This is the first in a series of reports on online learning sponsored by the Sloan Consortium. They were among the first to recognize that online is a completely new dynamic involving institutions that have little if any connection with distance education contexts, and they surveyed the entire academy in the United States--not just distance education institutions.

As reflected here, they have been (from the very beginning) interested not only in numbers of online courses, but attitudes (faculty acceptance of, etc.) to online learning, projected rate of growth, and differences among types of institutions (public, private, graduate, undergraduate, etc.).

Among their findings:

• over 90% of all public institutions of higher learning offered at least one online course in 2002
• over 1.6 million students took at least one online course during fall 2002
• approximately 578,000 students took all their courses online

In order to do their measurements, the authors came up with a useful set of definitions.

• traditional course: no online technology used
• Web facilitated: 1-29% online, such as Blackboard or WebCT to post syllabus and assignments
• Blended/Hybrid: 30-79% online, some F2F meetings, but substantial portion online, including discussions
• Online: 80+ % online, where vast bulk of content is delivered online and typically has no F2F meetings

This annual report on online learning from Sloan focuses on numbers of courses, the rate of growth of online, and concerns about the quality of online.

Among their findings:

• over 1.9 million students took an online course in fall of 2003
• online enrollments continued to grow at a faster rate than the schools had predicted
• 96.2% of public institutions agree (or are neutral) to the proposition that online learning is critical to long-term strategy of institution and 76.9% of private, not-for-profit institutions agree (or are neutral) that proposition.

This third annual report attempts (as in previous reports) to answer questions about the nature and extent of online learning, but this year the central question is whether or not online education has entered the mainstream.

Among their findings:

• over 2.3 million students took at least one online course in fall of 2004
• 65% of schools that offer graduate F2F courses also offer online graduate courses
• growth is slowing down slightly; between 2003 and 2004 there was an enrollment growth rate of 18.2% (though that growth rate was over 10 times higher than projected by the National Center for Education Statistics)
• the increased penetration of online courses has not had a positive impact on perceived faculty acceptance; the level of acceptance has remained relatively stable: 28% in 2003 and 31% in 2005

This report is critical to my paper, especially since I do argue that convergence has happened and online has become our new paradigm. Faculty acceptance to the value of online education undercuts, somewhat, my argument for convergence, though online education is not really the same as online as our new context.

Among the findings of the fourth annual report on the state of online learning:

• nearly 3.2 million students took at least one online course during fall 2005, a 100% increase from three years ago
• 62% of academic leaders rate learning outcomes in online education as same or superior to those in F2F
• 16.9% of academic officers rate online learning outcomes superior to those in F2F (12.1 believed that in 2003...a 40% increase)
• while online students are overwhelmingly undergraduates, the proportion of graduate-level students is higher in online education relative to overall higher education population
• online undergraduate students are more likely to be studying at two-year colleges than are their F2F contemporaries

The fifth annual report asks the same questions as in previous reports regarding the extent, nature, and attitudes towards online learning in the United States. But this year, the authors focus specifically on Blended Learning, bringing together three years of findings.

Among their findings:

• schools now offer an average of 10.6 % of course offerings online
• there is a slightly larger percent of blended programs offerings than online programs across all disciplines, but blended learning continues to decrease slightly as online courses continue to grow
• blended learning is generally not part of an institutional transition strategy from F2F to fully online, but, rather, an option chosen primarily on its own merits
• a majority of academic leaders believe that learning outcomes for online education are now equal to or superior to those for F2F instruction

Among the findings of the Sloan Consortium's sixth annual report on online learning in the United States:

• almost 3.5 million students took at least one online course during fall 2006
• online is growing at 9.7 % while overall higher education student population is growing at 1.5%
• two-year colleges continue to have the highest growth rates for online learning and account for over half of all online enrollments in the last five years.
• faculty acceptance remains a key issue

Note: I've long been frustrated by what I believe to be unrealistically high estimates of the cost of developing online courses. Those estimates are often produced by academics steeped in (strapped by) distance education contexts (i.e fordist institutions with whole departments devoted to graphic design and multimedia development) and the (mistaken in my view) belief that online classes should be producing content--as opposed to designing a learning environment and using text book. Evidence that those estimates have had some currency might be reflected in the Sloan finding that higher costs of online development and delivery are seen as barriers by those who are planning online offerings, but not by those who actually offer online.

Ally first establishes that it is the instructional strategy that influences the quality of online learning and not the technology itself. While online is our context ("place"), online design is the key to teaching and learning. He then focuses on key learning theories and examines their implications for online learning.

