Academic issues and future directions

From the start, correspondence courses acquired a poor academic reputation, especially those provided by for-profit entities. As early as 1926, as a study commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation found, there was widespread fraud among correspondence schools in the United States, and there were no adequate standards to protect the public. While the situation was later improved by the introduction of accrediting agencies that set standards for the delivery of distance learning programs, there has always been concern about the quality of the learning experience and the verification of student work. Additionally, the introduction of distance learning in traditional institutions raised fears that technology will someday completely eliminate real classrooms and human instructors.

Because many distance learning programs are offered by for-profit institutions, distance learning has become associated with the commercialization of higher education. Generally, critics of this trend point to the potential exploitation of students who do not qualify for admission to traditional colleges and universities, the temptation in for-profit schools to lower academic standards in order to increase revenue, and a corporate administrative approach that emphasizes “market models” in educational curricula, or the designing of courses and curricula to appeal to a larger demographic in order to generate more institutional revenue—all of which point to a lowering of academic standards.

Distance learning, whether at for-profit universities or at traditional ones, utilizes two basic economic models designed to reduce labour costs. The first model involves the substitution of labour with capital, whereas the second is based on the replacement of faculty with cheaper labour. Proponents of the first model have argued that distance learning offers economies of scale by reducing personnel costs after an initial capital investment for such things as Web servers, electronic texts and multimedia supplements, and Internet programs for interacting with students. However, many institutions that have implemented distance learning programs through traditional faculty and administrative structures have found that ongoing expenses associated with the programs may actually make them more expensive for the institution than traditional courses. The second basic approach, a labour-for-labour model, is to divide the faculty role into the functions of preparation, presentation, and assessment and to assign some of the functions to less-expensive workers. Open universities typically do this by forming committees to design courses and hiring part-time tutors to help struggling students and to grade papers, leaving the actual classroom instruction duties, if any, to the professors. These distance learning models suggest that the largest change in education will come in altered roles for faculty and vastly different student experiences.

The emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the first and second decades of the 21st century represented a major shift in direction for distance learning. MOOCs are characterized by extremely large enrollments—in the tens of thousands—the use of short videotaped lectures, and peer assessments. The open-online-course format had been used early on by some universities, but it did not become widely popular until the emergence of MOOC providers such as Coursera, edX, Khan Academy, and Udacity. Although the initial purpose of MOOCs was to provide informal learning opportunities, there have been experiments in using this format for degree credit and certifications from universities.