Developing a profile of distance learners in online education

Distance Learners

Many of us have an image of what we think a "normal" student looks like. And that typical -- or even stereotypical -- student is dressed casually but neatly. Sitting in a classroom with desks in slightly disarrayed rows, the twenty-year-old is mostly listening to her professor -- who is dressed only a little more formally than she is. But every once in a while she glances out the window over the campus and smiles to herself at the squirrels running up and down an ancient tree. She's also thinking about what she will do when she finishes this class. Maybe she'll go to a coffee shop with some friends before heading off to the library to study for a few hours before going home and getting to bed early.

There's nothing wrong with this picture, of course. Some students do look -- and act and think -- precisely like this. However, it is also the case that many, many students look nothing at all like this. One of the advantages of modern education is that many students who would never have found a place in higher education, who would never have had a chance to continue their education beyond the secondary level, now have the chance to do so because of the flexibility that now exists in the range of educational settings and program designs.

This paper examines one of those non-traditional settings, that of a private, post-secondary level business administration program in Puerto Rico. Essential to this paper is the development of a model of a virtual student. In order to be able to serve distance learners as fully and appropriately as possible, it is essential that the officials at the school have a clear understanding of the profile of a distance learner and how this profile differs from that of a traditional student.

What is Distance Learning?

There is a range of different strategies that distance learning programs employ. They can be combined in different ways for different programs and classes and for the novice distance learner and the one who has had a considerable degree of experience in this learning mode. But while there are important differences among distance-learning programs, there are also over-riding similarities. The key element, of course, is that distance-learning programs are formally designed to be carried out without any regard to geographic limitations. Teachers and students can be separated from each other by both space and time. A teacher can design a lesson from her office in London and the next day her students in New York, Mumbai, and Buenos Aires can be collaborating on a project.

Distance-learning programs help provide programs that work for students who have numerous responsibilities, as so many students today do. Students have part-time or full-time jobs, children to raise, parents to take care of, spouses to spend time with. Students can be both serious and dedicated to their studies and yet be unable to attend classes in a traditional setting at the traditional times. This latter can be especially helpful to students who do not have childcare during "normal" classroom hours and to students who do shift work and thus also are not available during traditional class times.

Flexibility in terms of location is useful to many types of students, but especially to those in rural areas where a college may be too distant for a student to commute to easily on a regular basis. Other students may live close to a college but because of personal physical challenges -- such as using a wheelchair or being blind -- may not find the accommodations that he or she needs at that campus. Being able to study in one's own home, where one's computer and other equipment has been adapted to one's needs may be what a student needs to be successful. Being able to study at home can also be extremely helpful to students who do not have access to reliable daycare during traditional class hours.

Distance learning programs can include a number of different specific technologies, including Webcasts or other voice-based media such as MP3 recordings or podcasts and various forms of video technologies such as DVDs and interactive videoconferencing. Perhaps most common to distance-learning are web-based technologies in which students respond to lessons by posting comments on a shared site that allows them to discuss class content with each other under the supervision of the instructor. All of these forms of distance-learning technologies can be supplemented with more traditional methods of assessment such as writing papers, which students can submit electronically or by mail.

Whatever specific form of technology is used to convey information to students, the most successful programs are those that maximize interaction between students and instructors and allow students to feel a sense of agency about their learning outcomes. The following summarizes these issues:

The terms "distance education" or "distance learning" have been applied interchangeably by many different researchers to a great variety of programs, providers, audiences, and media. Its hallmarks are the separation of teacher and learner in space and/or time (Perraton, 1988), the volitional control of learning by the student rather than the distant instructor (Jonassen, 1992), and noncontiguous communication between student and teacher, mediated by print or some form of technology. (Sherry, 1996, p. 375)

Before proceeding to a description of the traits that are most important for a virtual student to possess, it is imperative to stress that there are key aspects to teachers in a distance-learning teacher as well. While certainly it is imperative that distance learners take responsibility for their own progress through the program, it is also true that student success in distance programs is affected by teacher skills as well.

