July 14, 2009

Distance Education Resistance: Understanding Its Origins

By: Christopher Hill in Distance Learning

It’s a fact of life. Distance education proponents have to learn how to live with conflict. Distance education has been controversial from the start and in many ways continues to be so. Elizabeth Mitchell, PhD and Dr. Iris Geva-May, a professor on the Education faculty at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, have studied the resistance to distance education, where it comes from and how it can be mitigated.

Barriers to implementation
The literature that Mitchell reviewed is replete with studies and stories pointing out individual barriers to acceptance of distance education, and attempts to figure out what is the best way to deal with some of these barriers.

Up until now, the studies that have looked at barriers to distance education implementation have tended to view them from the technical or the administrative side. What Mitchell wanted to identify was more the “interest and values” sources of the problem. In looking at the literature from this perspective, there were four areas of difficulty that popped out:

• intellectual reluctance
• support
• cost-benefit
• change.

Intellectual reluctance is a lack of belief that online learning was a benefit to the teaching and learning process.

Support has to do with the perception that the institution values online learning enough to put in place assistance and resources to support faculty in their efforts. If that perception is not there, this is a major barrier to acceptance.

Cost-benefit refers to whether the faculty believes that distance education is worth the resources expended on it. Where do faculty place distance education in the priorities of institutional budgeting? “There are a lot of things that an institution could do,” Mitchell says. With faculty the cost-benefit factor is more a matter of values than money. Again that has to do with attitude and perception.

The study revealed two different levels of change — changes in individual faculty roles and institutional change. In Mitchell’s interviews with faculty, she found that they felt relatively secure in their tenure rights and other job security-related issues. They felt that they could use online learning on their own terms. But there was a higher level of insecurity associated with fears of institutional change. The faculty members felt less confident about how the institution would change, about how their environment might change with the advent of distance education. Mitchell and Geva-May found higher levels of conflict in direct relation to the degree that faculty felt they had no control over developments.

“We had many faculty who said, ‘No-one can force me to do this. I’m tenured.’ Nonetheless when these professors experience change beginning in their own departments they are concerned. They feel that the changes may not be beneficial for them and would ultimately add to their work load significantly.

Mitchell found that many times faculty felt that the decision-making process is not especially inclusive—they wanted to be more a part of the discussion. Mitchell points out that it may be simply that the faculty members had decided not to be included. Nonetheless, there was an impression on the part of faculty that change was being made, and they were not as much a part of it as they would like.

Practical applications for distance education administrators
How can Mitchell’s study help a distance education administrator? “The most important thing about working with change is to be aware that even though as an administrator you may feel you are being inclusive, it may not be perceived that way. And that you really look at how you are going to deal with that issue, so that faculty feel involved, not just informed.”

The key factor that Mitchell found that affected the level of conflict was the actual experience of online learning. There was a direct correlation between experience of online learning and acceptance of it. Mitchell explains that there are basically two schools of thought about faculty and distance education. “One is that you do get faculty involved, another is that if you do get them involved they’ll say that it’s too much time and effort, and they will fall by the wayside. What this research is saying is no, if you get them involved then your chances of actually implementing this are better.”

Excerpted from Is Conflict Inherent to Distance Education?, Aug. 1, 2007, Distance Education Report.

Permalink: http://www.facultyfocus.com?p=6661

Tags: distance education, distance education administrators, distance education research, Distance Learning Administration, faculty work load, online learning, support faculty, Teaching and Learning

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