The instructor's changing role in distance education

Abstract

The emergence of increasingly student-centered learning activities in the 1970s, facilitated by new instructional technology introduced in the 1980s, is contributing to a dramatic evolution in faculty roles, and raises fundamental questions within the professoriat about how it will contribute to the teaching-learning process in the 1990s and beyond. In particular, the likelihood of significant increases in distance learning enrollments within the next decade will have a profound impact on faculty members’ instructional roles. Distance education revolves around a learner-center ed system with teaching activity focused on facilitating learning. The teacher augments prepared study materials by providing explanations, references, and reinforcements for the student. Independent study stresses learning, rather than teaching, and is based on the principle that the key to learning is what students do, not what teachers do. It is a highly personalized process that converts newly acquired information into new insights and ideas. The institution’s function, and the task of its instructional personnel, is to facilitate and enhance that process - despite the distance - to achieve optimum learning outcomes. Rather that transmit information in person, many faculty will have to make the adjustment to monitoring and evaluating the work of geographically distant learners. Those faculty accustomed to more conventional teaching modes will have to acquire new skills to assume expanded roles not only to teach distance learners, but also to organize instructional resources suitable in content and format for independent study. A course previously designed as an intimate round-table seminar involving a dozen students known to the faculty member will have to be reconfigured for use by perhaps several hundred students who may never meet the instructor or one another, although all will be exposed to the same course material and will complete the same assignments and tests through the use of distance media. Further, faculty engaged in distance education must be adept at facilitating students’ learning through particular attention to process, unlike classroom-based teachers whose traditional role is largely confined to selecting and sharing content. This represents a major shift from the European model of the teacher as the exclusive source of information to being one of several resources available to learners who become more active participants in the process. This is a difficult and threatening situation for teachers, most of whom are themselves products of classroom-bound education and whose professional identities are linked to the traditional image of the teacher at the front of the classroom and at the center of the process. The teaching function is not becoming obsolete, but the role is being transformed dramatically. In addition to being adept at both content and process, faculty must recognize the role of instructional technology as a learning resource. The teacher is increasingly an intermediary between students and available resources. Teachers must know something about the potential of technology to facilitate learning and to enhance their own effectiveness. They must come to recognize how technological applications can create greater access to education by overcoming time and distance problems, and how it provides for diverse learning needs because it has the capacity to deliver material in many different formats.

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