How Distance Education Has Changed Teaching and the Role of the Instructor

Reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic (three Rs) have gone cyber. If only the schoolteachers of the 1800’s and early 1900’s could see the classroom of 2005, what would they say? The classroom has evolved from the one room schoolhouse to a virtual classroom. With this change come changes in the role of the educator. This paper delves into how the evolution of distance education has changed teaching and the role of the teacher from a disseminator of information to a facilitator of learning. It will discuss the professional development needed to prepare the teacher for teaching in the online learning environment. It also explores the area of the K-12 curriculum and describes how distance education is revolutionizing this learning environment. Finally, the paper will discuss current practices used to train future educators for teaching at a distance. The model of pedagogy emerged from the seventh to twelfth centuries with the monastic schools of Europe. Pedagogy means the art and science of teaching children. The pedagogical assumptions about learning and learners were, therefore, based initially on observation by the monks in teaching very young children relatively simple skills—originally most reading and writing. When adult education began to be organized systematically during the 1920s, teachers of adults began experiencing several problems with the pedagogical model. Successful teachers of adults were finding that they were deviating from the pedagogical model. Adult students did not fit the pedagogical model and so they had a pragmatic approach to their teaching and just followed their intuition. This happened in the years from 1929 to 1948 and at that time, there were no studies explaining the adult learner. During the 1950s, however, there began appearing books which analyzed these teachers’ reports but no theory was developed at that time. In the 1960s, more studies concentrated on the adult learner. The label “andragogy” emerged in the late 1960s. This word is based on the Greek word aner meaning “man, not boy” or adult. The adult learner was studied and it was determined that there were not only differences in the child to the adult learner; there were differences in the role of the teacher teaching children and teaching adults. (Knowles, 1980) The over-whelming majority of distance education students in the United States are adults. (Moore and Kearsley, 2005) Since the adult learner is the premise for distance education curriculum, the author thought a look back at the beginning of the change from pedagogy to andragogy would segue to the next challenge for the educator; namely, teaching online. Let us look at the beginning of distance education. Distance Education Emerges Distance education as we know it today began with what Moore called the third generation of Distance Education. The period was the 1960s and early 1970s. Moore stated that this was a time of critical change in distance education, resulting from several experiments with new ways of organizing technology and human resources, leading to new instructional techniques and new educational theorizing. (Moore and Kearsley, 2005) As technology progressed, so did the progression of distance education. By the 1970’s, it had achieved broad acceptance and in the 1980s, it “arrived” as one of the “flavors of the decade” in education, in higher education especially. (Moore and Anderson, 2003) Garrison and Shale (1987) recognized the move into an Information Age characterized by technologies capable of interactive and individualized education at a distance in 1987. Keegan (1988) stated that distance education is the normal provision of education for the working man and woman, for the