As a busy distance education professional, I am sure you are asked to hold faculty development workshops. In such workshops, the concentration is usually on technology. Inclusion of technology is important in two respects:

1. Faculty need to know how to work with it.

2. Faculty need to know how it changes the culture of their work.

While the first point is covered well in most workshops, the second point is neglected.

When faculty learn technology skills and try to engage in a distance education practice they quickly find out that this method of work is very different than what they are used to. They may shy away from a sustained involvement in distance education. They may set-up an online course, nurse it for a while and when the novelty effect wares off, they would abandon it.

This behavior, in fact, matches their culture of work, although it might look bizarre to the distance education professional. Faculty are solo workers. They are craftspeople who experiment with ideas in their classrooms, use them for a while and go on to a new idea. In doing so, they do not need to coordinate their work with anyone but themselves. They use technological tools as long as it is under their personal control and does not require the help of anyone else. Technologies, such as television, Webcasts, or learning management systems, on the other hand, require standardization, and division of labor. It is very hard and time consuming for one individual to use any of these technologies individually for a sustained period of time. Technology might also demand centralization of some work processes in the administration, or the campus media technology services. In short, faculty must synchronize their work with the work schedule of the others when they engage in distance education, something that they rarely do as part of their normal practice. While 1. Standardization around certain technologies, 2. Specialization by dividing certain tasks to specialists, 3. Synchronization of work processes with others, and 4. Centralization of management when it makes sense and provides economy of scale makes sense for the distance educator; these cultural norms are interpreted as encroachment in their academic freedom by most faculty.
As a faculty development workshop provider, you are not just asking the faculty to learn how to work with WebCT or Blackboard, you are asking him/her to change the culture of his/her work. Successful workshops should include training on these cultural changes and discuss standardization, specialization, synchronization and centralization with faculty as well.

I often remind my students that they live in a truly remarkable time in history. Historians of this period will most probably refer to it as a second renaissance. This is especially true about social sciences. They are redefining themselves by breaking away from methods of inquiry of physical sciences and establishing methods of their own. These new methods acknowledge the subjective while keeping previous objective quantitative analytical methods. Subjective methods have empowered the individual and put his/her understanding in par with that of the scientist of the yesteryears. The result has been growth in many areas, but confusion too.

Also, we live in an age that “you” are the Person of the Year! That means the you have the power to define your life, education, learning, health care, and perhaps even the field of distance education! And many are busy doing exactly that. They are putting forward new definitions for the field. The problem is that some of these definitions do not even pass the casual test of examining their face value. So, we have to resolve the perennial question of the role of the people in defining what science is in a democratic society. But, while philosophers are dealing with the paradoxes of postmodernism, and even when they have resolved such a prodigious task, we have to make sure that how we define our field would make sense to the lay and elite as well.

In recent years, definitions of the field and related to the field of distance education have surfaced that simply do not make sense!

In this series, I will analyze some of these definitions line by line, and will propose explanations for them from a systems science viewpoint which would be easily understood because they would be logical, and paradigmatic because they would not be convoluted.

I would like to begin with Asynchronous learning

Line 1- Asynchronous Learning - Any learning event where interaction is delayed over time.

Analysis: This could include a wide array of classroom interactions. There are many instances (not among my students mind you) that student interaction is delayed! Would those students be considered Asynchronous learners?

Line 2- This allows learners to participate according to their schedule, and be geographically separate from the instructor.

Analysis: Participate in what? Also, learners and teachers are always geographically separated. I have never seen a learner that has been physically attached to an instructor; have you?

Line 3- Could be in the form of a correspondence course or elearning . Interaction can take use various technologies like threaded discussion.

Analysis: So, if I am participating in a correspondence course, but have the option of calling my instructor or tutor via the phone, such as the practice in Gemological Institute of America, would that be Asynchronous learning, eLearning, or synchronous learning?

Synthesis: You can see that this definition defies simple logic. Observing any practice also negates it, let alone the fact that there have been no psychological studies of learning in this category. Learning is a change in a person’s conation, cognition and behavior. Synchronousity and asynchronousity, however, are modes of communication, not learning. These in normal ordinary life are not pure states either. Very rarely people communicate purely in one or the other mode. We can say that in education, communication can vary in a continuous state between synchronous and asynchronous. They are, therefore matters of degree not absolute states.

As such the concept of Asynchrnous Learning as a category of change in one’s conation, cognition or action has no face validity and is not helpful in understanding distance education. Stating that distance educators use synchronous and asynchronous communication to reach their learners and communicate with them has face validity and can be verified experimentally. Stating that such communication is a matter of degree and is one component in defining transactional distance between instructor and learner is also useful in illuminating the field and has use for practice, theory and research. Figure 1 is causal loop digram that shows the variable relationship between the rate of synchronous and asynchronous communication in measuring the level of transactional distance.

I think we can agree that the learning management systems currently available, such as Blackboard, are no more than means of providing instructional content to students and receiving some feedback from them. In reality, they mimic classroom instruction at best. What they do not do is manage learning! It is a misnomer to call them learning management systems.

What is needed in the future is a system by which students can truly manage their learning. In broad terms this new system would provide

• requisite structure to guide the learner towards what s/he must learn according to his or her prior knowledge of a domain, and learning preferences, as well as
• desired dialog to accommodate the learner’s creative motivation.

