December 2001 — Features
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Avoiding the Quality/Quantity Trade-Off in Distance Education
The promises of distance education to provide high-quality educational programs that can be undertaken anywhere and at any time are not new. Similar promises were made early in the 20th century by correspondence study programs. These programs failed to realize their promises because they were confronted by a fundamental trade-off between quality - personalized education - and quantity - the widespread communication of the message to large numbers of students. When higher education confronted this trade-off, they opted to choose the quantity model. That choice eventually led to a widespread dissatisfaction with the quality of correspondence education.
When higher education decided to choose quantity over quality, it was also electing not to offer a correspondence education equivalent to traditional higher education. Traditional educational models had emphasized small classrooms where the exchange of wisdom and ideas took place. Unfortunately, this model was expensive and now can only be practiced at a few relatively elite institutions. Most institutions, therefore, migrated to the high-volume model of large lectures and decentralized content delivery. This quantity model indirectly became the paradigm for correspondence education.
The Mediation Process
Higher education is now presented with a similar choice in the delivery of its distance education courses. If this trade-off is not resolved, meaning that both quantity and quality can be obtained simultaneously, then distance education will again be forced to pursue quantity-based delivery modes at the expense of quality. Such a choice will doom distance education to a second-class status in higher education. But, the choice between quantity and quality need not be made. Today, technology allows higher education, through distance education programs, to simultaneously achieve high quality while still delivering to a substantial quantity of students. Such an achievement would break the dichotomy of choosing between quality and quantity in higher education. This opportunity can only be seized if a vital element in the educational process is re-examined and transformed. We shall define this vital element as the mediation process.
The historical pattern in higher education has been that as the number of students reached increased, the richness of the information conveyed became diluted. This trade-off is a byproduct of the lost relationship between the instructor and the student or mediation process. When class sizes became large, the inevitable outcome was the reduction in personalized exchanges of insights that occur between the subject-matter expert, the instructor and the student. What is necessary is to understand the importance of the mediation process in knowledge transference. Such an understanding, coupled with an appreciation of the new capabilities offered through technology today, will allow the mediation process to be transformed from a response-driven methodology to a design-based feature of course development.
