Weeks 8 & 9: My conversation with Terry Anderson

Professor Anderson,
Welcome to our discussion week! I was thinking the whole week what to ask you. I read your blog, but I do not think there is a definition of Distance Education in there. Therefore here is my couple of questions:
1. What is your definition of DE? Why is it so hard to define it?
2. When you travel all over the world for DE conferences, do you find countries that need a lot of DE "upgrading" so to say?
3. Do you think DE in the U.S. is of a high quality? Are we behind or ahead? If yes, in what aspects?
4. Are there any challenges that DE is still facing? What are they?
Thank you so much for all your responses and participation!
Olga

Professor Terry Anderson's response to me:

Hi Olga
Thanks for the questions, I'll take a shot at them, but hope others jump in.
1. What is your definition of DE? Why is it so hard to define it?  This seems to have been a major topic of the course and so I wanted spoil it by jumping to any easy and conclusive definition.  I guess I kept the definition simple to be A form of formal education in which the students and teacher are separated by physical distance and/or in time.  The definition is contests because the nature of the technology used to support both content delivery and interaction is always changing and people love to give a new name to any new venture, thus the mobile learning, e-learning, online learning all are just variations of DE.
2. When you travel all over the world for DE conferences, do you find countries that need a lot of DE "upgrading" so to say?   Of course I see this and especially when I travel to the USA (just kidding....). Given the speed of change and educations in built resistance to change, distance delivery looks different in many countries. In addition the big cousin (campus based education ) is also run differently in response to different cultural and economic constraints and opportunities, so it is not surprising that this effects DE as well.
3. Do you think DE in the U.S. is of a high quality? Are we behind or ahead? If yes, in what aspects? (sorry for the joke in #2, I hadn't seen the US question coming).  I'll respond to your question by using my usual response to these type of institutional question and the US.  The USA has the best universities and the best hospitals in the world. It has also has some of the worst universities and terrible hospitals.  Overall the health and the education of its citizens is somewhere in the middle - at least of developed countries.  So I can think of many great DE programs, but also hear about some pretty bads ones and especially in the For-Profit sector - Trump University comes to mind.  

4. Are there any challenges that DE is still facing? What are they?  While I'll bet you can answer this as well as I Olga.  One that I see come up regularly is big data and learning analytics.  For most DE teachers, the students activities are way more hidden than in campus education. So we often get the feeling we are teaching into a blackhole. Learning analytics promises to shine the light on these activities and this is both good and bad. For the student it can be invasive and if misused by the eduction institution or company, the data can be used for their economic or political use - think the Russians and Facebook.   Finally like every institution in the midst of rapid technological and pedagogical change, adoption of innovations -within our institutional models is very challenging.