Gail Weatherly
Lesson 13
COMM 5350

Future Directions

The UT TeleCampus Distance Education Primer lists the following important considerations in the future of Distance Education:

Trends

As distance education continues to evolve, these are some of the current 'hot topics' in the field:

• Supportive infrastructure.
  How can educators create an environment for distance learners that provides the support that they require to succeed?

• Quality faculty development/support.
  Teaching at a distance is different from traditional teaching. How can faculty be best prepared?

• Student development.
  Students need new and different skills to succeed in distance education.

• Handbooks.
  Print resources have always been a fixture in distance education, but how can they be improved and targeted for the learner?

• Telling the truth.
  Because of the long-standing bias against distance education, practitioners must be scrupulously honest in their portrayal of opportunities and benefits of distance education programs.

• Education through a variety of means (multiple options).
  How can a blend of technologies and programs benefit the student?

• Masters degrees via asynchronous means.
  There is an emerging group of potential students, especially in the high-tech and business arenas, that particularly benefit from Master degree programs at a distance.

• Competitive education market.
  Because of the proliferation of telecommunications- and web-based programs, distance education is available from a wide variety of providers, creating much competition in a field formerly defined by geographic regions.

• Curriculum-driven technology decisions.
  The focus is shifting away from available technology and towards content as the linchpin for distance education delivery mechanism decisions.

• Focus on faculty, staff and learner development.
  There is a growing recognition that distance education programs must prepare everyone involved in the enterprise for maximum efficacy.

Other major issues in distance education will be a heightened awareness of copyright law, accessibility, and intellectual property policy. "Who owns the rights to the course?" is a commonly asked question by instructors (Salomon, 2000).

The true strength in distance education, however, may lie in the ability of universities to form collaboratives to support programs which meet a particular need. One example is the collaborative formed in Colorado (Conklin, 2001)..

Colorado's 28 public colleges and universities approved a plan to cooperate in distance education. (Under the plan, students will be able to take courses from any of the state's institutions, including the flagship universities and the community colleges, and accumulate credit in the colleges in which they're enrolled. The courses will be transferable among all of the institutions. The state's Commission on Higher Education expects to get ten percent of all degree programs in the state online in five years, which is estimated to cost approximately $10,000 per course.

The collaborative will be coordinated by the newly created Distance Education Coordinating Council, which will perform a market study of programs that meet the state's economic development goals. It also has responsibility for developing a common platform and establishing intellectual property agreements. The collaborative does not intend to charge a uniform distance education tuition rate. Fifteen other states have similar distance education collaboratives.

Another impressive collaboration is the Virtual College of Texas, which is built upon the same principles of trust and cooperation. (http://www.vct.org/). This organization is a collaborative of Texas' fifty community college districts and the Texas State Technical College System.

To take a course from a remote college, a student enrolls at a local community or technical college. The local college supports the student with a full slate of student services, including advisement and counseling, financial aid, and learning resources. The local college receives the student's tuition, fees, and the state's reimbursement for the enrollment. This college also awards credit for the course and transcripts it.

The remote college provides course instruction. Assignments, tests, and grades are administered by one of its instructors. For this instructional service, the local college pays the remote college an "instructional lease fee," as specified in an agreement between the two colleges. This is not an additional fee for the student.
This arrangement between local and remote colleges makes it possible for VCT member colleges to leverage their distance learning resources -- including faculty, courses, support services, and technology -- to benefit students throughout Texas no matter where they live or where instruction originates.

It is this kind of cooperation that will lead distance education to become cost effective as universities share the expenses of developing online programs for specific markets in order to meet specific needs. This makes much more sense than every university trying to develop the same courses and programs for a much smaller market share.

References:
Salomon, K.D. Coypright considerations in distance education and technology-mediated instruction. Taken from the American Association of Community Colleges Website on May 1, 2001 at
http://www.aacc.nche.edu/headline/070700head1.htm.

Conklin, Kristin. Colleges and Universities in Colorado to Cooperate in Distance Education. Taken from the National Governors' Association and NGA's Center for Best Practices on May 1, 2001 at
http://www.nga.org/center/frontAndCenter/1,1188,C_FRONT_CENTER%5ED_1209,00.html