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Maintaining High Touch for Effective Distance Education
by Daniel Roland
Attaining a post-secondary education using non-traditional methods has long been a driving force in the innovative use of technology for adult learners. For the would-be student who does not have the option of leaving home, moving into a dorm room or graduate housing, attending classes twelve or more hours per week, and putting in thirty to forty hours reading textbooks and writing papers, distance education has been a godsend. From the technology of a postal system that allows for correspondence course delivery of paper materials and audio/video tapes to the technology of real-time satellite television broadcast and digital video on the Internet, schools and universities are making innovative use of technology to include students who are unable to attend classes on the home campus.
The School of Library and Information Management (SLIM) at Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas began its Distance Education Program in 1987. The program was initiated at the request of library professionals in areas without local library and information management schools. In the ten to fifteen years prior to the beginning of the program, library and information management schools in the western half of the United States were closing and leaving large geographic regions without MLS programs.
At the time of this writing, SLIM is the only ALA-accredited library and information management school in a twelve-state area. The challenge to design a program that delivers a curriculum to various locations from two hundred to eighteen hundred miles from the home campus while maintaining quality and integrity is formidable -- and is constant. The result is a flexible program that enables completion of an MLS degree in less than three years, for students geographically bound by employment or family responsibilities. Since its inception, more than six hundred students have earned the degree through the program without ever needing to attend class on the home campus.
Much of the dialogue around distance education centers around overcoming geographical barriers by means of mediated instruction, such as offering classes over the Internet or via satellite television. For this reason, the SLIM program does not neatly fit the popular definition of distance education in "which teacher and learner are physically separated during the learning process." For SLIM, the student-teacher separation occurs primarily in the interim between weekend classes. E-mail, web page forums and toll-free telephone numbers help to overcome that separation.
SLIM faculty travel from Emporia to distance site locations and teach classes in a weekend intensive format. The basic formula is that a two-credit class is taught over two weekends, about a month apart, rather than the traditional two hours per week for sixteen weeks. Students attend class once every three to four weeks rather than two to three days every week. The format allows students to concentrate on the curriculum in longer time frames, so that instruction improves qualitatively. Students are able to schedule classes for a semester sequentially, rather than concurrently, which allows for more flexibility.
Dialogue among students and with faculty extends beyond the classroom via electronic mail and discussion forums. Each distance program has a dedicated electronic discussion list that students use to share information among the student cohort. Faculty and administration use the list to post announcements unique to that particular program. A common discussion list for all students helps facilitate communication, news, and general announcements. Each class has a dedicated WebCT site that allows for archived discussions, presentations on the web, and more.
SLIM has built its approach to distance education around Naisbett's notion of "high tech/high touch," (1) which is, that with every introduction of new technology, there must also be a counterbalance of human interaction, or the technology is rejected.
Galusha qualifies the need for high touch. She notes that "problems and barriers encountered by the [distance] student fall into several categories: costs and motivators, feedback and teacher contact, student support and services, alienation and isolation, lack of experience, and training." (2)
One example of high touch in the SLIM Distance Education Program is the team of four Site Coordinator/Student Advisors who work as the local administrators in each program location. In their role as student advisors, they are available for consultation during class weekends, by telephone and e-mail, and hold office hours for personal appointments. They each have an average of forty students and will have at least four face-to-face advising sessions with each student over the eight-semester cycle of a program. The Site Coordinators also encourage student social gatherings, track the return of student work from faculty, and work as advocates in the local area for their students. The SLIM Distance Education Program received the 1997 Outstanding Institutional Advising Program Award from the National Association of Academic Advising (NACADA).
The local site coordinators also provide high touch for visiting faculty members who may be unfamiliar with the classroom facilities, the local airport, motel and dining services. A high level of communication is required about faculty needs and resources long before the class weekend arrives. The coordinators represent SLIM at local library association meetings and maintain the human touch with local alumni. All four of the site coordinators spend several days each year on the Emporia campus for team building, advising training, and general social events so that they, too, receive the high touch necessary for success in their position.
Another example of the high tech/high touch approach is the combination of face-to-face and mediated instruction. As SLIM faculty begin to move their classes on-line, most are combining one weekend of face-to-face instruction with the balance of the course taught over the web. This results in less classroom and travel time for both students and faculty, while maintaining a high level of human touch.
