U.S. Distance Learning and Overseas Advising Services
by Glenn Shive, Ph.D.
The revolution in digital global
telecommunications will affect many aspects of international education as we know it. One
manifestation of this revolution is the rapid growth in distance education initiatives
among U.S. universities. Although the primary target audience of these programs are the
"nontraditional" adult students in the United States, the new Web-based delivery
systems, in contrast to the television, satellite, and cable communications used in the
past, are not restricted by national boundaries.
Not So Distant Questions
- Can the distance learning programs designed for
U.S. students living out-of-state also work for non-U.S. students living overseas? Is the
next stage of international education the digital export of university instruction and
services to overseas markets?
- As distance learning initiatives by American
universities reach across national borders, how will they affect the roles and services of
overseas advising offices? Will advisers be pushed aside by search engines on the digital
information highway? Or will advising centers become more important than ever? What new
roles and services may be needed? Who will support and train these centers to perform
them?
- Will distance learning diminish over time the flow
of foreign students to U.S. campuses? Or will greater access to U.S. study via technology
stimulate greater flows of students to the United States?
- What mixtures of virtual and campus-based programs
are likely to emerge in the decade ahead? Will U.S. universities, collaborating with
mighty media and entertainment moguls, dominate the new distance education sector of the
international education market? Or will new competitors arise from other institutional and
business interests? For all the talk, who is really doing distance learning abroad, doing
it well, and making it pay for itself (at least) in the process?
- How will this rising competition in the global
marketplace of educational bandwidth spill out and affect what overseas advisers do, and
are trained and supported to do?
New Clients for New Programs
Advising offices overseas are the front gate to
the U.S. university system for thousands of students. Many of the over 480,000 foreign
students on U.S. campuses would not be there, or at least not in programs that fit their
needs, abilities, and interests, without these advising services. What a deal universities
are getting! Do they even know it? As advisers abroad, we tend to view ourselves as
serving students in the preadmission and predeparture stage of the cycle of study in the
United States, answering questions such as where, which programs/degrees, what are their
reputations, how much will it cost, and how should one decide. We are used to this.
More recently, new questions have arisen. How can
I get a U.S. education while staying in my home country? Students who would never have
thought of studying by correspondence now wonder if they can get a degree on the Internet
from the land of Bill Gates.
There are also older students who may have missed
out on highly competitive indigenous education opportunities. Many are academically
qualified, have family resources, but they cannot take the time away from work and family
commitments to go to the United States. International education opportunity has passed
them by. U.S. higher education is not for them. Distance education, from the United
States, maybe.
How big is this potential market? Are other
countries, such as the United Kingdom and Australia, which have mature open education
programs, reaching these people? How should our advising centers provide information to
this population about opportunities for distance learning from U.S. universities?
From Campus Classroom to Global Network
In the 1980s some bold American universities set
up branch campuses and twinning programs with local universities abroad. If students could
not come to the United States, then U.S. education could come to them. But the cost of
setting up and sustaining these campus-based programs far from the home institution, and
the vicissitudes of such factors as currency fluctuation and government accreditation
policies, made maintaining these programs problematic. Many a U.S. college president has
had second thoughts about such commitments.
In the 1990s the Internet arrived. First e-mail
took our campuses by storm. Now most of us could not function without it. Dramatically
expanding bandwidth has made it possible to integrate television (video), telephone
(voice), and computers (data) into what is called digital convergence.
These three parallel sets of information
appliances are becoming one global, integrated network of communication possibilities. A
major reason this could happen has been the doubling of the speed of microprocessors every
eighteen months throughout this decade. It appears that this pace of innovation will
continue. Costs of communication will continue to go down while new applications will
proliferate. This growth will happen even faster if deregulation in the telecommunication
industry continues around the globe. This revolution has only just begun.
In the 19th century the land grant system (thank
you, Mr. Lincoln) started new universities. Now the new resource for higher education is
not land, but bandwidth. Internet 2 will put U.S. universities in a commanding position.
The front gate of new U.S. universities will be the Web site on a computer terminal.
