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Journal of Instructional Science and Technology ISSN: 1324-0781 Editors-in-Chief: Olugbemiro JEGEDE (jegede@ouhk.edu.hk) and Som NAIDU (s.naidu@meu.unimelb.edu.au) |
Volume 2 No 1, May 1997
- - - Article 1 - - -
by
W. R. Klemm, D.V.M., Ph.D.
Professor, Texas A&M University
Takeshi Utsumi, Ph.D.
President, Global University in the U.S.A.
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The promise of electronic distance education will not be realized until we overcome the widespread lack of accessibility to electronic communication technology. Even when the technology is accessible, many people, particularly in less developed countries, cannot afford it. To address these pressing needs on a global scale, a group of concerned educators met in January, 1995 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to form the Consortium for Affordable and Accessible Distance Education (CAADE). CAADE's vision is a flexible high-performance electronic communications infrastructure that can be tailored to integrate technologies for mass delivery of instructional materials with those for facilitating student-to-teacher and student-to-student interactions.
Strategies must vary from country to country, depending on culture, economy, and infrastructure. CAADE's research and development efforts help to identify the appropriate mix of satellites, telephone, wireless, and cable and computer-based communication. CAADE projects aim to demonstrate distributed electronic communication technologies that can be configured to 1) provide mass instruction with pre-packaged materials that coexist with and complement highly individualized instruction, 2) combine wireless and wireline technologies into an integrated system at reasonable cost at almost any site, and 3) promote experiential and collaborative learning.
Short-term goals are to demonstrate single, integrated distance education systems that have the following features:
Humankind is taking the next step in social and economic evolution -- that of a global information society and economy. Information is already becoming the foundation of wealth. Neither nations nor cultures can thrive if they fail to keep abreast of the rapid advances in modern agricultural production and management, environmental protection, manufacturing technology, medicine, and economic and political infrastructure. Beyond material well-being, we would hope that increasing interaction of distinctive cultural traditions will progressively enrich mutual understanding, tolerance, cooperative enterprise, and peace.
Into this emerging global information environment steps the Consortium for Affordable and Accessible Distance Education (CAADE). Today's "have nots" do not have affordable or accessible opportunities to participate. Even in advanced countries, many disadvantaged areas are being left behind in the information revolution. Does it matter? Yes, this new telecommunication age could revolutionize national culture and even economies. For example, people in small towns and villages around the world may find it possible to work from their home base, rather than migrate to the already overcrowded and polluted cities.
Interactive, multimedia electronic distance education (EDE) is recognized as the most
promising way to deliver information to widely distributed populations. EDE is in great
demand in rural and remote areas of the U.S., states of the former Soviet Union, and in
less developed countries.
CAADE is a consortium of educational institutions, national and international government and quasi-government agencies, foundations, and private profit and non-profit corporations. Its members represent prominent organizations and institutions.
What makes CAADE unique is that it is a broad-based, world-wide consortium that focuses
on the power and potential of telecommunications technologies to make education accessible
and affordable. Our group is interested in combining mass and individualized technologies
to make them inexpensive and accessible anywhere around the world.
CAADE's mission is to promote development and implementation of emerging communication technologies to increase access to educational opportunity and to do so in ways that will reduce cost and improve productivity and effectiveness, wherever people are who must rely on distance education.
We predict that these new global electronic technologies will significantly change the way people are educated and trained. Electronic distance education (EDE) will complement and supplement face-to-face classroom-based education, assist in reducing educational costs, and make education more accessible to a wider audience.
To address telecommunications needs of underserved learners, CAADE will develop and demonstrate high-performance electronic communications systems that combine the power of computers via telephone, local-area networks, low-to-medium speed terrestrial Internet and wireless telecommunications and digital satellites. This integrated approach to EDE uses more than one delivery and distribution platform, integrating mass delivery of instructional materials via satellite or Internet with innovative low-cost options for terrestrial feedback and interaction using Internet, telephone lines, and wireless telecommunications. The result will be increased access to richer learning environments while enhancing interactivity and sharing of information among teachers and students.
CAADE will emphasize the collaborative use of computer capabilities (e.g., virtual seminars, laboratories, application/simulation programs) by geographically dispersed students and colleagues. We hope to identify and develop promising technologies that enrich pedagogy, technologies that can be used in ways to promote critical thinking skills, problem solving, collaborative experience, and collegiality in the learning community.
Technology now allows instruction to emanate from the teacher's desktop computer. Low-cost interactive desktop televideo systems for the PCs operating on the Internet or via telephone lines are becoming available commercially (Currid, 1995). These video products come as easy-to-install kits, but costs can be prohibitive.