A final example is the formation of local advisory councils in each of the program sites. Advisory council members are selected from various fields and local association chapters within the profession. Semi-annual Council meetings serve as general information sharing sessions. SLIM keeps members up to date on how the local program is going and council members advise SLIM on the profession within the local state. Council members are invited to interact with the students to help make students aware of the various associations, career paths and professional networks available to them. Council members may also be asked to work with the local Site Coordinator to recommend possible mentors for students.
SLIM is not adverse to using mediated instruction technology, and has experimented with live and streaming digital video for several years. This technology was used to facilitate interactions between two sections of students taking the same course, one group in Omaha, Nebraska and the other in Emporia. Later in the semester, these two groups were able to interact with faculty and participants of a conference in Warsaw, Poland. Two students attended the conference and videotaped interviews with conference attendees. The interview videos were then digitized and posted to a conference web site for student use. Similar work from a previous conference was made into a CD-ROM that is used as the class textbook.
Such global interactions grow out of an area of the curriculum that focuses on the international nature of modern information systems, and technology is used to initiate and cultivate international experiences. An adjunct faculty member facilitated a summer semester of e-mail interaction between a group of students in Utah and a group of students from a school in Brazil. The faculty member was teaching a course for both schools and groups of students in both countries. It was a valuable exercise in communication and collaboration. Similar experiences are just beginning with students of three library schools in Nigeria.
This is an example of how the Distance Education Program sees itself as a learning laboratory. It is aware of the different roles for students and teachers in this learning environment. As Galusha observes, in distance learning, "The teacher is no longer the sole source of knowledge but instead becomes a facilitator to support student learning, while the student actively participates in what and how knowledge is imparted. More than any other teaching method, distance learning requires a collaborative effort between student and teacher, unbounded by the traditional limits of time, space, and single-instructor effort." (3)
Not only does learning require a collaborative effort between student and teacher, but it is also important between student and student. The group learning experience is one that draws high marks from its participants in the SLIM program. While the SLIM Distance Education Program brings the campus to the student by holding classes in Lincoln, Denver, Albuquerque, etc., the geographical limitation still exists for students who live in such places as Chadron, Nebraska; Grand Junction, Colorado; and Carlsbad, New Mexico. Students in these outlying locations still face journeys of several hours, often over difficult terrain, in order to attend classes. Information gathered through student recruitment indicates that sizable numbers of potential students are still unable to take advantage of the program due to distance.
Another limitation of the current model is that students at locations other than Kansas are able to start the MLS program only once every two to three years. The time frame may be even longer in smaller markets where it takes longer to recruit enough students to make a program economically feasible. It is problematic for a student to join a program even one semester after it has started, because classes in the early semesters of a program are required theory courses and are offered only once in an eight-semester cycle. If a student wants to join a program in the second or third semester, these classes must be taken at another location.
As SLIM moves toward the goal of having 80% of its curriculum with a mediated component by the end of this year, the vision is to increase the number of program sites from four to eight. It is hoped that students would have to drive no more than three hours to attend classes. Face-to-face instruction might be offered only two or three weekends per semester in these locations, as opposed to the current six to eight weekends, with the balance of classes offered through mediated instruction. Students wanting more than one class per semester in face-to-face instruction would have the option to travel to other locations. The model would allow for economic feasibility with smaller student cohorts and for a more continuous presence in smaller market locations.
Since 1987, the SLIM Distance Education Program has extended library and information management education to adult learners by focusing on innovative strategies to bring the curriculum and the campus to the student in order to minimize geographic distance. The program continues to evolve as technology becomes available, but always maintaining the human touch. The reward for the student is a flexible system that is responsive to student need and that is increasingly available regardless of geographical location. The reward for SLIM comes from the participation and perspective of many more students of multiple backgrounds, cultures, and ways of life than would be possible if the student body were limited only to those able to attend classes on the home campus.
Daniel Roland is the Director of Communications at Emporia State University School of Library & Information Management. He received a MLS from SLIM in 1995 and is currently enrolled in the doctoral program of the school. He has worked as the Information Specialist for the Koch Crime Institute in Topeka, Kansas. He may be reached at 1-800-552-4770, ext. 5064 or by e-mail at rolandda@emporia.edu.
(2) Jill M. Galusha, "Barriers to Learning in Distance Education," The Infrastruction Network, p4.