Introduction
Distance learning and the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) are both ancient, yet both are new. Distance learning is now associated with online learning using digital technologies, but it goes back to learning by rudimentary means of correspondence between someone with something to teach and those with a desire or need to learn. Oral stories and traditions preserved and passed on the teaching of individuals and cultures. With the development of writing, epistles, letters, scrolls, then books became the favored medium. In the late modern age, correspondence courses used overland mail delivery for those exchanges, but that was replaced with audio (telephone, audio tapes) and video (television, video tapes) means. The common thread for all those centuries of such distance learning is that the process tended to see learning as transmission of information and knowledge from a knower to relatively passive receivers (students).
The best teachers at any time in history have always been scholars of teaching. They have known that people learn best when most involved in the inquiry, when most able to question, analyze, interpret, evaluate, reflect, reconceive or reimagine, and communicate. These great teachers studied their students as their students studied what was being taught, and adjusted their teaching based upon what the students were actually learning; able to do with that learning. Not content with having students merely accumulate information or knowledge, these teachers created a continuous learning-loop of knowledge, experience, experimentation and application, assessment , reflection, revision, and new knowledge. These teachers were Socratic constructivists in practice, if not in name.
What is new is that now distance learning almost exclusively means online learning, where teachers and students can be anywhere and the learning process can occur synchronously and, largely, asynchronously. The digital age is transforming not only distance learning, but learning itself. As Milliron says, “In today’s higher education world, asynchronous learning is the power tool. Moreover, the associated techniques for using asynchronous learning to support in-class and online instruction are bringing learning to life in new and exciting ways” (2004), digital technologies plus cognitive and learning theories make for unanticipated opportunities for the educational process.
Yet with the expansive, if uneven, growth of distance learning, there has not been sufficient attention given to its processes and outcomes by those doing the scholarship of teaching and learning, or SoTL (Hake, 2007), not including examples like Buchanan (2001), Garner et al. (2005), and Hostetter & Busch (2006) Concurrent with the ongoing effort, spearheaded by Ernest Boyer in the 1990s, to recognize various forms of scholarship as valid, including the scholarship of teaching (Boyer, 1990), is the application of SoTL to all forms of academic teaching and learning, including distance learning.
background
Distance learning is learning removed from the physical presence of the teacher and, usually, other students. Thus, distance learning today is done from computer stations or home computers. As more of the world is connected to the Internet and has email access, the potential for online distance learning increases. But what is the quality of such distance learning?
That is a question that has been compared to the parallel question, “what is the quality of classroom or face-to-face learning?” Assumptions have abounded: that classroom teaching is necessarily better because of the human contact factor; that teaching via digital technologies is better because of all the multimedia ways subjects can be presented. Many studies (but not all) have settled on the view that between both ways of teaching and learning, there is no significant difference given that technologies may be used in various ways and effectiveness (Oblinger & Hawkins, 2006; Russell, 2001; Schulman & Sims, 1999).
Research on teaching in recent decades has concluded that traditional classroom teaching results in a focus upon lower-order thinking and learning (memorization, isolated knowledge) and not on the higher-order thinking and learning desired (analysis, synthesis, interpretation, evaluation, transference to different contexts, problem-solving). Distance Learning can learn from classroom teaching while seeking even better results.
Can we all agree to quit striving to make online education as good as face-to-face and stop comparing it to traditional education? Or is this a necessary comparison to make for any of a variety of reasons? How can we keep from falling into the rut of simply comparing new methods, strategies, and media to what we know? (McDonald, 2002)
Arguments have been made that asynchronous distance learning, while still relatively new and unstudied, can result in deeper learning than classroom, synchronous learning (Lou et al., 2006. Hacker and Niederhauser claim strong empirical basis for saying that online learning can be “even more conducive than traditional classrooms” in using basic learning principles (2000, p. 81). These kinds of research are examples of what happens when pedagogical and educational assumptions are questioned. Kreber states that: when teachers engage in inquiry-based learning about teaching through content, process, and premise reflection, they may drawn on, first, their experience-based knowledge of teaching, and second, formal or theory-based knowledge of pedagogy to provide evidence for the validity of their assumptions. (2006)
Through such inquiry, online learning can address the not inconsiderable skepticism about the learning effectiveness of distance learning. The newness of online learning has, so far, precluded a significant body of research on its effectiveness from becoming part of professional and public knowledge (Waterhouse, 2005, p. 250). But as that newness fades, SoTL research must supply that knowledge.
