance education as incorporating more than merely the geographic separation of learner from teacher that absorbs the attention of the communication technologists, by focusing on the individual learner, the learner outside the group setting, individuals each of whom has a degree of competence in self-management, offering teachers and teaching institutions the responsibility to design conditions that will allow each student opportunity to choose between options. These include not only choice of when and where to learn (including the availability of as many alternative media channels as possible, and far more than could be provided in a conventional classroom), but also, more importantly, designing and communicating a range of alternative structures of content and pathways through that content, as well as a range of alternative dialogic relationships with the instructor and fellow students.
The promise of technology, the promise of distance education itself can not be fulfilled as long as teachers are permitted to continue to think about distance education as merely a reproduction of the classroom group. Of course, groups can be a useful environment as a means of facilitating learning, but the group is not an end in itself as many seem to think, but merely a means to the end of helping individual students achieve their learning outcomes. Always it has to be remembered that we are dealing with individuals, that the group is made up of individuals, each of whom is different from the other. I urge as strongly as I can that today, we all need to give renewed and fresh attention to questions about the differences in individual learners and the opportunities offered by new technology to tailor courses and teaching better to the characteristics of each individual learner.
Rather paradoxically, if the above was written in 1986, it might not have seemed as unfashionable as it does today, in this time of social networking, virtual groups and preoccupation with social presence, because in past years there was a far more robust interest in study of the individual learner. One especially important and promising thread was that of so-called aptitude X treatment interaction, in which researchers employed instruments like the Edwards and the California Personality Inventories to identify which personality types and cognitive styles of students would benefit best from different teaching procedures and technologies. Building on, and yet challenging, evidence first gathered by Dubin and Taveggia (1968) of there being no apparent differences between results of different teaching methods, other researchers, most well-known being Cronbach and Snow (1977) explained that such results only compared group averages, and that there is a best method, but it varies from learner to learner. In the early 1970s I myself undertook such a study of personality differences in distance learners as measured by Witkin’s Embedded Figures Test, but very few others have followed down that track. It seems a golden opportunity for young researchers today, where studies of group interactivity is such a crowded field, to revisit this tradition of aptitude X treatment interaction, studying today’s learners in interaction with today’s technologies, leading I would hope to better understanding of how to support self-directed learning and thus providing the underpinning of knowledge needed for developing 21st century ways to design courses and learning experiences that provide as wide a range of options as possible to satisfy individual differences.
To close on an optimistic note, I will draw attention to what appears to be some kind of revival of interest in independent learning, freshly re-invented in the movement referred to as ‘personalized learning.” The last decade has seen a growing number of documents and research into such personalized learning, such as a European Grundtvig Project, Leading Elderly and Adult Development Laboratory — which defined personalized learning as “learning that may be self-directed or may be facilitated by a tutor on a one-to-one basis and/or within a group setting” (http://leadlab.euproject.org/). Other currently popular and relevant topics include a renewed interest in competency-based education, assessment of prior learning, and adaptive learning. Especially promising in this regard is the new technology (compared to 1986), of learning analytics, i.e., the use of large data sources to help in the analysis of student’s prior performance, strengths and weaknesses, and problems with various learning tasks.
Finally, in the spirit of the definition quoted in the previous paragraph I want to insist that in suggesting the need for a fresh new focus on autonomous, independent learning, I see no conflict between such teaching that is designed for and directed at individual learners and that which is aimed at group learning; on the contrary, the optimum environment for learning is surely one that provides the best experiences of both independent learning and social learning – the best that is for each individual student.
References
Boyd, R. D., & Apps, J. W. (1980). A Conceptual Model for Adult Education. In R. D. Boyd & J. W. Apps (Eds.), Redefining the discipline of adult education (pp. 1-13). Washington D.C.: Jossey-Bass.
Cronbach, L. & Snow, R. (1977). Aptitudes and instructional methods: A handbook for research on interactions. New York: Irvington.
Dubin, R., & Taveggia, T. C. (1968). The teaching-learning paradox: A comparative analysis of college teaching methods. Eugene, OR: Center for the Advanced Study of Educational Administration. ERIC Document ED 026 966.
Moore, M.G. (Ed.). (2013). The handbook of distance education, (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Peters, O. (1998). Learning and teaching in distance education. Analysis and interpretation from an international perspective. London: Kogan Page.
Wedemeyer, C. A. (1971). Independent Study. In L.C. Deighton (Ed.), The encylopedia of education, 4. New York: Macmillan.