Trends and Issues in Distance Education: International Perspectives (review)

This collection brings together contributions from 24 authors from five continents and covers a wide range of distance education themes. It has four parts:

1. 1. Five distinct perspectives on global trends and issues in distance education.

2. 2. Four interviews with leaders in the field: Otto Peters, Don Ely, Barbara Spronk, and Robert Morgan.

3. 3. Eight carefully contextualised case studies speaking to the successes and shortcomings of distance education in various regions of the world.

4. 4. Three chapters on design and development trends for international distance education.

In their introduction, the editors certainly raise expectations. "There remains little question that there is a growing base of intellectual capital within the field that desperately requires collection and codification," they assert (p. ix). Furthermore they comment that the field itself has not always been successful in offering an integrated representation of the experiences of distance educators around the world and that, when it has, such perspectives have "seldom been analysed from the standpoint of the state of the discipline per se" (p. x). However, they see the book's purpose as the more modest one of contributing to this discipline "by presenting international perspectives on the state of the field, and by exploring specific current trends and issues faced by the distance learning community" (p. x).

What is considered to be a trend or an issue? The interview with Don Ely focuses on a definition: a trend is "a line of general direction of movement and a prevailing tendency or inclination. The general movement over a course of time of a statistically detectable change" (p. 84). Ely further notes that current and emerging trends should be international. An issue is seen as "a burning question that people are trying to resolve in some way" (p. 87).

Two chapters concentrate on itemising trends: Peters's interview looks at trends that bear on higher education and distance education, namely the pressure on funds for higher education, with distance education seen as an attractive cost-cutting mechanism; the rise in for-profit higher education institutions; the interesting perception that traditional institutions are becoming more like distance education institutions and not vice versa; that academic accountability is increasing but without the necessary accompanying training; and the resistance by some faculty to online course delivery.

He also claims that the very nature of scientific knowledge will not remain the same because of developments in digitized learning. Discussion of these trends, however, is left to a minimum, and the reader is referred to his Distance Education in Transition: New Trends and Challenges (2003).

In a similar vein, Brent G. Wilson in Chapter 1 lists the following as key trends in education with implications for distance education: "technologizing" school systems, learner and user-centred philosophies, moves to automate instructional design, the digital shift and advances in information technologies, the global marketplace, radical forces inspired by global connectivity, and changing paradigms of thought in instructional design. He then writes tantalizingly brief, descriptive paragraphs on each theme, raising but not exploring contentious claims such as "the shift to online learning . . . creates new economies of scale" (p. 13).

More satisfyingly, Visser explores themes related to distance education's contribution to the overall improvement of the human condition through developing the learning capacity of the world's people. Along with other authors in the collection (Dodds, Day, Muriel Visser-Valfrey, et al.), he laments the unfulfilled promise of distance education, especially insofar as distance educators have sought to transfer "found solutions" from one context to another and the extent to which they have emulated face-to-face practices rather than concentrating on "creating the best conditions for human learning" (p. 40). He bemoans what he sees as an overemphasis on cost-effectiveness in distance education and worries about the commodification of education, where, borrowing from Sfard, acquisition rather than participation becomes the metaphor (p. 42).

Dodds, in a chapter concentrating on developing countries...