Such change is not so easy, however, as the
visionaries and the entrepreneurs would have it. Moving classroom instruction into on-line
networks is a very complex process. Investment costs are high. Moreover, not everyone,
especially faculty, is convinced that virtual education is good education. No doubt, some
curmudgeonly faculty simply fear for their jobs or don't like learning new technologies.
To many, technology also threatens to erode the warmth and spontaneity of their relations
with students. Even if they exaggerate these difficulties, there are serious and
unresolved issues about creating effective teaching and learning in the simulated
environments of the Net.
The struggles on American campuses over
"going digital" are big and will grow. As faculty and administrators do battle
on these important issues, new and limber institutions, without traditional academic
infrastructure and governance procedures, will jump into the large virtual opening created
by the new technologies and the increasingly market-driven environment of international
education.
One is reassured when a major U.S. university
announces the launching of a distance learning degree program. Such institutions have a
campus system behind the effort and a reputation to protect. But what about a new, unknown
organization offering a degree program in this new mode of delivery? Our reputations as
advisers rest on the quality of the guidance we give our clients. How do we remain open to
the new potential for digital education to expand access to U.S. higher education abroad,
while also doing right by students who may be considering untested degree programs and
study methods? It's not an easy position to be in.
Digital Instruction: A New U.S. Export
The main focus among U.S. distance education
programs has been on creating and delivering instruction. This is natural. Academic
content is the heart of a program. In the past, the high costs and technical requirements
of television production meant that the few providers of telecourses generally did high
quality work. Leasing options meant that producers could recoup their costs, and more.
As we have moved to the user-friendly, democratic
world of the Web, individual faculty, working as if in a new cottage industry, can now
each "put their courses on the Net" with a little help from their university's
computer center and a teenager to design the Web site. This possibility gives us many more
suppliers of content, but who knows at what cost to quality and consistency.
The pedagogues and producers of educational
television are beside themselves when watching the often-amateurish production qualities
and simplistic assumptions about learning reflected in these do-it-yourself, Web-based
courses. Other educators are concerned that without an effective dialogue of people
dealing with other people in real life (in cyber terms, "RL") situations, U.S.
digital education abroad may devolve into so much test-prep and loosely organized
cyber-schmoozing.
It is hard enough to organize an active-learning,
discovery process for students who come to classrooms. Who knows how to engender the
Socratic process in virtual space? And to do it effectively across cultures? There is
great need for international educators who understand something about learning across
cultures to get involved and add value to this new, cross-cultural instructional process.
There appears to be little thought among digital
educators about adapting America-centric curriculum to audiences of students overseas.
Technologists are often blind to cultural issues, continuing educators are usually
oriented to local issues, and many faculty are not aware in any case of the cultural
contingencies of their knowledge base.
In addition to the usual difficulties of learning
how to learn on-line, students based overseas do not have physical access to U.S. campuses
with all their services and resources to help make sense out of what the teacher is saying
(or posting) in the course.
Most U.S. students who enroll in on-line courses,
it turns out, are actually on or near their college campus. They may take one or two cyber
courses that fit their schedules and learning preferences while pursuing other classes on
campus.
Digital bits of information travel very well
across nations and technology platforms. But how well do instructional practices, which
are language- and culture-intensive, travel across societies? A U.S. teacher who travels
abroad to meet and teach students in a classroom, as in the Fulbright Program or with a
branch campus, will learn from, and adapt knowledge to the foreign students in
face-to-face contact. Indeed, the teacher is the foreigner in this situation, not the
student. Such transformations can make for good teaching. Will the cyber-prof in the
United States be able to do the same with students around the globe? What if that
cyber-prof is hired to teach on a piecework basis and does not even come to a campus to
work? How powerful will these virtual academic communities of teachers and students be?
How can we assure they become as powerful as the face-to-face communities they replace?
If adaptations and localizations are not made to
U.S. curriculum for export, we will hear new rounds of criticism from higher education
leaders of other, especially developing countries—in which many of us live and work
as advisers—about the new aggressive "digital colonialism" of U.S. higher
education. These leaders even now fear a growing gap between digital haves and have-nots.
