Historical

"Distance Education" is currently associated with the relatively new electronic tools of Email and the Internet.  Historically, distance education was any off-campus education, typically without a classroom.  Schools that specialized in correspondence instruction, typically by mail, were common.  International Correspondence Schools (ICS) was founded in 1890.  The engineering profession worked to discredit correspondence education and since the 1950's such education is not accepted toward professional licensure.

Correspondence courses offered by regular accredited degree-granting institutions, however, are widely accepted.  This correspondence instruction covers the same material as a classroom-based course, and the faculty and institutional oversight are the same also.  These courses are sometimes known as "independent study" rather than correspondence.  The media used are typically textbooks, printed (photocopied) notes and assignments.  Many also offer videotapes of lectures. Communications are by mail and telephone.   Most courses are "asynchronous," that is, the students do not have many intermediate deadlines for assignments, although there is typically a deadline for course completion.  Correspondence courses typically have a high rate of non-completion.  The CEE course, CE 603, Arctic Engineering, is available by correspondence.  It has a high demand and high completion rate.  CE 603 (or an equivalent) is required for engineering licensure in Alaska.

These distance education courses have changed little since 1890, except that in the 1960's videotapes became available.  In the 1970's telecommunications systems became commercially available that permitted televising lectures to remote classrooms.  This technology has improved with two-way TV, electronic blackboards and similar devices, such that today it is possible to have a teacher in one city and students in several other cities, and all parties are able to see and hear each other.  Here is a Good Overview  on distance education from the University of Idaho.

Electronic Distance Education

In the 1980s desktop computers became available, but these had little impact on distance education, because their memories were limited and there was little advantage to shipping information materials via 5 1/4 floppy disks.  In the 1990s large memory desktops and CD drives became available that permitted large files to be conveniently transported, stored, and displayed.  New modes of communication, Email and the Internet, became fast and cheap.  I'll refer to this wave of technology as "electronic distance education."  See Streaming boundary values where the instructor uses a PowerPoint slide show combined with streaming audio or UW, Intellectual Property where the instructor streams audio and some video.  These electronic lectures lack the clarity of videotape.  The current state of art, which is likely to prevail for a long time, is that audio takes a lot of electronic resources ("bandwidth"), and video takes even more.  For example, a 10-minute video clip of good quality takes about the memory of a CD.  It is practical to stream audio with good quality sound.  It is very expensive to do the same for video.  There are many programs available to compress the video, but these decrease quality.  It is not practical to transmit video electronically that has quality comparable to videotape.

The large, fast computers made practical Computer-Based Training (CBT).  (The synonymous term Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) is sometimes used.)  CBT teaches by "drill and practice" interaction with content embedded in the program, rather than with other people. CBT may take the form of tutorials, drills, quizzes, simulations or games. CBT lacks the powerful motivating aspect of human interaction - little if any two-way exchange of ideas occurs.  CBT often has rich media.  Here is some CBT that is on the web.  It starts with a page and a half of lesson. Lesson You can scroll to end of lesson and click on right arrow to see a quiz.  Guess at an answer and then click on the right arrow on the left side of the page.  The program responds telling if you are right or wrong.  CBT is very well suited to certain types of learning, especially memorization of bodies of knowledge.  It is generally not suited to college courses.

Web-based Pedagogy

What videos, TV classrooms, and the jerky videos and audios have in common is that they are inferior to an in-person lecture.  Trying to adopt a lecture to Internet instruction does not work well.  Feenberg says it well:

....interactive text based systems [web-based pedagogy] actually accomplish legitimate pedagogical objectives faculty can recognize and respect. There are good reasons for this.

Considered as an environment, the world of online interaction has properties that determine its appropriate use. Just as a concert hall is a space appropriate for different activities than a living room, so the electronically mediated spaces of computer networks are also suited to specific activities. It would of course be possible to conduct a class in a restaurant, or dine on a basketball court, but the results would likely be disappointing. Similar abuse of the online environment will also yield disappointing outcomes. But this is precisely what happens when we try to reproduce a face-to-face classroom online or on CD ROM.

The basic fact about computer networks is scarcity of bandwidth. Even with all the recent advances, we are far from being able to reproduce the actual experience of human proximity in space.

(For full articles, see Feenberg, 1998)

For a through report on the issue see Teaching at an Internet Distance: the Pedagogy of Online Teaching and Learning.  The Report of a 1998-1999 University of Illinois Faculty Seminar.  University of Illinois Seminar.  Which starts:

In response to faculty concern about the implementation of technology for teaching, a yearlong faculty seminar was convened during the 1998-99 academic year at the University of Illinois. The seminar consisted of 16 members from all three University of Illinois campuses (Chicago, Springfield, and Urbana-Champaign) and was evenly split, for the sake of scholarly integrity, between "skeptical" and "converted" faculty. The seminar focused almost entirely on pedagogy.

Their conclusion was the same as Feenberg's and mine, electronic lectures are not good pedagogy.  Web-based pedagogy, or "interactive text based instruction" does work.  Web-based pedagogy consists of students interacting with their computer, the instructor and each other.  Students learn by doing things and by interacting.  Not by listening to a lecture, writing notes, and memorizing them.  Below I give examples of web-based pedagogy in EQE 693, but first we must discuss two other things that web-based pedagogy is not, electronic course management and shovelware.

Electronic Course Management and Shovelware

The ready availability of computers and the Internet makes electronic course management practical for all courses.  There are several vendors of ECM tools - UAF uses the Blackboard ECM system.  It is important to understand that Blackboard is not web-based instruction, and web-based pedagogy does not require an ECM tool.    Blackboard does facilitate some aspects of web-based pedagogy.

The vast majority of postings of "courses available on the web" are simply course syllabi and notes posted to a web site or ECM site; they do no instruction.  Typically instructors take their syllabus, notes and other handout material, which are usually in electronic format anyhow, and shovel it all onto the web.  This is known as shovelware.  Look at fine print below the courses listed by the University of TEXAS.  Here is an international site, International Distance Learning  .  Most "course offerings" are shovelware; some are standard correspondence courses with Email.  Shovelware is quickly becoming the norm.  Most of the users of shovelware are on-campus students. 

Above we distinguished that web-based pedagogy is different than "distance education," and that it is also different than ECM and shovelware.  ECM is a convenience and the elements of shovelware, a syllabus for example, are found in courses taught by web-based pedagogy. 

TOC Examples of Web-based Pedagogy