General Education and Distance Education: Two Channels in the New Mainstream

Introduction

University-level distance education began in the United States in 1892, when the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, and The Pennsylvania State University launched their first correspondence study programs. The late 19th century was a time of great change in the United States. The Western frontier had closed in 1891. The nation was absorbing massive waves of immigrants and, at the same time, was shifting from an agrarian to an industrial economy. At Penn State, the initial focus of correspondence study was to use the still-experimental system of Rural Free Delivery to improve rural life and help secure the country's agricultural base.

These were also times of significant change in American higher education. The emergence of the research university and the land-grant college movement had led to a conflict between advocates of a utilitarian curriculum, who focused on service to the community, and advocates of liberal culture, who opposed what they saw as the materialistic vocationalism of the utilitarian movement and the narrow intellectualism of research (Miller, 1988). This struggle would help shape the development of the general education movement at the end of World War I.

Throughout this century, general education and distance education have been affected by, and help effect, higher education's response to the shifting currents of American society. Since the 1980s, however, their fortunes have been increasingly intertwined. In 1988, I noted three factors that would shape the future of general education: the change in standards for professional education, the emergence of the adult learner as a significant percentage of the student population, and the rise of computer-based technologies that offer new instructional tools (Miller, 1988). In the intervening decade, these three factors have not only contributed to the demand for general education, they have brought distance education into a new prominence in higher education.

Distance Education: From Individual Access to Virtual Learning Communities

Access to higher education has always been central to the notion of distance education. Independent Learning, a descendant of correspondence study, originally used printed materials and mail-in assignments to provide access to geographically isolated individuals. While the model has been expanded to include broadcast and cable television, video and audio cassettes, computer-based materials, and, most recently, E-mail and the Internet, this approach still assumes an isolated, individual student who studies alone. Since the 1970s, institutions have used microwave systems, telephone conferencing, satellite, compressed interactive video, and variations on these technologies to distribute live classroom lectures to remote sites. In these cases, the students comprise a distributed classroom. However, access remains the primary benefit.

Growing access to the World Wide Web has created a third approach to distance education: asynchronous learning networks. Recognizing that, in today's society, students are isolated not only by geography but also by time, asynchronous learning networks use on-line computing to allow students to study at their own time and location; the networks also permit students to work together and to have access to a wide range of information and learning resources. This new learning environment encourages active and collaborative learning with an emphasis on inquiry, independent use of information resources, case study approaches, and individual and small-group problem solving and decision making. The result, which is increasingly apparent in on-line distance education programs offered around the world, is a virtual learning community, where technology is used not only to provide access to instruction but also to create a highly interactive, resource-rich learning environment (Miller, 1995).

This new capacity in distance education parallels recent developments in general education. General education can no longer be defined simply as the breadth component of the undergraduate curriculum (Levine, 1978). A more comprehensive definition is as follows:

General education is a comprehensive, self-consciously developed and maintained program that develops in individual students the attitude of inquiry; the skills of problem...