He considers:

• The Behaviorist School of Learning. Online Implications include matching objectives with outcomes, appropriately sequenced learning materials, and appropriate feedback from instructor to learner.
• The Cognitivist School of Learning Part 1. Online implications include strategies to help learners transform information to working memory (appropriate text placement, color, graphics, size of text, etc), the pacing of information, clear indications of why information is important, use of organizers, conceptual models, and pre-instructional questions.
• Cognitive School of Learning Part 2 (Learning Style Differences): Online implications include accommodating differences in learning styles by presenting information in different modes, as well as encouraging reflection, self-assessment, and applying learning to real-life activities. Accommodating differences in learning styles includes building activities appropriate for:
  • concrete-experience learners: such as: including specific examples in which learners can be involved and relate to peers and not to people in authority such as group work and peer review
  • reflective-observation learners: such as: allowing learners to observe carefully before taking action
  • abstract-conceptualization learners: such as:allowing some learners to work more with things and symbols and less with people
  • active-experimentation learners: such as: allowing learners to do practical projects and learn in group discussions.
• Constructivist School of Learning- Online implications include emphasizing collaborative and cooperative learning, giving as much control of the learning process as possible to the students, emphasizing reflection, interactivity, and allowing students to construct their own knowledge.. Essentially this approach allows students to experience information first-hand, which then gives them the opportunity to personalize and contextualize the information for themselves.

Ally emphasizes that placing information on the Web and linking to other digital resources constitutes effective online instruction; rather online instruction occurs when use the Web to complete a sequence of instruction/activities in order to meet learning outcomes and objectives.

He then proposes his own model of online instruction which includes:

• setting up a variety of pre-learning activities
• providing a set of activities which include reading, listening, and/or viewing visuals and then reflecting (such as in a journal) on those
• interacting with the content (shared cognition, form social networks) such as in conversation, discussion
• transfer what they learn to real-life applications.

The author, Mohamed Ally, comes from Athabasca, a historic distance education instruction. And although no where in this article does Ally confront the issue of distance education vs. online learning, neither does the author explicitly address traditional distance education. The entire assumption of the article is that online is its own context. Ally does reference a few articles from the discipline of DE, but the majority of his research comes from journals such as Review of Educational Research, Educational Technology, Educational Technology Research and Development, and Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks. It is implicit. But this article is a recognition that online learning is becoming its own discipline. That, and the focus on learning design, is what makes it a key article for my paper.

I began my project thinking that I would argue that online teaching and learning is a discipline separate from distance education, and one of the distinguishing characteristics is that online teaching and learning focus on pedagogies of design as opposed to pedagogies of delivery.

My most recent thinking is that I will focus more on the issue of convergence, probably make it a key component of my thesis, and argue that (for better or worse, what I'm calling now) "Online Convergence" is a discipline that encompasses both traditional and distance education.

After Anderson spends a little bit of time justifying the need for a theory, he constructs the first part of his theory of online learning around four key components of the "new science of learning" as developed by Bransford, Brown, & Cocking (1999) (see below), proclaiming that effective learning is:

1. learner centered
2. knowledge centered
3. assessment centered, and
4. community centered.

Once that has been established, he considers, briefly, the extent and nature of online and determines that it is essentially an interaction media. In that context, Anderson then constructs the second part of his theory of online learning by referring to different types of interaction for teaching an learning suggested first by Moore (1989) and, in the new context of online media, extended by Anderson and Garrison (1998). These six types of interaction are:

1. student - student (Moore)
2. student - teacher (Moore)
3. student - content (Moore)
4. teacher - teacher (Anderson and Garrison)
5. teacher - content (Anderson and Garrison)
6. content - content (Anderson and Garrison)

Again, we get back to design. Anderson suggests that the task of the online course designer is to choose, adapt, and perfect educational activities that (a) are learner centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered, and community centered; and (b) integrates as much as possible the six types of interaction.

While Anderson believes it is yet premature to define a particular theory of online learning, he presents his model as a first step and suggests that the next step is to measure the direction and magnitude of each of these variables on learning outcomes, cost factors, completion rates, and satisfaction rates.

Although Anderson is in the field of distance education and assumes himself that online learning is a subset of distance education, this article is important for my paper because it lays out a clear direction for a theory of online learning that is not tied to distance education.

I'm almost certain at this point that I will argue the opposite--that distance education is a subset of online learning.

This series of articles, written just before the explosion of the World Wide Web and exponential growth of information and communication technologies, confronts issues of learning design. Banathy essentially argues that instead of designing education around instruction (enabling teachers to present content to students), we should design educational systems around the learning experience (enabling learners to master and apply their learning).

Put in the context of online instruction, this insight is absolutely key to the argument I support that we should shift from pedagogies of delivery to pedagogies of design. My argument is that traditional distance education was/is primarily about pedagogies of delivery and that online teaching and learning is primarily about pedagogies of design. The online learning platform, by redefining time and distance, has given us the place (tools as spaces) to implement pedagogies of design.

