Comments on Promotion of Distance Education Through Digital Technologies, Article

My name is Tom Henderson and I’m serving as Interim Associate Vice Provost for MU Extension at the University of Missouri-Columbia. I’m honored to share some perspectives with the U.S. Copyright Office on behalf of our Institution.

In preparation for this presentations, I received ideas and written input from my professional colleagues within our Continuing Education units and in particular from Dr. Dale Huffington, Director of our Distance Learning Design Center and a nationally recognized figure in this area. I share this information with you in light of the University of Missouri-Columbia’s 75 years of experience in delivery of continuing and distance education efforts.

I will share with you a portion of my previously submitted written comments as time allows.

Nature of Distance Education
(a) Distance education is a planned program of instruction provided by an instructor to a student or students separated from the instructor by time and/or space.

This activity differs from traditional face-to-face education in that it need not happen “in real time” or in the same physical space. This makes it possible for people to engage in a formal program of education when they would otherwise not be able to do so because they are fully employed (or have other time constraints), are distant from locations where classes are offered, or have physical limitations making access difficult to a campus and its classrooms.

Distance education is facilitated by digital technology but can occur without it. Conventional correspondence courses use postal services; telephone conferencing and analog video transmissions via satellite, cable, or tape permit use of instructional materials and communications between instructor and students. With the growth of Internet access, the technical possibilities of networked web sites, e-mail, discussion groups, real-time conferencing and shared applications make it possible to significantly increase opportunities for students to work with other students and with their instructor. Interaction can be faster, easier, and more frequent in well designed instructional programs. However, interaction has been a part of correspondence, telephone, and video-delivered course materials long before the digital capabilities of the Internet opened up more possibilities for instructional communications among students and their teachers.

Instructional use of these digital technologies differs from general use of electronic communications in educational setting because it is driven by learning objectives. General communications may be driven by administrative, marketing, production, or social purposes. The structure and nature of the communications in a course should be governed by what students are expected to learn and how they are asked to demonstrate competency. The students who are given those communications are normally limited: only the students who have been accepted for the course and have paid their fees. Their communications, within the framework of the course activities, are considered to be private. Frequently the sequence as well as the content of instructional communications is dictated by the learning objectives of the course.

Many similarities exist between distance education and face-to-face courses. Important among those similarities is the need for access to course information that may be located in library resources (books, journals, and non-paper media). Just as students in a traditional classroom have been given “fair use” access to those resources, the student at a distance also needs “fair use” access. The privacy of the classroom for presenting reports, demonstration projects, performances, recitals and other manifestations of learning or competency for students at a distance is important because without it, publishers are reluctant to grant permission to use materials, which have traditionally been available to students in the traditional classroom.

Without this “fair use” access, the potential of this avenue for education will be greatly limited. Individuals will lose opportunities to stay abreast of developments in their field or acquire competencies in new areas and industries will loose productive time to the necessity for transporting instructors or employees to physical classrooms.

(b) Distance education programs currently using digital technologies use the Internet as a resource. Several types of communication or learning activities are carried out with the use of e-mail, electronic discussion lists and real-time conferencing. Web sites provide an effective medium to communicate information in text, in static and animated visual forms, and can be structured to provide learning activities similar to those provided in laboratories on campus. Web sites can provide two-way interactive opportunities to acquire concepts, learn relevant information, and apply both to a new context with responses from the instructor (either live, or provided by the computer program) and from other students.

The communications medium is not inherently interactive. Even the telephone can be used as an instrument for passive reception of information. To the extent that a teleconference teacher sets up activities that require students respond and interact with other students, with the instructor, or even with the instructional material, the course involves two-way communication. When learning activities require students to absorb background information, learn and apply concepts to new information working with other students or a real-world environment and the instructor ensures that students receive guidance on how well they are doing, then the course provides opportunities for interactive higher order learning.
The interaction can be effective whether it is synchronous or asynchronous. Some students appear to do better in an asynchronous learning environment because there is time to reflect and organize their thoughts. However, some learning activities must be carried out in real time and good instructional design will reflect that in the choice of medium and evaluation methods.

Copies of the instructional materials and recording of instructional activities may be necessary for some types of instructional design; for others, it will only be necessary to have a record of satisfactory completion. Copies of a video class, for example, might be retained for use by students who were absent, and then erased after a pre-determined interval. Other instructional programs may choose to tape a full set of video classes and then permit the instructor to be in contact with students only for discussion, conferencing, and grading activities. The copies are typically made by the media production/distribution unit of the school; if not, then the instructor normally has chosen to make the copies and controls their use and distribution. In most cases, an instructional program delivered by video can benefit from preparation and distribution of course materials ahead of time; Effective interactive use of the video time requires planning and preparation even though the instructor appears to be inventing the course as it happens. Video production resources and time on video networks can be more effectively used when the class is planned, high quality materials are recorded for re-use in the course setting, and the stimulus for live, spontaneous interaction among students and their instructor is dependable.