This should hardly be surprising, of course, since good teaching always matters. But just as there are key attributes that ensure that some students will flourish in a distance program while others will find more benefit in a more traditional educational setting, there are also key attributes that ensure that some teachers will be more beneficial to students in a distance-learning environments than will others. Holloway and Ohler (1991) describe this phenonemon:

Little happens of any magnitude without administration buy-in, and the best way to achieve that is to succeed on a small level first. Put most of your effort into finding the right people rather than the most exciting technology...Some teachers work well on camera, behind a microphone, or running a computer conference, and others do not. Find teachers who feel comfortable and work well with the media, then give them all of the technical support you can afford. Their job is to teach, not splice cords together or figure out why their conferencing software is misbehaving. The more transparent the media are to them, the better service they will deliver. This has a financial payoff too: the better a teacher works with media, the less necessary the expensive elements of distance delivery coursework (like graphics and sophisticated editing) become to the creation of a quality product (p. 264).

This last point is an extremely important one for both administrators and students. Containing costs will allow administrators to offer a degree program at a level that will allow more students to enroll.

Differences in Teaching and Learning Styles

As has been suggested above, successful distance learners can be assessed in different ways. There are demographic factors that are generally associated with distance-learning success, such as students who are older and who have already taken other distance-learning classes. There are what might be generally summarized as emotional or psychological aspects of the successful distance learner, such as good time management skills and a good social-support system. One aspect of the successful distance learner that has not yet been addressed in this paper, and indeed one that has received relatively little attention in the literature, is the style of learning.

Different individuals tend to have a medium in which they learn more easily than in other modes. Some learners tend to be more visually oriented, for example, while others tend to absorb and retain information better when they receive it in auditory form while others are best served when there is a kinetic element to learning that allows them to manipulate physical items. While all people can learn in all different ways, it should be obvious that people who are most attuned to learning through kinetic methods are less likely than those who are visual learners to feel entirely at home in a distance-learning environment in which almost all information is conveyed through visual methods.

Students in the distance learning class who possessed a more independent and conceptual learning style, had the highest average scores in all of the student achievement areas. People with the lowest scores in student achievement in the distance learning course had a more social and conceptual learning style.

Students with both a social and applied learning style performed much better in the on-campus class. The outcomes of the Gee study suggested that successful distance education students favored an independent learning environment while successful on-campus students showed a preference for working with others. The relatively small sample of 26 students suggested that additional work is needed to further explore this relationship. (Diaz, & Cartnal, 1999, p. 133)

Again, learning style is something that is difficult to assess as a part of an admission process: Certainly any successful distance-learning program will enroll students with a range of learning styles given that (as described above) is not why students enroll in a distance-learning program.

However, understanding that there are differences in learning style and that some are more attuned to a distance-learning program can help administrators design a program that accommodates as many different learning styles as possible. One way of doing this is to integrate concepts of constructivist learning. Historically education has been seen as a process of conveying information from the teacher (who possesses expertise) to the student (who does not). A more contemporary understanding of educational processes is that while teachers still possess expertise that they are engaged in conveying to their students, they should also cooperate with their students.

Students who are encouraged -- and even required -- to engage as actively as possible in their education, to "construct" their own knowledge and understanding, are those who flourish in any educational setting, including a distance-learning one.

The alternative approach is based on constructivist principles, in which a learner actively constructs an internal representation of knowledge by interacting with the material to be learned. This is the basis for both situated cognition (Streibel, 1991) and problem-based learning (Savery & Duffy, 1995). According to this viewpoint, both social and physical interaction enter into both the definition of a problem and the construction of its solution. Neither the information to be learned, nor its symbolic description, is specified outside the process of inquiry and the conclusions that emerge from that process. Prawat and Floden (1994) state that, to implement constructivism in a lesson, one must shift one's focus away from the traditional transmission model to one which is much more complex, interactive, and evolving. (Sherry, 1996, p. 352)

Basing a distance-learning program on a constructivist framework can be extremely helpful in promoting distance-learning success.

Education is a complex process and the farther away one moves from traditional educational programs the fewer models administrators have for creating the conditions that will allow as many students as possible to succeed. Attending to the profile of the successful distance-learner outlined above will help those distance-learners meet their goals and move on to a successful post-collegiate career.