Hence the need to build new collaborations between U.S. academics and their overseas
counterparts, to co-create new curricula for virtually delivered instruction. We have not
seen much of this so far.
On-line Support Services for Virtual Students
Abroad
Problems of adapting to on-line formats and to
cross-cultural situations also arise in the whole area of providing academic support
services. Such difficulties will affect overseas advisers in a major way. Failures by U.S.
universities to adequately support and communicate with their on-line students abroad will
lead students to appear and reappear on our doorsteps asking for help. Are we ready for
this?
The "soft underbelly" of distance
education is support services. Campuses provide many services (if often in bureaucratic
style), which help students through degree programs—the admissions office, the
registrar, the financial aid office, the diagnostic testing and writing center, a math
phobia clinic, personal counseling if needed, libraries with reference personnel, the
bookstore, computer labs with junior tech-people to unsnarl computer problems, and even
the professor's office with posted hours for appointments. And for many foreign students,
perhaps the most important support (and sometimes court of last resort) comes from the
international student services office.
Many of these campus-based services have used
Internet technologies to become more efficient and even more user-friendly in the 1990s.
The new on-line services, however, often assume on-campus options and fallback systems for
the student. If dealing with the bureaucracies of a large campus is challenging to foreign
students, it may be even be harder for on-line students overseas who lack a face-to-face
option to sort out a miscommunication on a bill, or a grade, or a course scheduling
glitch.
In most cultures, the response to such
bureaucratic impasses will be nonconfrontation and withdrawal. In societies where face is
enormously important in defining and conducting social relations, including education, it
will take time and effort to adapt to the on-line relational environment for learning, for
socialization, and for solving the often pestering bureaucratic issues that go inevitably
with belonging to a university.
The word "belonging" is quite relevant.
Will foreign students who stay at home develop identification with the university through
on-line transactions? Will they derive a sense of belonging, develop attachment to the
university?
Will the social networking, which many foreign
students value as part of their U.S. education, emerge from on-line conferencing and chat
rooms on the Internet? It may be easier to succeed in replicating on-line the cognitive
learning functions of a university education than to devise virtual alternatives to the
social, psychological, and formative roles that a university can play for students of and
in other cultures.
Ultimately, on-line support services will make
U.S. universities more efficient and productive.
One can surely hope. Containing the costs of U.S.
education depends largely on this achievement. Designing, de-bugging, and setting in place
the safety nets of student services for distant students, especially those overseas, will
be an enormous and unglamorous challenge. Nonetheless, the quality of the educational
experience, even with the best instruction, will depend on it.
We may discover that the on-line environment is
actually an "inter-culture." As more non-Americans wade into the sea of Internet
communications, cultural norms and assumptions will diversify. Languages other than
English will appear on the Web. Teaching and learning, coaching and advising skills will
improve with practice. A "third culture" may arise in the contact zones shaped
by and for Internet-based communication among people in different cultures.
Eventually, some students will opt to go to
university on the Web because their subsequent careers and the domains for using their
learning will also be on the Web. This may sound like science fiction to us now. But our
lives at century's end would have seemed like science fiction to people at mid-century. In
any case, it is important to international educators to get involved with this new
creation.
New Roles for Overseas Advisers in the Digital
Age
As distance delivery expands overseas, more
students will be able to stay in-country with their jobs and families while studying for
U.S. degrees. This change means that advising centers may not just be the front gate to
American universities any more. U.S. universities offering degree programs at a distance
will have new support needs. Some overseas advising centers may wish to consider acquiring
capabilities to offer these services, thus playing critical (and remunerative)
face-to-face support roles for their overseas students. Given current resources,
positioning, and "rules of engagement" between U.S. universities, overseas
centers, and their advisee/clients, it is unclear how many centers would want or wish to
move toward assuming these new roles and functions.