It is all about designing environments for student-centered learning. And Banathy, in this series of articles, promoted, if not pioneered, this new approach to teaching and learning.

This is an excellent book for teachers in the field; Bender assumes no course development department or team, but, rather, provides sound, practical advice for the online instructor. The book first discusses theoretical implications, then practical applications, and finally assessment. Bender covers key components of appropriate online design for discuss-based classes by discussing strategies for active learning and design appropriate to different learning styles.

This is important for my final project because it is a text book I would select for a Foundations of Online Teaching and Learning class.

The authors consider research on how people learn and organize it in a way that is practical for educators. They distill the findings into three key principles of learning. Teachers should: (a) work with student preconceptions and prior knowledge, (b) teach in depth and providing multiple examples of the same concept, and (c) help students develop metacognitive skills so that they can take control of their own learning.

Topics include:

• How learning changes the physical structure of the brain.
  
• How existing knowledge affects what people notice and how they learn.
  
• The relationship between classroom learning and beyond the classroom
  
• The role of technology in education.

Essentially, they argue that effective learning is:

1. learner-centered
2. knowledge-centered
3. assessment-centered
4. community-centered

I came to this book because Anderson (see above) structured his article "Toward a Theory of Online Learning" around their findings. It seems important to me as we construct a new theory of online learning that we do it appropriate to research on how people learn. Once again, the focus is on design. Not delivery.

In terms of one of the central arguments of my paper--that Online Teaching and Learning is a new discipline, essentially separate from the organizational, institutional, historical roots of distance education--this article provides very little support. Caplan assumes without discussion that we are talking here about "computer-mediated distance education," and he makes the point that "Web-based distance education technology and pedagogy is still very much in its infancy" (176). I do, however, find a disconnect in his assumptions when he claims that computer-mediated distance education is becoming ubiquitous, yet it is very clear that this ubiquity is not coming from distance education institutions (they are hardly ubiquitous anywhere), but, rather, from traditional campus-based institutions. So his initial claim supports my point, even if his assumptions do not.

At any rate, definitions and assumptions aside, Caplan discusses issues such as what an online course is, faculty buy-in, resource management, faculty rewards, the need to focus on sound pedagogy, and, most important for my paper's argument--the importance of teacher education for online classes.

The strongest part of Caplan's article is his discussion on the "New Teaching Paradigm" where he makes the excellent point that we should "strive to create learning environments that exploit the features inherent in computers and the Web, in order to promote active learning that resides in the control of the student, and that can effectively lead to the development of high-order and critical thinking skills" (182).

After that initial set-up, Caplan spends the second half of the paper outlining a course-development process appropriate for a fordist institution delivering content (as opposed to a post-fordist institution designing learning spaces). He argues that online course development is too complex to be created by one or two people. We need, according to Caplan, a centralized online development unit and a course development team that includes:

• a subject matter expert
• an instructional designer
• a Web-developer
• a graphic designer
• a programmer and a multimedia author.

Admittedly, he is laying out the ideal situation. But in my view, this last part of his paper misses the point--that few institutions have these departments and positions, and even if they did, would they really need them to design learning spaces? Perhaps we would if the goal were to continue producing courses as packages to deliver to students. But that's not what most institutions are doing (or should be doing, in my view). We should be using online learning platforms to create learning spaces. And we need instructional designers and instructors who understand how to use the online learning platform to design an environment for student-centered learning.

I do not think the future of online education is producing content. Rather, it is designing learning spaces. And why, given the context of an online learning platform and its tools, would we need a Web-developer, a graphic designer, a programmer, or even a course development unit for that? Technology has become less a tool and more of a place, and what we need to focus on are strategies for using the technologies to design learning spaces--not create courses for "delivery."

Caplan makes a number of excellent observations about the nature of online in the first part of his paper, but when he moves from that to outlining how online courses should be developed, he falls back on fordist assumptions and old paradigms and provides a good example of what I want to argue against.

In this book, the authors suggest that "the best way to look into the future is through the lens of theory" (p. xxi). And the core of his theory revolves around what kinds of innovations are developed and what kinds of customers they serve. Essentially, innovations are of two basic types: disruptive and sustaining. A disruptive innovation is an innovation that either creates new markets or reshapes existing markets. A sustaining innovation is an innovation that "moves a company along an established performance trajectory." And the first thing to do when looking for "signals of change" is to look at three customer groups (pp. 3-14):

1. Nonconsumers: customers not consuming any product
2. Undershot customers: customers who are frustrated with a products limitations
3. Overshot customers: customers for whom the product is too much; further improvements are not needed or wanted

The authors argue that predicting whether an innovation will take root (and either sustain existing businesses or disrupt them) largely depends on what customers are served. If the innovation serves undershot customers (#2), for example, this does not bode well for business models which seek new markets; instead, this innovation privileges existing businesses. If, however, the innovation serves nonconsumers (#1), or overshot customers (#3), then existing business models are threatened and the new business model is more likely to succeed.