SoTL continues to disclose, across all and in every academic discipline, that what is important is not what the teacher does, but how the students experience the learning process and what they can do with that learning. The great teacher is simply one with whom students learn in significant, enduring ways. The methods or techniques of teaching are not the key; the students’ active learning and discernible learning outcomes are. SoTL is a focus upon learning outcomes and is needed by all of higher education. Huber and Hutchings state it boldly: “Our argument, then, is that the scholarship of teaching and learning is an imperative for higher education today, not a choice” (2005, p. 13). Therefore, there is a great need to build up a body of research literature about distance learning by SoTL scholars from which all who teach via distance learning can benefit. This research contributes to a contemporary need to re-imagine academic organizations, structures and theories of teaching and learning (Palloff & Pratt, 1999).
THE SOTL LINK
The scholarship of teaching and learning has become an international momentum for improving student learning. As such, an understanding of SoTL and its effectiveness in changing the way teaching is approached internationally in all disciplines and in all formats, including online and distance learning, is significant.
With the rapid and constant development of online technologies and of academic courses, programs and degrees online, high levels of funding and support staff are required for implementing distance learning initiatives. However, how is it known what methods of online teaching and which technologies are most effective in improving student learning in particular contexts? In distance learning it is bad business and questionable pedagogy to base outcomes upon unreflec-tive assumptions or conventional hopes.
The scholarship of teaching and learning, through its inquiry-led, evidence-based approach to teaching and learning, calls for the gathering of evidence from the actual educational contexts in order to measure the scope and quality of students’ learning and how best to create an online process for creating optimal pedagogical results. SoTL, therefore, helps the teacher become a scholar of how people learn and how best to teach one’s discipline or topic so that it is learned well (Weimer, 2006; McKinney, 2007). Simply trying to replicate classroom methods in a virtual environment is to miss unique opportunities that digital contexts provide. SoTL can transcend assumptions about learning and lead to efficient, cost-effective online outcomes in places not otherwise possible.
The rush to develop online courses and programs in higher education came at a steep price. The financial cost to purchase and maintain computers, hardware, software, networks, servers, etc., plus the need to hire support personnel in information technology units, plus the training of faculty to use the technologies to teach the courses results in an enormous outlay of money, time, and people. Yet much of this rush to be a “wired campus to the world” has been done with very little understanding of how and why online learning does and should differ from classroom learning. In other words, distance learning has been pursued as a great idea upon the assumption that it would result in an adequate quality of teaching and learning, mainly because online courses are largely taught by the same faculty who teach fact-to-face classes.
If classroom teaching is complex, serious intellectual work, and requires the teacher to know the basics of how humans learn, distance learning is equally so. There are clear similarities between traditional and distance teaching: desire to teach well and the desire to learn well; knowledge of human learning and pedagogy / andragogy; active involvement in the learning process; communication and work with others involved in the study; regular feedback to the learners; opportunities to rethink, rework and revise. Whether teaching in a classroom or via a computer, it is people who are participating in an intellectual, developmental activity. SoTL has been perhaps the best way to improve classroom teaching by bringing the actual results of teaching and learning out into the open.
For example, in calling for SoTL scholars to use methods that measure for higher-order learning in “Can Distance and Classroom Learning Be Increased?,” Richard Hake (2007, p. 1) says that “pre/post testing might demonstrate a substantive superiority over traditional classroom teaching for both classroom and distance education that recognize recent advances in cognitive science and emphasize learning rather than teaching. But such demonstration probably cannot be achieved if scholars of teaching and learning continue to rely on low-resolution gauges of students’ learning.” By the inherent, intentional nature of SoTL (when using high-resolution gauges) to foster a shift from teaching methods to learning processes and outcomes, and by SoTL’s focus upon integrating rigorous theories of cognition and learning into the teaching-learning dynamics, SoTL can, with probability, raise distance learning effectiveness and outcomes. At the very least, SoTL enables distance learning to build on what has been learned from classroom teaching and from the modest amount of current research on digital, asynchronous distance learning.