The first two sets of services are extensions of
what most advising centers already do. They include—
- Interpreting features of the U.S. education
system, in general, and how distance learning programs work, in particular, so that
prospective students overseas can decide if such a program is suitable for them.
- Interpreting educational, cultural, and technology
access issues for students in the host country to U.S. outreach educators so they
understand how to orient and make appropriate their academic curricula and support
services. A new round of advisory and consultative services will be in demand, regarding
how to recruit for these distance delivered programs in target countries.
Beyond these "front gate" services,
advising centers have opportunities to expand their roles in the educational process, to
become what might be called "intermediate learning support units":
- As intermediate learning support units, advising
centers could provide on-going, user-friendly, culture-sensitive interface between on-line
students abroad and their home institutions in the United States. The goal here would be
to support persistence toward degrees among students and to alert home institutions about
glitches and about students who appear at-risk. The major volume of communication between
overseas student and U.S. academic staff would be direct and electronic. But it will be
important to have back-up or "redundancy" services in place that can offer
communication on a face-to-face basis.
- Advising centers could also provide support to
on-line students on issues of technical access to the U.S. university. This could include
maintaining terminals and access points in the center office where students could
communicate with their home institutions. It may also entail maintaining services, paid
for by the home institution, to provide technical support to enrolled students.
- Another area of potential involves providing or
organizing the provision of tutorial services associated with core courses offered on-line
where there are substantial numbers of students to warrant group approaches to learner
support.
- Internet literacy skills required to participate
in on-line academic programs will be in great demand. Instruction in these could be
offered for fees from the students, by the centers.
- One potential virtue of on-line mediated programs
is their capacity for individualization, or so-called "mass customization."
Distance learning programs promote ideas of active and student-centered learning. U.S.
culture tends more than others to support the idea of a high degree of student choice.
Intermediate learning support centers would need to develop ways to help non-American
students understand and make these choices. Such assistance would include taking a
coaching and mentoring role towards students. It is unlikely that the home institutions,
dealing with many students in many countries, will know how to offer this support
effectively through mediated communications technology. Nor would students know how to
receive such support.
Intermediate learning support centers would have
to be linked effectively and communicate well with the U.S. home institutions. It would be
essential that roles were clear and hand-offs between staff abroad and staff at the
university were made cleanly. Student records and service logs would have to be accessible
to both sides. Gradually, centers would develop a deeper representation relationship with
the U.S. institution. New definitions of the responsibilities and limitations of that
representation would have to evolve.
Acquiring these deeper relationships with
distance-delivered programs will also have to be reconciled with the transinstitutional
fairness rules for traditional advising services. In most cases, however, the pool of
stay-at-home users of technology to get an U.S. education would be different from the pool
of clients, usually younger, who come to advising centers to seek advice about going to
the United States to study.
The Irony of Geography in Distance Learning
Abroad
Distance learning is supposed to take us
"beyond geography." The logic of the Internet is that a message going next door
costs the same as the message going around the world. Distance becomes irrelevant. The
irony is that distance learning will make overseas-based learning support units of various
kinds even more valuable to U.S. universities. This importance is based on two things:
these centers' proximity/accessibility to the students and their knowledge of the learning
culture of the students. In a sense, U.S. universities will seek to "out-source"
some student support services in order to locate them closer to the student, who, of
course, resides abroad. These intermediate learning support units could have contractual
relationships for specified services with many universities.
U.S. universities pay substantial amounts for
such services when the services are located on their campuses. If income from delivering
on-line education abroad becomes substantial, it would follow that the universities would
be in a position to pay well for these services abroad. Indeed, centers with strong
reputations for rapport and client satisfaction in target countries should be able to
charge the real costs of these service plus an adequate additional amount to support
continual upgrading and institutional development both abroad and for their home offices
in the United States.
Distance education will make what advising
centers do, or could do, even more valuable to U.S. universities, not less.
Most advising centers overseas are supported
substantially by the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), soon to merge into the State
Department. Support for the advising centers, which sustain the vital flow of private,
fee-paying students to U.S. universities, has always been a struggle to maintain. Under
State Department administration, it is hard to see how any more importance would be placed
on such support. Decline is more likely the pattern.