It is difficult for existing businesses that are successful in serving their current customers to re-invent their business models in the middle of their successes. Typically, when it becomes obvious the new business model has created new markets and is replacing the old business model, it is too late to change.

This theory is helpful to my paper because it gives a theoretical framework for examining online teaching and learning; that is, is online learning a disruptive innovation or a sustaining innovation?

I will suggest that in the broad field of Higher Education, it can be both innovative and sustaining because Online Learning can be used in at least two different ways for two different markets.

• for traditional campus-based institutions, I will argue that it is sustaining
• for traditional distance education institutions, I will argue that it is disruptive.

This best-selling book on globalization and the exponential technical advances of the digital revolution will be referred to when I need support for the notion that the time and distance have been redefined in recent years, and that time and distance (key elements in traditional distance education) no longer "mean" quite the same thing as they once did.

The authors believe that online learning is a new paradigm, not only for distance and distributed learning, but also for education in general; and the key component that creates this new paradigm is the ability to use online to create what they call "critical communities of inquiry."

They assume that online is a "subfield" if distance education (I believe I am going to argue just the opposite), and it appears to me that this gives them some difficulty as they try to reconcile how a subfield of distance education has become (is becoming) a central dynamic in education as a whole. But definitions, fields, and subfields aside, their primary focus in this article is to outline a theory of online that can help educators "think through their needs and understand the pedagogical, technological, and organizational options open to them" (113).

Their central focus is distance education, so they argue that the recent developments of online has helped move theoretical concerns of distance education from a preoccupation with organizational and structural concerns to transactional (teaching and learning) concerns.

This article works off an earlier paper where they propose that a functioning community of inquiry contains three overlapping elements:

1. a social presence
2. a cognitive presence
3. teaching presence

Again, they believe this augers a new era in distance education. I will argue that the ability to create a learning space that contains a social presence, a cognitive presence, and a teaching presence beyond the classroom augers a new era in education--that it is not a subfield of an older paradigm, but a new paradigm for all education.

Gillani makes the argument there are four fundamental developments that have altered the foundations of education in recent years:

1. Information Overload--traditional instruction was long structured around the scarcity of information
2. Student Diversity--social composition of students has changed; we can no longer assume the same linguistic, cultural, and academic backgrounds of our students
3. Learning Theories--new information about the human brain and the learning process have produced new models of teaching
4. Web as a Medium of Instructional Delivery

In the context of these new developments, Gillani:

1. takes recent research on learning theories,
2. divides them into four basic categories:
   1. Behavioral
   2. Cognitive
   3. Social, and
   4. Psychological
3. then discusses theoretical and practical considerations for designing elearning activities based on those four key categories.

This book is helpful for my paper primarily because it can function as either a textbook for a Foundations Class in Online Teaching and Learning and/or provide an excellent overview of how one can indeed design elearning activities according to these basic approaches to learning.

On the cusp of the explosion of information and communication technologies, Hall sees clearly that the conceptual structure of the traditional university has been going through a fundamental change, and is about to change even more radically.

For years, the organizing concept of the traditional university was essentially convocation (generation after generation, gathering together, cloistered, guarding the gates, convening in a single place and using/providing resources for a select few). For generations, scarcity was the controlling condition, both for resources and for those who could take advantage of them. Too often, this dynamic spawned a critical (but false) qualitative measure of a university's excellence--how few of its student applicants could actually become matriculants.

In recent years, for political, practical, and technological reasons, this organizing concept has evolved. Over the last half of the 20th century, the growth of the large land grant universities, the implementation of the GI Bill after WWII, the growth of the community colleges, along with some distance education initiatives have all helped to undercut that organizing concept (though still present in many of our so-called prestigious universities).

But technology is redefining the university itself--not only distance education, but all of learning. Hall's central argument is that through applications of technology, the traditional university of convocation is about to become the university of convergence.

As he describes convergence, it is where scarcity has been replaced by wide access and multiplicity; it is where exclusivity has given way to outreach and inclusiveness. Hall believes that when the "tyranny of the classroom hour" finally gives way, and when classroom instruction is redefined as student learning, then the transforming possibilities of the new university will be complete.