The growth of distance education has led to creation of many more courses that exist as videotape or computer files. In the face to face classroom, course materials exist primarily as syllabi, handout materials, and lecture notes; they are considered to be the property of the instructor. Now, the existence of those materials in re-usable forms, in physical forms usually created and stored by other university employees has made it more important to have a formal agreement between the instructor as course developer and as teacher and the university. That agreement, as it is being developed on campuses across the country, typically defines who determines whether or not the course may be offered, who may teach it, and who will benefit if the course materials are to be licensed to others.

The fact that these courses may be offered to people in many locations makes it important for the university to define to what extent they will consent to a faculty member teaching a course which was developed with university resources at some other institution, especially when the other institution may be in competition with the university which developed the course. If the faculty member resigns or retires, will the course materials still be usable by other faculty members at the university? Academic culture has yet to arrive at a generally accepted set of conventions for dealing with these questions.

(c) Course materials may be made available in electronic form, depending upon the instructional design, the communications medium used for the course, and agreements between the institution and the instructor(s). Some media are difficult to use without having a pre-existing copy that can be accessed: a web site is often a series of computer files. However, it can also be dynamically created from a data base that makes up a unique presentation of materials for each user. In that case, the learning experience is as transitory as a spontaneous discussion in a face-to-face classroom.

Access to course materials (whether dynamically created or provided as a fixed set of files) is normally strictly limited to enrolled students. As in the face-to-face classroom, use of books, periodicals, and multi-media resources is controlled. Normal educational use is either licensed through purchase of texts or other materials for repeated use, or is drawn into the class on a one-time basis because it presents a contemporary application of concepts relevant to the course. Application of these principles has been more strictly applied in the distance education environment than in the face-to-face classroom because there is essentially little evidence of use in the face-to-face classroom, whereas the distance education course normally provides some physical record of use, even if transitory. Licensing of materials for distance is typically tightly controlled: the period of use, the name of the course, and the maximum number of students who may use the materials are usually specified in the licensing agreement. The time required to process a request, and the small number of positive responses obtained from publishers has limited the number of requests made by experienced teachers and course developers. If a better mechanism for licensing such uses could be developed, and the owners were more certain they were not setting a potentially damaging precedent, potential income from these licenses could rise – especially if fees were to come down to a level that would permit schools to license multiple items for a single unit or module of a course.

(d) Distance education programs, when developed by universities, are normally funded through institutional support of up-front development and production expenses. For many high quality video and internet courses, the up-front capital has been obtained through external funding. Some university programs are sufficiently large and “prosperous” to permit the school to provide the needed risk capital out of internal operating surpluses. For the average undergraduate class (15 – 25) which may be offered for three to five years before requiring extensive revision (e.g. change of text, instructor, or curricular revision), only those courses which are very lightly produced and rely on faculty to create most course materials can recoup development expenses totally out of tuition income. Graduate level classes have
smaller class sizes, on average, and require longer to recoup development costs. Frequently they are subsidized by larger enrollment undergraduate courses. For many video programs, the university subsidizes production and network/transmission costs to permit its colleges to serve the professional-level continuing education needs of their service areas. In contrast, Internet courses are frequently expected to generate sufficient tuition income to cover costs of production and a portion of computing infrastructure costs.

At the present time, there are both commercial and non-commercial producers of video courses, but non-commercial producers are predominant. Non-commercial entities are frequently associated with governmental or educational institutions, so they are not expected to make a profit for “shareholders,” as citizen constituents. However, they are typically expected to generate a surplus of income over expenses sufficient to fund future productions and provide financial reserves. Fees charged to students may reflect licensing costs as a separate fee; alternatively, the license costs may be covered as part of the tuition or general support provided by the institution. Distance education courses, when offered by a nonprofit university, frequently are expected to cover their costs, but the full cost of the university infrastructure is seldom reflected in the tuition costs. For-profit universities, on the other hand, must cover all costs, both direct and infrastructure costs. They can do so by reducing infrastructure costs through such means as hiring part-time faculty, concentrating course delivery into shorter time periods, using other institutions’ library facilities and limiting their physical plant expenses.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the majority of such producers are non-profit. The most visible for-profit producers serve commercial markets for business, industry and government clients.

Universities such as the University of Phoenix typically charge higher rates than their nonprofit competitors. Most of the non-profit universities charge their standard tuition rates but add a special fee for “delivery costs”. For example, the University of Missouri Schools of Nursing are permitted to charge an additional $50 per credit hour for distance education course delivery.