This means allowing the learner to:

• Assess his/her learning preferences, and develop a learning profile as a guide to managing his/her study habits, metacognition and general academic experience that would lead to success

• Offer live and/or automated academic and instructional advising
• Provide a rich array of instructional information to dynamically adapt to the learner’s preferences, prior knowledge and learning objectives.
• Provide for the learner a rich environment for exploration
• Offer relevant environments for learner to develop new ideas, experiment with such ideas and transfer them to novel situations
• Provide supportive and corrective dynamic feedback to the learner, and
• Prompt the instructor to intervene at appropriate times.

It is time for learning management systems to stop being the conveyor of the one-size-fit-all system of education which may have been appropriate in the industrial era and allow learners to engage in the type of learning that they need in order to become competitive in the work place of the future.

The distance learner, perhaps more than any other learner, needs to rely on his/her own ability to learn. In the absence of an immediate support group of peers, tutors and instructors the distance learner has to know how s/he learns, and be able to manage her ability to learn. For example, one might know that s/he can solve mathematical problems when there is not a lot of distraction. That is knowledge about how one’s learning is facilitated. The other aspect is knowing that one’s learning is enhanced by reviewing several examples related to the problem at hand first, setting them aside, and then attempting to solve the given problem as compared to plunging right into solving the problem without the benefit of prior examples.

The term psychologists use to describe thinking about thinking is metacognition. (Livingston, 2003) It refers to two concepts:

1. Knowing how cognitive processes function
2. Knowing how to control cognitive processes.

Instructional designers and instructor who design or teach courses at a distance, therefore need to offer their students the chance to

• Learn about the information processing capability of the brain. The primary lesson here should be that students must do something with the new information they receive to learn it; examples would be summarizing it, repeat it to a friend, or using it solving a problem.
• Become aware of how one learns. This would be aceived through self-reflection after a learning exercise or period. Stopping and reflecting on how I solved this problem is essential in developing one’s metacognitive ability.
• Identify and describe the nature of the task. This would be clearly identifying a task, such as conducting a chemistry experiment in the lab, writing a term paper, operating a new cell phone, etc.
• Identifying and distinguishing the nature of the learning strategy is also significant. How was the task mastered? Was sheer force of memorization, drill and practice, applying previously learned rules to a new situation, understanding the context of a problem and comparing it with the context of other problems solved before, etc. useful?

The more students learn about how their brain function in general, and how they think idiosyncratically, the better learners they become. Also, the more they are able to distinguish and describe the nature of the task that they have to learn, and what strategy they can use to master the task, their learning is enhanced.

For further reading also see (Flavell, 1979; Kuyper et al., 2000; Olugbemiro et al., 1999)

References
Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring a new era of cognitive-development inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906-911.
Kuyper, H., van der Werf, M. P. C., & Lubbers, M. J. (2000). Motivation, meta-cognition and self regulation as predictors of long term educational attainment. Educational Research and Evaluation, 6(3), 181-205.
Livingston, J. A. (2003). Metacognition- an overview. ERIC Document Number ED 474 273.
Olugbemiro, J., Taplin, M., Fan, R. Y. K., Chan, M. S. C., & Yum, J. (1999). Differences between low and high achieving distance learners in locus of control and metacognition. Distance Education, 20(2), 255.

Americans, according to recent census, (Logue, 2006) are moving out of the cities to suburbs and beyond. The great American migration to the cities, which started in the 1860s is reversing itself. (Tindall & Shi, 1996) Between 1860 and 1910 the urban population of the United States grew from 6 million to 44 million, and by 1920 more than half of the population of the country lived in cities. (p. 877). This trend continued until the 1950s when most Americans lived in urban areas. After WW II and the maturation of industrialization in making automobiles at an affordable price for the middle class, the great movement to suburbs started. This created a new culture around “bedroom communities” with fast food restaurants and malls. People still had to commute to cities for work in factories or business offices.

It seems that more than 50 years later, people, in almost all ethnic backgrounds are spreading beyond suburbs. This exurbanization is a relatively new phenomenon. It signals the fact that people no longer have to converge around factories in cities to work, as they did in the first half of the 20th century, and no longer need to go to offices in urban areas to conduct business as they did in the past 50 years. The nexus of telecommunication and computers, availability of high speed communication in exurbia and the change from a second wave industrial economy to a third wave post-industrial economy (Toffler, 1980) has made living in the cities superfluous. In fact information technology has become the great decentralizer. Exurbanization of population and decentralization of work bodes well for distance education. It does not mean that great central campuses will die and wither away. Many baby boomers will probably flock to central campuses to take the music, literature or drama courses which they missed while they were taking algebra and trigonometry, or simply sit back and enjoy a football game or a live concert.

However, the sons and daughters of Millennial Generation will have no second thoughts in finding appropriate learning experiences in formal university courses and informal environments in exurbs on a computer.

References
Logue, S. (2006). Hispanic, black and Asian Americans are spreading out across the country. http://www.citymayors.com/society/us_migration.html.
Tindall, G. B., & Shi, D. E. (1996). America: A narrative history (Fourth ed.). New York: W. W. Norton.
Toffler, A. (1980). The third wave. New York: Bantam Books.