Invitation to an open debate about DL

The thing is, from ancedotal experience (my own and others), these semantics are things that people out there in the real world have to face in the job market. Especially as DL becomes both more popular and has higher availablity, there is a greater awareness, and sometimes that awareness is tinged with bias due to media exposure of things like diploma mills and the latest For-Profit recruitment 'scandal'.

Personally I think these 'semantics' are rather valid thoughts and concerns. Shrug.

 

I personally have faced this in the work force as well. I graduated a B&M school with a masters degree and part time on campus attendance, the rest of the program was completed online. The transcripts indicated "DL" for the program, degree and every course I took online. DL was metioned 11 times on my transcript. Those letters were hindering my efforts in securing employment so I wrote the president of the university and expressed my concerns that the transcript indicates DL all over it and I am facing bias in the workforce. The president sent it to the legal department and they agreed and lifted it from everyone's transcript. It certainly can be a stigma. In my situation DL was not entirely accurate because I actually attended the campus as well but became a stumbling block in obtaining employment. Since they lifted that distinction, the topic has never been brought up or been an issue.

My experience is that having an online component in the medical and nursing field certainly raises eyebrows and brings unwanted attention, scrutiny and prejudice.

Thanks for your comments!

 

DL programs don't all use the same format, in terms of class design, content delivery, student-faculty and student-student discussions, projects, lab experiences, and so on. The broad category of 'DL' encompasses a lot of different implementations, ranging from minimal professorless independent study/exam formats, to programs that try to emulate the in-class experience as completely as possible.

So I'm not sure whether it's possible to profitably generalize about the DL format, without paying at least some attention to what different programs are doing with it.

From the point of view of the student, there's risk that prospective employers might be less-than-impressed with a degree earned by DL. So from the student perspective, "moving distance education forward" would probably have to involve improving employer perception of DL, so as to reduce that risk.

My belief is that employers aren't going to suddenly adopt a whole new set of expectations when it comes to DL. If employers need somebody with a particular degree, then they are going to be evaluating degrees the same way, whatever the source. So that suggests that in order to raise perceptions of DL degrees, the programs awarding them will need to look reasonably good in terms of whatever variables already define the stronger academic programs in the B&M world.

And once DL creates some academic stars, once some DL programs start getting lots of professional attention for their academics, a halo-effect might start to extend over other DL programs, making the whole format seem a little better by association. The DL/B&M distinction will start to shrink in employers' minds.

I think that current technology can deliver a lecture class to remote students just about as well as it could be delivered in person. (That's assuming that DL programs aren't pushing up the class sizes and so on.) But I don't think that laboratories and hand's-on practical experiences can be delivered nearly as well. DL still lags behind B&M in those areas, which implies that DL is probably more appropriate for some majors than for others.

I think that it's a mistake to suggest that DL already offers students everything that they need (to say nothing of everything that their employers need). The educational product still has plenty of room for improvement, particularly at the top-end.

There probably is. But it might be best to concentrate on those aspects of the faculty experience that are relevant to and will positively impact student learning outcomes.

I take it that was aimed at me. Of course, I didn't actually say that.

But the fact remains, whether professors like it or not, the whole reason for their having a job revolves around how well they advance their university's educational and academic functions. If the goal is to "move distance education forward", then that's where I think that the emphasis should go -- towards furthering the educational and scholarly mission. If doing that improves faculty prestige and professional standing while it simultaneously improves graduates' employability, then it's a win-win for everybody.

That's not necessarily the same thing as treating some faculty wish-list as if it was somehow the DL-advancement agenda -- (great pay and cushy working conditions, life-time tenure). Nor is it the same thing as giving students everything that they want -- (open-admissions, fast and easy contentless degrees). It's a matter of improving distance education in terms of the same measures that are already used by employers and professionals when they form opinions of B&M programs

 

I've noticed numerous schools offering tuition discounts to employees of numerous corporations including Fortune 500 companies. This is a good move by the school to gain acceptance of their programs and graduates.

 

Hi Bill:

I appreciate your engagement on this topic and would love to debate/discuss it with you. However, I can’t figure out what you are trying to say. You respond to each statement I write and seem to try and correct or disagree with it, but I don’t think I understand you overall viewpoint. We may not be even discussing the same topic, I can’t tell.

DEL

 

You posted your paper and asked for debate on the issues that you'd raised. (That's the title of the thread.) I've only made two posts. In the first I read your paper and responded to it with my own ideas, which is what I believed you were inviting us to do. The second post was my response to what I took to be your rather angry response to my first post.

I've expressed my own ideas about how best to "move distance learning forward" as clearly as I know how. If you didn't understand what I've already written, there's no point in me posting anything more. Things are growing increasingly heated and I don't want to get into an ego-contest with you, so this will be my last post to this thread.

 

As debates progress one of the inevitabilities is a clash over semantics. It's important to know if someone is in an "apples v. oranges" debate. Then it becomes oranges v. grapefruit (at least we're all on the citrus page) and then maybe at some point it becomes navel oranges v. valencia oranges. In short, it's my opinion that semantic differences are important.

 

Hi Bill - If it counts for anything, I got it.

 

I agree. Different words usually have different meanings. Somebody smart once said that within my hearing...

 

Hello Dr. Lady,

I have been away from Degreeinfo for some time, so I realize that I am entering this discussion quite late. I found your article quite interesting. There are some assumptions that differ from my own observations and experience. While I agree with your observation that "education has historically tied its assessments of quality to a faculty driven model," in some areas, such as currency of the curriculum, the qualifications of those who teach and student grades, other measures of quality, such as student retention and attrition, time to degree, cost effectiveness, non-"academic" student services (admission, registration, financial assistance, etc.), have not been driven by the faculty. While peer evaluation is a faculty-driven assessment, student evaluations of courses and instructors (a primary indicator of quality) tend not to be.