Thus, what SoTL can do for distance learning is help avoid some of the inertia found in much of classroom teaching where student passivity leads to lower-order thinking. Distance learning must not simply try to replicate classroom learning, but utilize the opportunities for immediate resource acquisition, cross-cultural collaborations and contacts, narrative and multimedia communication, and all the other aspects of digital technologies that can provide distance learning with unique ways for students to experience learning. Full and discerning integration of these technologies has the potential, perhaps even probability, of leaving “no significant difference” behind and giving distance learning a validity that could positively influence the too-slow transformation of classroom learning.
future trends
The trajectory of the future for the relationship between distance / online learning and SoTL is wide and open, ready for faculty teacher-scholars to study the objectives, outcomes, and design of their online courses of study. Whereas SoTL is advancing steadily, but gradually, among classroom teachers, it could assume a much more prominent role, more quickly, in the world of distance learning.
With the further anticipated increase in online degrees, courses, faculty, students, and revenues, there is much at stake in developing distance learning to be not only cost effective, but of the highest educational and professional quality. There does not seem to be anything that can inform and form that quality more than a systematic, persevering SoTL approach that is made public, accessible, reviewable: building up disciplinary and trans-disciplinary bodies ofpedagogical knowledge about teaching and learning online. One could even say that SoTL can become distance learning’s closest friend that speaks openly and honestly, based upon the learning evidence at hand (a virtual and real hand).
conclusion
From ancient times people have desired to learn and know, making those distant peoples not only our ancestors, but our companions in learning. Most of the ancients experienced formal learning in a proximate context, but rudimentary distance learning did exist. The historical story of distance learning discloses that the technologies for learning have changed and developed, making learning at a distance from the source of the teaching more available and potentially more effective.
Yet even the most state-of-the-art technologies today when used in distance learning contexts do not guarantee significant, enduring learning will occur. Often what seems to happen is that the quality of classroom teaching and learning is replicated and projected into a digital context which often limits the quality of that online learning from the start. “No significant difference” is not a great recommendation and distance learning needs to envision greater student learning outcomes than occurs in too many traditional classrooms.
The secret to how distance learning can achieve such desirable results for students is no secret at all, even if it has been, so far, relegated to the periphery of the distance learning world. For distance learning to be more than expensive correspondence courses with multimedia flash, or to be more than digitized replications of traditional forms on classroom teaching and learning, SoTL is needed.
SoTL stimulates inquiry into what is being learned, how it is being learned, and why it is being learned as it is. From that inquiry come questions that the teacher / researcher can pursue in informal or formal investigations that yield qualitative and / or quantitative evidence of the student learning outcomes. By being made public and open for critique, those investigations can benefit all who teach online. It would be a real error and missed opportunity for distance learning to be as slow as classroom teaching and learning to realize that SoTL is the most effective, efficient way to improve a course, a program, or a whole curriculum (classroom, blended, or online).
With some educational insight, distance learning, by embracing SoTL, can avoid losing pedagogical knowledge in the digital ocean of information, and losing the wisdom of learning in faulty knowledge of teaching. Said another way, SoTL can help online teachers and learners recapture the innate human desire and need to learn, to know, even to gain a little in wisdom. Through SoTL, online teachers themselves become online learners of how and why their students learn in the best ways.
key terms
Andragogy: Theory of adult learning and teaching adult learners.
Asynchronous Learning: A learning context not limited by the teaching-learning process occurring at a delineated time; learners can participate at their convenience using various technologies.
Correspondence Course: Former term for distance learning as developed in the late 19th century and initially conducted via postal mail, later by email, telephone, FAX, etc.
e-Learning: Learning within a digital environment (Internet) that can be synchronous or asynchronous.
Face-to-Face: Traditional classroom setting for teaching and learning where teacher and students are at the same location at the same time.
Online Learning: A learning process experienced via the Internet.
Pedagogy: Theory of teaching and learning, originally referring to the learning of children but usually generalized for all academic learning.
SoTL: An inquiry-led, research-based investigation of student learning outcomes that is made public, open for critique, and that builds up a body of knowledge.
Synchronous Learning: A learning context process occurring in real-time that could be either in traditional classroom or in simultaneous distance learning.
Virtual: Simulated, online learning environment as opposed to physical, proximate environments.