The primary beneficiaries of overseas advising,
U.S. universities, have never had a framework in which to collectively step in to enhance
their support. USIA has maintained the global network of advising centers but has been
unable to orchestrate a paradigm shift that would move these important resources into a
new stage. Meanwhile, distance learning is emerging as a primarily private sector movement
in U.S. higher education. Its expansion into overseas recruitment and delivery will likely
follow the same pattern.
The problem is that the costs to an individual
institution to field these services abroad, if they are to be sustained and effective, are
quite high if maintained on an individual program basis.
The basic level of advisory services provided
through the USIA-assisted centers is vital to retain. Advising centers' collective ethic
of quality in representing U.S. education abroad must be reinforced.
Distance education as a movement will be troubled
by the ease with which it will be possible to set up cyber-degree mills. It is easy to
charge students up-front for enrollment in a virtually delivered program which, without
follow-through support services, essentially leaves the student on his or her own.
Continuing and imaginative support to reinforce student persistence is vital for any
successful distance learning program. The consumer protection function of overseas
advisory services will be even more important in this bold, and sometime bowdlerized, new
future of distance education.
USIA support has been essential to advising
centers. Yet this may result in a kind of stability trap in a dynamic world. At most
centers, there is so much to do and just enough resources to get by. Nobody wants to risk
taking on more roles, which mean, of course, more work, without real and assured
compensation. Meanwhile, a critical mass of U.S. universities seeking to export their
distance learning programs has not yet emerged. Yet one wonders how long that will be.
Regents College: Developing a Model
Regents College in New York, for one, has already
begun conversations with several overseas advising centers about developing a set of
support services. The menu of services being considered includes consultations on the
design and outreach strategy for Regents College in the country; an in-person academic
advising session for admitted students that maps out pathways to the degree given
in-country learning options that dovetail with Regents degree requirements; and assistance
to Regents in articulating with locally available flexible learning programs for adults
whether from in-country or international sources.
Regents, founded in 1970, offers twenty-seven
undergraduate degree programs that can be earned entirely in one's home country, without
U.S. residency requirements. The college is equipped to recognize learning that students
have acquired in both formal and informal settings and to apply that learning toward its
degree programs. Regents acts as a broker, assisting students in making a plan to complete
their degrees using credit-by-examination from Regents College or distance courses from
other regionally accredited institutions.
If advising centers abroad wish to explore the
potential for developing and offering intermediate learner support services in
collaboration with Regents College, they are welcome to contact Dr. Paula Peinovich,
Academic Vice President of Regents College at paula@regents.edu. Advisers are also welcome
to inquire with local Sylvan representatives about the new availability of Regents
examinations in computer formats.
In Closing
The new technologies for distance learning have
developed faster than the structure of academic programs or the organization of learner
support services that undergird them. U.S. universities can indeed be leaders in distance
learning as a new export of higher education services worldwide. Institutions that have
strong reputations for on-line programs can also attract more overseas students to their
campuses.
New strategies for providing support services to
on-line students abroad, however, are an essential requirement for quality. Some overseas
advising centers are well positioned to evolve into intermediate learning support units,
working with many institutions in the United States that are just beginning to recast
their programs into distance delivery mode. Not all advising centers will want or be able
to grow in this direction. The transition will be complex. But in my opinion, no other
global network of educational information service units is in a better position to do this
well. Done well, these local-global services would be a great contribution to both our
student clients and to their U.S. universities.
The author is currently a Fulbright Senior
Scholar at the Hong Kong America Center, which serves the universities of Hong Kong. He is
on leave this year from his position as Director of the Board of Governors Bachelors of
Arts Program at Governors State University, Chicago, IL, and is at work on a book on open
and distance education in Asia. Dr. Shive, who also served as Director of the Institute of
International Education's office in Hong Kong and who has worked extensively in China on
advising and study abroad issues, presented on distance education at the 1999 NAFSA
National Conference.