He concludes his paper by considering whether or not distance education can survive when the traditional university is no longer traditional. He acknowledges that DE might indeed have a dim future, but he believes that the distinguished track record of distance education of the past several decades will give distance education universities a head start on traditional universities.

In 2008, thirteen years later, DEs future (in the United States) still remains to be seen. My argument is that the ubiquity of online in academic processes (admissions, registration, support) as well as pedagogies (Web, multimedia, collaborative, student-centered) has brought us to the gates of this new paradigm of the convergent, networked university.

Especially important for my paper is that Hall argues (in 1995) that "distance" itself is rapidly losing "its significance as a defining characteristic or an important descriptor for courses or for students. He predicts that "networked or connected learning" will likely become a more accurate descriptor. And he believes that technology will lead to the change of the organizing structural concept of the university from convocation to convergence.

This is a key article for my paper. I will use Hall to help define and explain my central thesis of convergence happening in the university of today.

I may use this article if I need statistical or research support in an argument about students' experiences with online learning. But this article is not particularly special--certainly not significantly different from what similar reports have been saying for nearly ten years now.

In short, the authors surveyed 217 adult learners taking distance learning courses and found that the learning outcomes were similar and that most, but not all, students who took online preferred online.

I would use this book as a textbook in a foundations class online teaching and learning. The collection of a dozen articles is geared to online learning, as opposed to distance education, and gives an excellent overview of what we currently know about asynchronous learning, and what areas are still open to research. After each article, there is a section of questions for discussion and research.

According to Holmberg, the essence of distance education is that it is a separate mode of education in which interactions between students and faculty and students and content are mediated in some way; that is, they do not meet face to face at all, or, in some cases, only to a very limited extent.

Distance education, according to Holmberg, has always "favored" individual learning. Even as Holmberg recognizes that computer conferencing provides new dimensions of mediation, he seems to miss the collaborative/community component of the new information age.

Primarily focusing on the individual, Holmberg  describes independence in at various ways; i.e., from the ability to carry through study tasks, and the ability to select, compare, argue, analyze, and synthesize information to the notion of independence as alienation--independence as distance.  Holmberg reports how various experts have addressed this issue of independence as alienation (distance), but his own strategy is the “empathy approach,” which is, essentially, the theory that motivation can be nurtured, independent thinking be encouraged, and alienation overcome by teaching through conversation. 

I include this reading because it represents distance education theory of the past adapted to the new contexts of the information age. But it seems, at least to my view, increasingly marginal, dealing, as it does, with distance in ways distance no longer exists--privileging "independence" over collaboration and building theory based on alienation instead of theory based on community.

This is a seminal work in the field, where Keegen suggests that we need to answer three questions before developing a theory of distance education:

• Is it an educational activity?
• Is it a form of conventional education?
• Since education requires "intersubjectivity" (a shared experience in which teachers and learners are united by common goals), is DE even possible, or is it a contradiction in terms?

Obviously, with the advent of information and communication technologies in recent years, the last question is not quite so relevant. But his point is that the intersubjectivity of teacher and learner has to be recreated in some way for the enterprise to be distance education instead of just distance instruction.

Keegan's work here is important for my paper as I do an overview of classic distance education theories/definitions.

Keegan, D. (2004). The competitive advantages of distance teaching universities (1994). In G. Rumble (Ed.),
     Papers and debates on the costs and economics of distance education and online learning (Vol. 7)
     (pp. 97-102). Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg.

This study is remarkable because of how much information it contains, yet how little we can actually learn from it. The markets, business plans, strategies, organization, technologies, and pedagogical approaches were so different among the ten institutions studied that almost nothing common could be determined from the reports. That didn't stop the authors from trying, however. They believe the study shows the importance of:

1. market research
2. adequate funding
3. course choice and accreditation
4. appropriate institutional models
5. careful business planning.

I would argue that the above is so obvious that we could study ten elearning successes and learn the same lessons.

At any rate, in the case of the two US initiatives studied, it was (in my judgment) almost certainly about markets. In both cases (California Virtual University and the Open University of the United States) the fundamental organizational model was distance learning. And the trouble is, in the United States, students have so many other options.

The California Virtual University was essentially a set up where the CVU brokered around 1,600 online classes from 95 public and private schools in california.

The question I have is why would a student want to go through the virtual university, when he/she could instead go through one of those member institutions and get the same online courses, yet benefit also from being associated with a local campus-based institution?

Common sense would suggest that Distance Education and corsortial arrangements work best when students have few other options. In California, students had plenty of other options. Amazingly, the report does not address that issue. The report lists instead "inadequate prevision and planning" and "lack of quality and coherence."

The Open University of the United States attained accreditation from the Distance Education and Training Council, but that organization has very little credibility in the US. The OU had been seeking accreditation from Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, but at the time the university closed, they still hadn't been properly accredited. Without question, that had to be one of the major reasons they failed. And this report addresses that.

