Distance Education in the United Kingdom - Essay Example

125947 In recent years, distance education had been steadily gaining more ground in United Kingdom. It has become an integral part of higher education today and has yielded impressive results. Now distance education includes e learning and e-programmes, Internet and web use. The mission and vision statements declare that universities are student-centred now (a far cry from Dr. Johnson's being sent home by Oxford) and the aim is to provide lifelong learning opportunities for a highly diverse student community. Distance education has evolved in many ways and offers short programmes, part of big programmes, designer short courses, Internet studies, many professional courses for which lab facilities are needed and such courses were excluded from the purview of distance education. Today's distance education encompasses all courses, except pure medicine, that too till now. With education being revolutionised almost by the day, there is no guarantee that medicine too would not be offered as a course in distance education. Distance education has opened new vistas and new dreams. People, who had found it difficult to continue or complete their education owing to various reasons, have been offered another opportunity to do so through distant education. They cannot learn in planned instructional events. It is not surprising that the popularity of this new trend keeps growing unendingly. Today every society and culture have realised the importance of education and information. People are eager to learn more about hitherto unknown things. ""The prominence of education and learning within the post-industrial, information society analysis was in no small part responsible for the high-profile reassessment of education and training by education and politicians in developed countries over the latter half of the 1990s," (Selwyn, 2006, p.5). Open learning offers greater flexibility to study, with the student's own pace, in whichever place, at whatever time, supported by Internet or intranet and all the choices are of the student alone. But without the academic support of Universities, distance learning cannot function. It needs greater efforts from universities and faculties to improve quality of learning experience while providing greater flexibility of study, and encourage easy access to programmes. Main purpose of this new trend has been to add value to flexibility. It had always been noticed that a great amount of rigidity prevailed in the educational scene of the country, in the name of tradition, discipline and educational highhandedness. Distance education's main purpose was to lessen this rigidity in the field of education so that it could be evolutionary and reachable. University's learning and teaching strategies should lay out a path through which accessibility of programmes could be extended. For people who are unable, or unwilling to attend classes, this includes up a new region of possibilities by offering full award bearing and accredited programmes and short courses. Learners could be local and distant; but usually, full programmes will be particularly relevant for international students, Distance education does not come cheap. It needs development of substantial and high cost materials and support mechanisms that are expensive. It cannot be done unless it is an adequately funded venture. Design and delivery of programmes has to take account of recent research and this, sometimes, means additional expenditure. Universities have to be confident that there is an adequate market to repay the hopeful spending. Programme should be appropriate, and improve the quality of learning experience. They also have to ensure that quality should be equivalent to any campus programme. Particular concern has to be taken to ensure that e-programmes are delivered in the most pedagogically effective way possible. Educational research has been going on full swing and emerging results have brought up many theories of learning and these have to be taken into account while preparing the material. Students need appropriate communication and discussion opportunities as well as access to quality materials. A proper strategy to implement the programme has to be set up by every mother institution. All these arrangements cost a great amount of funds and they should be justified by the end results. Costs include set up, development and delivery. Providing instructions across the Internet and other computer networks is a relatively new phenomenon and hence, needs elaborate arrangement again costing money. "Providing instruction across the Internet and other computer networks is a relatively new phenomenon. To some extent, we are just learning how to harness this media for learning, and stakeholders are rightly asking whether our efforts are paying off. Establishing value for any venture is, at its most basic level, and determining what goals are important, selecting measures to show if these goals are achieved, and then measuring and analysing. This is true for e-learning, too," Patti Bhank, eLearning Guild, http://www.e-learningcentre.co.uk/eclipse/Resources/effective.htm Even with the advancement of networking process, UK distance education still depends quite a lot on the traditional way of teaching and learning. Measuring cost and value as opposed to performance and success had been taking a lot of researcher attention recently. "Only by evaluating the effectiveness of DE Programs can we justify their use and continue to develop their quality," Barbara Lockee et al, http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0213.pdf