A most obvious assessment of quality (research into the achievement of students learning at a distance) has certainly been faculty-driven. Nine decades of research has established the equivalence of face-to-face versus "technology delivered" instruction. No body of literature has been able to generate any consistent data to establish the inferiority of online or other forms of "mediated" instruction.

Your second point "that distance education in general is much less satisfying for faculty to teach than on-ground classroom instruction," is an assumption that cannot be generalized. Many of my colleagues at my former public institutions and my current institution find their online courses to be as satisfying as their on-ground courses. Many find that their online interactions with students are more numerous and robust than their once-a-week face-to-face interactions. I have often heard the comment "I get to know most of my online students better than I know most of my on-ground students."

Your third point about scalability is valid: "you can scale the on-line format to have individual faculty instruct a lot more students, without necessarily having to pay them more." True, but scalability happens more often in undergraduate brick and mortar general education courses, where a single professor may be in an auditorium classroom with 500 or more students, who take electronically graded scantron tests. Now, I cannot speak to all institutions, but I have enrollment caps on online courses. Our largest lower division courses are capped at 25 and upper division courses are capped at lower levels (depending on the level and discipline). This is lower than our face-to-face courses.

Your assumption (ad you are hardly alone) is that DL programs are used as a cost saving and profit-maximizing venture. this may be true for many institutions, but it is not true across the board (in either the non-profit or for-profit sectors). Since we have a separate physical and human infrastructure to provide services to our on-ground and online students, we do not find DL to be incredibly cost saving. The ROI of DL is that it allows us to reach a larger pool of students than those who live close to campus and to keep our students when they move, are transferred or are deployed (we have a significant number of military students at our Ft. Knox campus). Our growth aspirations are quite modest compared to Phoenix, Kaplan, Strayer, etc.

After 23 years in higher education (21 of which has been at traditional non-profit colleges and universities), I have observed and am observing a high acceptance of DL degrees in higher education. Now, as well all know, someone with a newly defended DL doctorates will have an incredibly difficult time getting a full-time, tenure track assistant professor position at a traditional brick and mortar campus. No one debates that. DL degrees are not marketed to those people (or if they are, shame on them).

However, I have dozens of colleagues who are already masters-level faculty at community colleges and universities who have completed DL doctorates. I have yet to see a case where the faculty was denied the promotion or tenure that the institution offered to terminally-degreed faculty after they earned their DL degree. Administrators and staff at Universities, Colleges and K-12 schools and districts are becoming commonplace.

Finally, a word about your observation that "anything over around $300 per credit hour identifies a school that is profit maximizing." This may, indeed, be true. However, that has little to do with DL. Many factors influence tuition. In my own city, the local publicly-subsidized state university currently charges $351 per credit hour, while the two private "non-profit" universities charge $585 and $690 per credit hour. The local "for-profit"? $15 more than the state university. My father's alma mater (Pepperdine) charges $1,210 per credit hour. So, who is really engaging in "profit maximizing"?

Thank you for a thought-provoking article. DL will always be a fruitful topic for debate.

(Yes, I can sense those of you who are saying, "Couldn't he have stayed away just a bit longer? )

 

I agree with the basis of the argument presented in the article. I would also like to make these points;

• 
  New modalities arise in every industry as emerging technologies take route. Slates went out of use with the advent of the ball point pen. Wars are now involving drone aircraft flown from different continents to te operating environment, business is global and connected by fibre optic, medicine has embraced technological advancement, why not education? Technology has a duality with culture, business, and social bnehaviour of human beings. It is both a product of the above and also drives its parent. Education that ignores the use of the internet is isolating itself from the society that it serves;
  The internet has presented an opportunity to empower the individual. If knowledge is power, then the diffusion of knowledge diffuses power amongst the population. Education was previously denied to many because of exclusivity and cost. DL has opened access and has lowered the cost of education;
  
  In Australia, there is an attempt to produce local hubs to prevent convergence and concentration on certain geograpghical zones. Local communities can now access education opportunity by DL in their own localites without the need to converge on B & M sites. Nothing new in this. The external UOL was setup to enable the colonies to access education without a need to return to the UK. In short, the local hub was the colony;
  
  There will need to be as "shakeout" of the providers of education using the DL modality to bring quality. The issue of quality education by DL has been dealt with by Open University(UK), UNISA, Australian Universities, University of London, and Harvard Univesity. These universities have unquestionably high standards and have embraced DL as an educational modality;
  
  If one assumes that education and all human endeavors follows trade and business, then globalisation has created a need to reshape education to meet its needs. DL and online learning is the only modality of education that effectively address this new economic phenomenon. Isolationist policies and regressive educational labelling of DL is a little like typewriter manufacturers belittling the personal computer as secondrate.
  
  I was interested to read that lawyers in the US were an exclusive and powerful elite until the 1840s. After that, the US requirement for lawyers and legal education outstripped the system of supply. There was a rapid growth of law schools and differing quality until this was stabilised by standards set by the ABA. I consider that this is analagous to the DL situation.
  
  My thoughts on the matter.

 

I did neglect to mention that I am quite impressed with the price point that Aspen is able to offer--it's difficult to find a better bargain for an accredited degree. I also respect Dr. Lady's willingness to discuss/debate with those who have different points of view.

 

I could not agree more on both counts. I think Aspen gets it.