But again, the OU offered distance education courses to a market where students had plenty of other choices--and better choices since the US is full of accredited higher education institutions that offer online courses. Amazingly, this report does not address that issue. The authors list poor management, poor funding, and even have the temerity to suggest the British model of course content was just too difficult for the less prepared US student. (In my opinion, the ones poorly prepared were those running the OU.)

This report considers failures of eLearning, and so is useful for me to read and take account of in my paper. But I found the report superficial, annoying, and blind to the obvious.

The majority of this article, while interesting, is not particularly important for my article. As the author considers the possible unintended consequences in online learning, the usual neo-luddite suspects show up here (Postman and Birkerts, though surprisingly not Noble). Reading is in danger. Thinking is in danger. Community is in danger. Our authentic selves are in danger. We no longer "talk" with one another. The sky is falling. And so on.

But towards the end of her paper, she lists three major conceptual shifts in the structure of higher education that may prove helpful as I try to explain the genesis of online convergence:

1. higher education institutions no longer knowing what "business" they are in
• For instance, are we in the fifty-minute lecture business, or in the student centered learning business, be it campus based or DE
2. the role of the university in regards to information
• the information explosion has overwhelmed traditional gatekeepers of information like universities.
• Now it is more about information management than information transfer.
• Educational institution that considers itself as a gatekeeper, or in the business of transferring information is not likely to be successful in this new paradigm
3. the transformation of pedagogy made possible by information and communication technologies

It is the author's discussion of these conceptual shifts which I may use in laying out the key characteristics of the new paradigm of what I am likely to term "online convergence."

Mugridge, I. (2004). Response to Greville Rumble’s article “The competitive vulnerability of distance teaching
     universities (1992).  In G. Rumble (Ed.), Papers and debates on the costs and economics of distance
     education and online learning (Vol. 7) (pp. 93-95). Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem
     der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg.

O'Donnell focuses primarily on how the history of the written word intersects with the explosion of the internet, juxtaposing the modern and the ancient. He is a professor of classics, and makes a number of interesting observations and predictions about the future based on models and frameworks from Sophocles to Derrida.

Most appropriate for my paper is the section on higher education. I will likely refer to him as he asks the intriguing question of how a business defines itself. He uses the well-known example (also discussed by Christensen) of the railroads, which saw their business as railroads rather than transportation. He suggests that higher education (in 1998) is operating as if it were in the "fifty-minute lecture business."

In my argument on convergence, I will make the argument that higher education has (in the past ten years) determined that it is now (a) in the student learning business instead of the fifty minute lecture business and (b) in the information management business instead of the information transfer business.

Otte and Benke do not really argue that convergence has happened; they assume it has. They take the point of view that online learning is now reaching the core of the educational enterprise and that the dichotomy between distance learning and campus-based learning has broken down. In that context, they argue that senior administrators in higher education institutions should embrace the new approaches to education, cultivate the community building and branding of site-based education that online can perform, and embrace online as central to the institutions core, instead of allowing it to linger on the margins, or be isolated in some continuing education program.

This is a key article in my paper. They provide excellent support as I try to define convergence and argue that it is no longer a matter of distance learning on one hand and traditional campus-based learning on the other. Online has brought them together.

This book would be an excellent supporting text for a course in online teaching and learning. It covers the key issues of working with students online and provides practical advice for doing so, privileging diversity and student-centered learning. Topics include learning styles, assessment, and best practice for becoming "learning-focused."

Here, Peters works off his previous publications and argues famously that distance education is “the most industrialized form of teaching and learning.”  From the very beginning, DE institutions have been motivated to seek efficiencies and economies of scale in order to generate maximum profits. For the last century and a half, most DE institutions have done just that.  In order to achieve maximum profits and/or lower costs, they have, as Peters demonstrates, organized the production of their products (education) around key concepts of industrialization, such as mass production, division of labor, and standardization.

The most obvious advantage of the industrial model is that it has mass produced and mass delivered education to students who otherwise would not have had educational opportunities. From a global perspective, the consequences of this are almost incalculable, since increased global education adds immeasurably not only to world economies (increase in human capital and thus economic growth and social welfare), but also to global politics (education functioning as prerequisite for democratization).

Another component of industrialization--division of labor—offers advantages as well. In an industrial scheme, the course would be: (a) designed by an instructional design expert, (b) written by a content expert, (c) reviewed by subject experts, (d) edited by editors, (e) produced by publishers, (f) distributed and delivered by professionals, and, finally, (g) taught (or tutored) by someone trained specifically for teaching. Done properly, this product would acquire the benefit of numerous experts, the sum total of which would be far greater than any one teacher could produce.