Click here to see a summary of more than 45 televideo systems
Using such systems is best done over high-speed lines of the Internet. However, Internet service is not readily available in underdevelop areas of the world. Where telephones are used, these videoconferencing systems operate most effectively over digital (ISDN) lines, which are not only expensive (often $100 or more per month plus several hundred dollars for installation), but also are not readily available, even in major cities of developed countries.
In addition to a system for instructional delivery, EDE students should have access to a "virtual campus." Like students on the "real" campus, distance students need not only opportunities to interact with teachers and to learn symbiotically from peers, but they also need libraries, lounges for socialization, and counseling centers.
The new electronic distance education technologies make it possible to implement delivering instruction on a large, world-wide scale. Multimedia EDE is becoming a practical reality. Also, CAADE is committed to improving what happens "at the other end" of the delivery pipeline, the "learner end," which is at the heart of learning.
Fig. 1. Traditional EDE efforts often put the emphasis on electronic delivery systems for slickly packaged instructional material. Distance education has two components, teaching and learning. What happens at the other end of the instructional delivery pipeline, i.e., the learning, is greatly influenced by how much interactions students have with the instructor and with each other.
One dominant distance education model involves lesson delivery as one-way video broadcasts, with a return telephone path for questions and feedback. While live telephone call-ins from students at remote sites is better than no teacher-student interaction, it greatly restricts the number of students that can give feedback during any given class. There is often no convenient way for students to send questions to the instructor, to share ideas among themselves after the scheduled broadcast time or to access other relevant information. Any follow-on learning activities encouraging students to work collaboratively are difficult to manage. What is needed is an affordable, highly interactive, well-integrated and easy-to-use approach to closing the loop between mass delivered and highly personalized communication and learning.
EDE instructional delivery systems have typically operated in a same-time, same-place way. Televideo lectures, we believe, can now be supplemented by follow-on learning activities. Creating collaborative learning opportunities is especially crucial, because distance-education students are often relatively isolated and do not have the same chances to interact with professor and peers as in traditional classrooms.
To promote interactivity among students and teachers and to leverage teacher effort by promoting collaborative learning among students, the CAADE effort will incorporate instructional delivery via collaboration software. An increasingly popular EDE strategy is the use of collaboration software to allow students and faculty to interact either synchronously or asynchronously (Acker, 1995). There is growing awareness that computer conferencing is also an ideal environment for facilitating small-group collaborative learning (also variously called "team learning," "cooperative learning") (Klemm, 1995). This requires conferencing software that creates a collaborative environment for constructivist learning, i.e., students work together to construct their own knowledge and information to help each other learn and understand. In short, they do more than just chat electronically. They produce academic deliverables.
CAADE must be flexible to achieve its goals. Each underserved area or nation has its own unique communication infrastructure, and the economic incentives and capability for investing in communication technology will vary. Technologies that may be too expensive today, may not be tomorrow. We may interface "low-tech" teaching technologies in underserved areas with "hi-tech" technologies originating from advanced societies. And so, CAADE is always open to considering a wide range of technologies, although the focus will be on identifying workable solutions at prices that the underserved can afford.
CAADE has not made a commitment to any single technology. Indeed, the philosophy is to use whatever mix of technologies is appropriate for a given situation. However, Fig. 2 shows one example of how satellite, internet, telephone, and radio technologies can be combined in a flexible, hybrid communication system that accommodates the full spectrum from instructional delivery to feedback to collaborative learning.
Fig. 2. Instructional delivery begins with an instructor using
ShareView to transmit teaching materials via satellite and telephone lines to multiple
schools. Alternatively, instructional delivery can be achieved via CU-SeeMe or other such
software via the Internet. At the receiving schools, a digital projector can display the
instruction in real time in a traditional classroom.
One or more of the schools may have a LAN and file server to accommodate student asynchronous conferences and post-instructional learning activities via the collaboration software, FORUM. Each LAN's server has a connection to the Internet, so that instructional materials and references that are at various Web sites can be hyper-linked into local conferences. Each LAN can be accessed via modem or packet radio. Other schools may have only a single file-server PC that acts as host for FORUM conferencing via modem or packet radio.
The CAADE program design and delivery capacity is wide and deep. The individuals and organizations involved have extensive resources (people, archives, curriculum, previously produced programs, technology) that enable design, development, and delivery of EDE for: K-12 (including advanced placement and specialized offerings), vocational/technical needs, community college programs, certificate programs, short courses and workshops, workplace education, informal educational enrichment, higher education academic credit courses, and issue-based offerings appropriate to a global future.
The participating institutions operate from the following set of assumptions:
We believe that electronic distance education can - and must - be made accessible and affordable in rural and undeveloped parts of the world. Our consortium is committed to testing a variety of hybrid technologies that are suited for specific needs and conditions in underserved user communities. We believe that we are pursuing options that will provide complete, integrated educational systems for underserved communities at costs low enough to encourage implementation.
How the lead author can be contacted
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