Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy

International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning

Vol. 12.3   March – 2011

Terry Anderson and Jon Dron

Athabasca University, Canada

page 84 

(video) to be transmitted through television, film, and multimedia-based educational productions. Despite the general absence of the teacher in these CB pedagogies, one cannot discount the teaching presence that potentially could be developed through one-to-one written correspondence, telephone conversation, or occasional face-to-face interaction between teacher and student, as amply demonstrated in the movie and play versions of Educating Rita. Despite this potential, the teaching-presence role is confused in that the learning package that instantiates CB pedagogical models is supposed to be self-contained and complete, requiring only teacher–learner interaction for marking and evaluation. No doubt some distance education students using this model do experience high levels of teaching presence, but for many, teaching presence is only mediated through text and recorded sound and images. This reduction of the role and importance of the teacher further fueled resentment by traditional educators against the CB model of distance education and gave rise to the necessity of creating single-mode institutions which could develop educational models free from the constraint of older models of classroom-based and teacher-dominated education.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Cognitive-Behaviourist Models

To summarize, CB models defined the first generation of individualized distance education. They maximized access and student freedom, and were capable of scaling to very large numbers at significantly lower costs than traditional education, as demonstrated by the successful mega-universities (Daniel, 1996). However, these advantages were accompanied by the very significant reductions in teaching, social presence, and formal models of cognitive presence, reductions that have come under serious challenge since the latter decades of the 20th century. While appropriate when learning objectives are very clear, CB models avoid dealing with the full richness and complexity of humans learning to be, as opposed to learning to do (Vaill, 1996). People are not blank slates but begin with models and knowledge of the world and learn and exist in a social context of great intricacy and depth.

Social-Constructivist Pedagogy of Distance Education

While there is a tradition of cognitive-constructivist thinking that hinges on personal construction of knowledge, largely developed by Piaget and his followers (Piaget, 1970), the roots of the constructivist model most commonly applied today spring from the work of Vygotsky and Dewey, generally lumped together in the broad category of social constructivism. Social-constructivist pedagogies, perhaps not coincidently, developed in conjunction with the development of two-way communication technologies. At this time, rather than transmitting information, technology became widely used to create opportunities for both synchronous and asynchronous interactions between and among students and teachers. Michael Moore’s famous theory of transactional distance (1989) noted the capacity for flexible interaction to substitute for structure in distance education development and delivery models. A number of researchers noted the challenges of getting the mix of potential interactions right (Anderson, 2003; Daniel & Marquis, 1988). Social-constructivist pedagogy acknowledges the social nature of knowledge and of its creation in the minds of individual learners. Teachers do not merely transmit knowledge to