Originator: College of Micronesia - FSM
Copyright: COM - FSM
Writer:       Robert Churney
Date:          Oct. 13, 2000
Status:        Unabridged

Education Distance

Most of us would agree that distance education is an idea whose time has come at COM-FSM. The college is effectively serving the needs of the average and traditional Micronesian college student. Now it’s time to fill a niche for the not-average and non-traditional student – the one who can’t come to a college campus on a regular basis. In order to serve these potential students the college needs to offer courses in ways other than the traditional classroom model.

The FSM is a very geographically dispersed nation and there are people on outer islands who cannot attend either the national or state campuses but who might like to take college courses and could benefit from them. There are also people on main islands who cannot attend formal classes on the local COM-FSM campus because of other life-situation reasons such as housewives who must stay home or people with full-time jobs, or people with physical disabilities. Through distance education the college can reach out to these people and give them a chance to improve themselves and the nation and also to increase the enrollment and the funds of the college.

Distance education is really a simple and straightforward proposition – deliver the material to students through various means, receive feedback and assess the students through various means, and award a grade to students.

My credo concerning distance education can be summed up as follows: I believe we must rapidly jump into distance education and not wait to build a comprehensive program system because we need to experiment and evaluate first. I believe that we must get into distance education not because it is the in-vogue thing to do but because we are intrinsically motivated to reach out and serve non-traditional students. I believe that distance education initiatives by the instructional divisions should be encouraged and welcomed at this time because the more experience we gain the more likely we will be able to build more ambitious and successful program systems in the future I also believe that, while online courses are nice we must not forget that there are other tried and true and often more appropriate technologies for use in distance education, like the mail and the telephone.

Flexibility And Accountability

Successful distance education initiatives (like successful correspondence course programs that form a useful model) require flexibility and accountability if they are to be meaningful and valid.

Here in the FSM there are people who have access to state and national campus computer resources and those who don’t. There are those who know how to use a computer and those who don’t but who can write and mail a letter. So our distance education courses will have to be flexible with regard to how instructor and student communicate with each other. Students with access to state campus computers and email will be able to respond much faster to instructors than those on an outer island who don’t have email access and must correspond with instructors via the regular mail. So there will be times when we need to be flexible with regard to the amount of time we allow for the completion of a semester-length course. For some people the completion of a normal semester-length course may require one and a half or even two semesters for reasons of communication speed but also because these students may move slower through the material because they do not have the benefit of a classroom experience and its attendant benefits to their cognitive development. Some people may have access to a TV and VCR and others may not, so some will be able to watch videos and others may have to rely solely on their textbooks and instructor-provided materials.

A useful model for our distance education courses is the correspondence course programs of the University of the South Pacific in Fiji which have been successfully used for more than 20 years. In these degree-supporting and certificate programs students from the university’s member states can do coursework using a correspondence approach (flexibility) but must sit for a major day-long cumulative test at a satellite campus (accountability) before a final course grade is awarded.

With regard to the correspondence aspect of USP’s program, the students use textbooks and instructor-provided materials such as written lecture notes and other handouts and complete assignments which they then mail to the instructor for grading. Because the instructor never knows for sure if the work was actually done by the student, the student must sit for a cumulative final exam at a satellite campus to see if they really know the subject matter. These final assessments often have an oral component in addition to the written test. With regard to the issue of distance students relying heavily on someone else to help them, this should not be necessarily viewed as a weakness of accountability. Cognitive apprenticeships and distributed cognition are the norm rather than the exception when it comes to all real learning anyway. And for those who fear for the accountability, in the end it is not unlike awarding credit by examination. What matters most is not how the student actually learned the material but that they do learn the material in the end.

With this model in mind I might teach a distance education course in the following manner: The student would receive a complete curricular package at the beginning. This would consist of 10-12 units of work which can be completed during one semester but need not be and could be extended up to 12 months. The unit work includes reading of the entire textbook chapter, the instructor explanations and any supplemental readings. Students would be required to complete assignments at a rate of 1-2 per week. The student would complete and submit unit assignments via regular mail or email. The instructor would then mail or email back the graded assignments with extensive comments. The instructor can also post instructional materials on the existing social science webpage for students with computer internet access, but I think that many of my students will be handwriting assignments and mailing by regular mail. Lastly, the student must sit for a cumulative written final exam at a state campus and an oral exam via telephone with the instructor at the national campus.

Distance education courses may work better in some subjects than others. For example, it may prove difficult to offer developmental English courses to those with very limited English via correspondence because it is almost necessary that the student be exposed to the English language by native speakers for extended periods of time. Content courses such as social science or business are easier to offer via distance education than are skill courses such as expository writing, but even writing courses can be successfully offered through distance methods.

There are many ways to offer distance education. The University of Alaska, which serves a diverse and geographically dispersed clientele, offers distance education through many different means such as correspondence, audioconference, computer-based, email, internet web-based, satellite TV, audio CD, software-based, videos and telecourses. Interestingly, the most common means of distance education by the University of Alaska is audioconference by telephone, after that it’s the use of videos, then email, then internet web-based, then computer-based, then telecourse and Satellite TV, then audio-CD. There are also 100 courses offered through the college’s 40 year-old correspondence program with courses that have a maximum completion time-limit of 12 months. All of this is offered through the University’s Center for Distance Education and Independent Learning

The issues we need to address immediately before we can do anything are the financial ones. How much to pay instructors for developing and delivering distance education course? How much will instructors be paid for teaching a distance education course? Initially we will probably only have small numbers of students but each will require individual attention and correspondence via mail or email. Regular telephone contacts between student and teacher as well as the oral components of the final exams could be easily done but who pays the telephone bill? Do we at COM-FSM call the students and pay the bill, or do students call us and pay the bill? Do we reimburse them and if so how? Students with easy access to a State Campus could make their telephone calls from there, but others may have to use private phones.

These two compensations – course development and course delivery – need to be formulated as soon as possible. Another issue is that of who will proctor the large cumulative final exams at the state campuses in Chuuk, Kosrae and Yap and how much will they be compensated? One last thought, could some or all of instructional costs such as telephone time or even travel to and from a State Campus to an outer island be covered by the Pell Grant? In general, how could the PELL be utilized to help facilitate distance education?

In summary, we need to jump right into distance education right away in order to experiment and see what works and what doesn’t work, but we don’t need to develop a comprehensive program structure at this time until we learn more. The administration has to deal with the issues of compensation for development and delivery of courses and for all of the logistics involved in distance education.

It’s understandable that we always tend to think in terms of courses offered in classrooms with regular contact between teacher and student and this is no doubt the most straightforward way method of education. But this only allows us to reach the traditional students in the traditional way and we’ve done a good job of that. Now it’s time to reach out to the non-traditional student. In the end the important thing is not how you offer the course but just that you do offer the course, one way or another.

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Robert Churney is a Social Science lecturer at the College of Micronesia FSM.