There is a compelling need to determine the quality and evaluate distance education as a future trend. Difference between distance and face-to-face courses, stages and types of evaluation, research and assessment have taken the time and effort of many educational researchers. "Distance education consists of a complex array of infrastructures and personnel. A few of the factors to consider are instructional, technological, implementational and organizational issues," http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0213.pdf Summative evaluation is useful while formative evaluations are the best way to ensure quality in the unit before its release. Formative Evaluation is a kind of internal quality control and evaluates the formative stages and methods, the way it has dealt with disabled and hearing and seeing paired, manipulative using of audio and video, which will lead to design review, expert review, one-to-one review, small group reviews and field trials. To take the measures of justification, assessment of inputs like budget and personnel, performance outcomes like learning outcomes, attitude outcomes by judging how interested, society feels about distant education, programmatic outcomes like job change, promotion etc. implementation concerns by faculty, learners, and organisation etc. too are necessary. Justification measures should also go through personalised systems of instruction, discussion, enquiry, and independent study and the results would show the success of the programme. Costs of any venture include obvious costs and not so obvious costs, development costs, learners' time away from work, overhead of education department, physical material, programme materials, servers, graphics, web powered programming, and other connected costs. The enormous popularity of the programme shows that costs are covered in almost all the universities, who have taken pains to advertise the programmes. More and more people are getting enrolled, and are actively moving through the course, scoring well and the feedbacks and surveys, show that these programs are well received. "The most fundamental definition of distance education is a form of education in which students are separated from their instructors by time and/or space. Distance education is utilized in some form at every level of the educational spectrum, with the most extensive use in higher education," http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat52599.html Distance Education is reaching wider audiences covering all segments of population and right now, it is moving into the digital field with its student population that also includes professionals and trainees and retired people. "Distance education has been defined as an educational process in which a significant proportion of the teaching its conducted by someone, removed in space and/or time from the learner." http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001253/125396e.pdf British Open University was set up in 1969 and is working as a model to others in distance education. Students use computer conferencing as part of their studies to contact tutors and to interact with each other. They also use print, broadcast, cassette recordings, and computer-based materials. Financial assumption comes from the fact that quality should not suffer due to cost. Cost of computer equipments like CD ROMS, cost of physical campus, non-faculty personnel and faculty too had been high. All the costs are justified by the great success of the Open University. At the same time, there are arguments that the cost is actually decreasing with the digital revolution. "As Knight (1994) argues: 'While the relative price of conventional education is rising, the digital revolution has been decreasing the cost of storing, manipulating and transmitting information by 50% every 18 months, with no end in sight," http://www.dfid.gov.uk/pubs/files/distedengedpaper13.pdf Hence, Distance Learning is a revolution and it is unstoppable. It would occupy a large portion of conventional learning very soon. Today, Distance Learning is connected with Lifelong learning that is catching up in almost all the societies, especially with issues like fundamental global demographics, influence of television and media, environmental imperatives, and terrorism. "There are issues affecting every society and they propagate a view of lifelong learning as a global phenomenon, entirely consonant with the reality of governmental perceptions. The efforts of international governmental agencies have offered some hope that it may be used to improve the lot of the developed and developing world alike, even though responses and action will be very different," (Longworth, 2003, p.5). BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1. Chapman, Judith D. and Aspin, David, (1997), The School, the Community and Lifelong Learning, Cassell, London. 2. Field, John (2006), Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order, Trentham Books, Stoke on Trent, UK. 3. Gereluk, Dianne (2006), Education and Community, Continuum, London. 4. Longworth, Norman (2003), Lifelong Learning in Action, Kogal Page, London. 5. Selwyn, Neil, Gorard, Stephen and Furlong, John (2006), Adult Learning in the Digital Age, Routledge, London. ONLINE SOURCES: 1. http://www.e-learningcentre.co.uk/eclipse/Resources/effective.htm 2. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0213.pdf 3. http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat52599.html 4. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001253/125396e.pdf 5. http://www.dfid.gov.uk/pubs/files/distedengedpaper13.pdf 6. Read More