Rob Linschoten is about two weeks
ahead of us.

The Director of the Centre for Education
Technology (CET, formerly Instructional
Media Services), who is promoting distance
education at Douglas College, says the
technology changes so quickly that no one’s
an expert in the field.

“It’s a very rapidly changing
environment, and if your information is
more than two weeks old you need to update
it.”

This week, the technologies include
satellite, interactive video, audio graphics,
audio conferencing, and the Internet. Part of
the challenge is making appropriate use of
the many different technologies and methods
that exist for delivering courses
electronically. The CET is developing a
facility to handle what’s now being called
‘distributed learning’.

Distance education uses technology to
create access

Linschoten notes that “the only
difference between ‘distributed’ and
‘distance’ is that students are more likely to
be on campus, but not in a specific

classroom taking a course at a specific time.

They could also be taking the class or
course at the Thomas Haney Centre or
Pinetree Way.” In that way, the three sites
are really one big campus. In the distance
model, the student could well be in another
town or province, taking the course from
home (see story below).

“A successful distance education course
will use many of these elements at some

point during the semester,” says Linschoten.

Distributed learning can be seen as a
College-wide effort to become more
productive and increase access. With the
nerve centre up and running, five distance
education projects will begin in January in
Phase Two of the Skills Now-funded

 

 

 
 

Among the downsides: at present,

the program Is totally text-based, so
some classroom teaching techniques
now used by instructors won’t work.
Words come across differently on-line,
says King, and an instructor might get
40 to 50 messages a day on a class topic,
and that dialogue can be time-
col

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
 

“If the instructor doesn’t

_ respond, you get students who
go to the college president

| demanding their money back
because the instructor doesn’t

_ talk to them. Students have to
be somewhat motivated on

| their own, because they’re not

| attending that class three times
per week to remind them that ~
the term paper is due next
week,” King says.

One point that King
emphasized in her presentation: it’s a
sea change in education, because

oe eke regional borders will fall

 

10

initiative. Douglas College will be a
‘delivery’ site for one course and the
‘receive’ site for two courses, from
University of Victoria and BCIT.

Distributed learning makes access to
education more equitable at a multicampus
site in the sense that students at remote
campuses have the same learning
opportunities. Also, the technology brings
potential new learners into the picture. “It
opens a new pool of students we didn’t have
before, people like single parents, people at
workplaces, living in remote areas, people
who are traditionally not our students,” says
Linschoten. ““The technology is maturing to
the point where it’s financially feasible for
them, and for us.”

Many College departments have to be
involved in delivery of distributed/distance
learning. Linschoten outlines a typical future
scenario as follows.

“Douglas Development assists with the
conversion of a course to its electronic
equivalent. CET provides instructional
support and part of the technology. Systems
provides the other technical parts of the
puzzle, including the critical Internet
connections. The Communications &
Marketing Office markets the course via the
Web. Learning Resources arranges for
resource materials to be available through
electronic links with other institutions.
Students at other campuses might interact
with academic advisors using a video link.
Centre 2000 might re-package elements of
the material for training employees taking in-
house courses at their workplace. The
Bookstore may be asked to sell or lease
laptops with specific course material and
related software pre-loaded on them.”

The role of Linschoten and the staff of
the CET is to help the College community
ease into distance education and understand
how the technology works. But how to get
people to adopt the technology when it’s
seen as almost overwhelming? There’s a
philosophical way to look at it, Linschoten
says.

“When you’re ready to jump into this,
you take a snapshot of what’s currently
happening, you engage with that technology
at that moment, and you don’t worry about
what’s coming next week. Then, four years
down the road when you want to upgrade,
you take another snapshot.”

It’s going fo be a wild ride, but Douglas
College is well positioned to be a player in
the distance education business. “At the
current rate that we’re working, I consider
Douglas College to be in the early adopter
wave, which gives us more time to become a
centre for excellence in certain disciplines,”
says Linschoten. &