December 2001 — Features
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Avoiding the Quality/Quantity Trade-Off in Distance Education
The result was a model that utilized subject-matter experts to design the correspondence courses, then required a cheaper source of labor in terms of instructors, adjuncts and graduate students to critique the written submissions. But even this model was too labor intensive to generate the desired net revenues. As a result, the mediation process was abandoned and the educational quality of correspondence education deteriorated significantly. The result was a decreased demand for correspondence education, a development that further reduced the net revenues generated from this source.If distance education is undertaken with the same goal of effectively generating significant net revenues to subsidize traditional education, then its future will mirror the experience of correspondence education. This is because, as has been seen, the mediation process, as it is presently conceived, forces a trade-off between quantity and quality in higher education.
Recall our assertion that modern information technology has presented distance education with the opportunity to escape this dichotomous trade-off between quantity and quality. Presently, distance education can free the student from having to travel to a distant physical site to receive their educational experience. Current distance education can also free the student from having to devote a specific time period to receive their educational experience. All this can be accomplished through an exposure to the same subject-matter experts who oversaw similar courses in a traditional educational setting. What is not recognized is that the mediation process, which works so efficiently in a traditional classroom, cannot properly function within distance education courses as pres-ently conceived. As such, distance education will discover that the quality of its educational offering will deteriorate as did those of correspondence education.
Mediation Problems
One limitation of distance education is that unless the course is made very labor intensive design-driven mediation is not possible. But, what if the student had to go through an exercise prior to addressing the issue? Such exercises would be designed to reveal the student's limitations, and why the student made the mistake he did. Such a mediation process must be built into the design of the course, hence the term design-driven.
The current problem is that as the class size is increased, the mediation process can only be addressed to a specific, abstract student, such as the average student in the class. Often the average student becomes the lowest or highest common denominator of the class because an actual average student d'es not exist. This means that the variance among the individuals who constitute the class would have to be ignored.
Utilizing a mediation process relevant to the class size would allow the wider variance of student abilities in large classes to be addressed. In such a learning process, the students could customize the time and attention they spend on a subject, allowing them to focus on the areas where understanding is limited. To date, however, distance education has only been able to properly address the mediation variable in a limited number of classes.
