Distance Education and the Myth of the New Pedagogy

Distance education, broadly defined as instruction that is not bound by time or place, is bringing about fundamental changes in higher education. Writing in a recent online newsletter from the American Association for Higher Education, Ted Marchese describes the many “not-so-distant” distance competitors to traditional colleges and universities: the University of Phoenix, the for-profit university with some 50,000 students in 12 states; the Western Governors University, the competency-based consortium that was founded by 17 governors and is supported by 14 business partners, including Sun, IBM, AT&T, and Microsoft; and Britain’s venerable Open University, which has allied with several universities in the United States and will begin offering courses here this year. Marchese also writes that private industry, which spends $58 billion annually on employee training, is realizing that distance education gives employees access to an enormous variety of educational and training opportunities; some 85% of the Fortune 500 companies now subsidize distance education for their employees. Kaiser Permanente even offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in health science through distance education, and MetLife has teamed with Drexel University to offer a distance master’s degree in information systems. In technical communication, a number of universities are creating distance versions of undergraduate and graduate courses. Mercer University, Utah State, Texas Tech, and Sheffield Hallam University in England all have distance versions of master’s programs. The growth of distance education in technical communication is inevitable for two main reasons:

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