Standardization itself offers advantages, especially if the product created by the division of labor is one of quality.  Standardization can “standardize” quality on a mass scale. 

Further, standardization and mass production produce economies of scale, so the industrialization of education provides advantages to the student (consumer) in lower costs and advantages for the producer (distance education institution) in higher profits.

Most disadvantages of industrialization are simply another side of the advantages.  For example: standardization, which can disseminate a quality product, can also disseminate an inferior product; division of labor, which can take advantage of the talents of many, can also become a bloated system, more interested in perpetuating itself and its individual roles than in producing an efficient quality product; mass production, which can reach large numbers of students at low costs, only works with institutions large enough to commit the proper resources. 

In other words, the strengths of industrialization are also its weaknesses.  

But perhaps the biggest disadvantage of industrialization in education is the very nature of industrialization itself; that is, educational institutions are not really assembly lines, education is not really a product, and students are not really consumers. Further, as Peters notes, even industrialization as an organizational model has evolved in recent years to new post-industrial models.  Essentially, post-industrial models: (a) take advantage of information technology to increase efficiencies, (b) replace “top-down” management with horizontal networks, and (c) re-distribute power and  responsibility to flexible working groups.

I include this article because not only because it represents the seminal historical observations of a pioneer in the field of DE, but also because it helps demonstrate how traditional distance education is different from online teaching and learning, especially in course production. DE is at its heart about producing instruction for delivery. Online Teaching and Learning, on the other hand, is about post-fordist course development and far less about delivery and more about design.

Without question, Peters understands that the information and communication technologies prevalent in the past few years have profoundly changed not only how we interact with the world, but also how we teach and learn. And he understands that this new digital information age is not just another an addition onto our traditional structures, but a dynamic that redefines all our educational processes--DE and traditional. Further, Peters sees clearly that these new technologies give us the opportunity to move from pedagogies of instruction to pedagogies of design. When he complains, however, that in these new digital environments, there is no real place students can interact with, I'm not sure he quite understands how online learning platforms can indeed function as spaces--technology as place.

At any rate, where Peters misses the boat, in my view, is in understanding the nature of these new collaborative learning environments. He seems not to understand that collaboration is not just a pedagogical activity, but actually a central organizing concept of networked communities--a central organizing concept of these new digital places.

To be sure, Peters confronts the issue of learning through collaboration, but his focus remains on the individual and independent learning. For him, collaborative learning is learning together apart. And this explains, I believe, his emphasis on the independent learner, which is, arguably, a holdover from traditional distance education theory.

Rumble, G. (2004a). The competitive vulnerability of distance teaching universities (1992).  In G. Rumble (Ed.),
     Papers and debates on the costs and economics of distance education and online learning (Vol. 7)
     (pp. 67-87). Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg.

Rumble, G. (2004b). The competitive vulnerability of distance teaching universities: A reply (1994).  In
     G. Rumble (Ed.), Papers and debates on the costs and economics of distance education and online learning
     (Vol. 7) (pp. 103-106). Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Carl von Ossietzky Universität
     Oldenburg.

This article has the honor of being the inaugural chapter in Moore and Anderson's Handbook of Distance Education, and so, obviously, must be highly regarded in the discipline.

The author does indeed provide a brief (and useful) outline of key issues and theories of DE, from Holmbeg's focus on the individual and Peters's focus on industrialization to Keegan's typology of systems and the more recent work by Garrison and Anderson on post-industrial education. What is odd to me is the author's attempt to apply pragmatism and systems methodology to the entire field in order to provide clarity. To my reading (and this may be my own failing), it adds adds complexity and confusion.

Saba apparently believes that distance education is not a subset of education, but, rather, the center of the entire educational enterprise, and so distance education theory must account for the whole of education and not just when learner and teacher are separate in space and time. I admire the attempt, but I cannot follow the reasoning. If what Saba identifies as DE is at the center of the educational enterprise, then why are we still calling it DE?

This article is important for my paper primarily because of its overview of the field. But it is interesting to see an attempt to create a systems-based model that accommodates traditional distance education, distance education in our new paradigm of networked communities, and education itself.

The point of this article is to lay out the differences between what the author terms the "teacher-centered conception" of teaching and learning" vs the "learner-centered conception, and to recognize that new pedagogies and new technologies in distance education are privileging learner-centered approaches.

This information is useful for my paper, particularly as I attempt to describe, explain, and argue what I will call "pedagogies of design" (learner-centered, new paradigm) over "pedagogies of delivery" (teacher-centered, old paradigm).

A few key points the author makes.

The Teacher-Centered Conception of Teaching and learning:

• characterized by formalized activities
• focus on what teacher says and does
• success is measured primarily by how well student retains and repeats the content presented

The Learner-Centered Conception of Teaching and Learning

• based on constructivist principles
• problem-based, but also collaborative, where learners collaborate with other learners and with the teacher about the problem solution/situation
• without Web-based technologies, it would be difficult to implement collaborative problem-based pedagogies
• what a teacher does is more important than how much information a teacher knows

I expect I will return to this article for support, ideas, and language when I try to characterize pedagogies of design.

To get more students and/or to get more money. That's the article in a nutshell.

Note: I do not yet have a copy of this publication. The only copy I was able to locate was for sale in the UK. I did order a copy, but have yet to receive it. Currently, my only knowledge of the work is in how it is referenced by D. Thompson (1999) (see below).

This publication would be important for my paper because it is the first publication I'm aware of that talks about convergence, and one of the first public recognitions I'm aware of that defies conventional DE thinking and claims that DE and tertiary education really are not all that different.

As my reading and writing has progressed, it appears I am coming to the conclusion after the age of the Information and Communications Technologies they they argued for twenty-one years ago-- before the age of the ICTs. It would be fascinating to read. I hope I'm able to receive it before I complete my paper.

This publication is a collection of articles, all of which assume or deal with in some way with the phenomena that policies and processes of distance education are converging with policies and processes of conventional education. Obviously, there are a wide range of perspectives from which to consider this phenomena--including financial, learner, instructor, markets, recruitment, as well as the evolution of more design-focused pedagogies.

My focus here is on the initial essay written by Tait and Mills, where they argue more generally for convergence and set up the context for the book.

Part of this is a little awkward, and will, in some ways, make referencing the article difficult, since one of the key characteristics of convergence Tait and Mills discuss is not at all what I believe to be happening in the US now, nearly ten years after this article was written; that is, they note the increased interest in traditional campus-based institutions in " resource-based learning"--essentially, instructor-minimal or instructor-less Web based courses.

Although interest in resource-based learning was a huge part of corporate eLearning in the late nineties, if it ever was an interest in a large number of US higher education institutions, I never saw much evidence of it. And I don't see much evidence of it today.

As a matter of fact, I will argue and try to demonstrate in my paper that quite the opposite has occurred--that the most successful Distance Education institutions in the US (with US students as their market) are moving away from the so-called resource-based learning methods and more toward online classes where there is a significant social presence and significant faculty presence in the learning activity.

Converge is still occurring, but not quite as described by Tait and Mills in 1999.

At any rate, they argue that there is no longer a decisive break in the distinctions between distance education and conventional education. And despite some of the details on how DE and conventional are becoming similar, the larger point that the distinctions are breaking down is, to my mind, quite accurate.

They argue that the real distinction will not be between distance education institutions and conventional institutions but between institutions that (a) use a wide range of teaching and learning strategies based on information and communication technologies and (b) those that do not.

This article first tackles the issue of technology itself and recognizes that our language is poorly suited to convey the complexity of our interactions with technology.

For instance, Thompson argues that our technological processes and tools are complex and interconnected enough to be both "means and ends" (both "fish" and "water"). This makes a lot of sense to me as I have long tried to describe the online learning platform as a process, a means, an "end, " a technology, AND a place.

But the point here is that as our technologies advance, they redefine our contexts in ways that our language is inadequate to describe.

The majority of the article is an argument for how technology can indeed create the kinds of learning communities envisioned by even the most skeptical, and what sorts of issues must be considered (finances, infrastructure, student diversity, etc. ). The author also discusses the familiar trajectory of enthusiasts, early adopters, late adopters, etc.

A a few points she makes along the way:

1. technologies themselves are converging under such banners as multimedia and digital
2. once single modes of instruction are becoming multi-mode models (blended learning, use of online learning activities even in tertiary settings, etc.)
3. DE scholars (such as Stewart--see above) are beginning to recognize that there are no unique principles inherent in distance education which are not also inherent in mainstream education
4. since information and communication technologies are fundamental constituents of work and home, F2F teachers are increasingly employing new media and technology skills in their F2F classes
5. information technologies are having a major impact on administrative processes in tertiary institutions, essentially helping to create the virtual places where teaching and learning can flourish.

The title would led one to believe that this would be a key article for my paper, but with the exception of the intriguing comment about how our language is not adequate to convey how technology is redefining our contexts, there is very little in here I can use for my argument.

White, V. (2004). Response to Greville Rumble’s article “The competitive vulnerability of distance teaching
     universities (1992). In G. Rumble (Ed.), Papers and debates on the costs and economics of distance
     education and online learning (Vol. 7) (pp. 89-91). Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem
     der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg.