Educational Development: A Developing Profession |
\ |
Educational developers play a key role in the preparation and delivery of courses offered in the distance education mode. However, their attempts to mediate in academic teaching are not always viewed favorably by academics, and educational developers are frequently required to justify their roles. This paper examines the adequacy of these justifications, based on the theories of educational development. These concepts include the following:
The assumptions underlying these justifications are open to question. They cast the teacher in the role of "subject matter expert," downplaying the importance of the teaching role and the interaction with learners. They also rely on a simplistic view of the relationship between research, theory, and practice in education, a view which ignores the selective nature of technological applications in education and the political and institutional contexts in which education is conducted.
Inevitably educational developers focus on the quality of self-instructional materials as an index of the quality of education. Variables which are more difficult to display - such as quality of feedback, receptivity of staff, efficiency of delivery systems, and quality of counselling - often receive less attention, even though these may be the qualities learners perceive as valuable. The assumption that the traditional teaching priorities of teachers need to be adjusted when planning and delivering courses is based on the assertion that a deterministic systems approach to education is automatically superior. It ignores the significance of changes currently occurring in several areas of education which are teacher-driven or learner-driven rather than orchestrated by educational developers. This paper prompts those who are in the educational development profession to re-examine their roles and assumptions and to develop a professional identity based on an understanding of the relationship between teachers and developers, an appreciation of the qualities which learners value in an educational experience, and an analysis of the contextual variables - both political and institutional - which impinge on educational practice.
Les concepteurs de cours et de matériel didactique jouent un rôle capital dans la préparation et la transmission des cours offerts par enseignement à distance. Cependant, leurs tentatives de s'entremettre dans l'enseignement académique ne sont pas toujours vues d'un oeil favorable par les universitaires et on leur demande fréquemment de justifier leurs rôles. Cet article examine la justesse de ces justifications en se basant sur les théories du développement de cours et de matériel didactique. Ces concepts comprennent les éléments suivants:
Les présomptions qui sous-tendent ces justifications soulèvent certaines questions. Ces présomptions enferment l'enseignant dans le rôle "d'expert en la matière," minimisant l'importance du rôle de l'enseignement et de l'interaction avec les apprenants. Elles s'appuient aussi sur une perception simpliste des rapports entre la recherche, la théorie et la pratique de l'enseignement, une perception qui ignore la nature sélective des applications technologiques pour l'éducation et les contextes politiques et institutionnels dans lesquels se déroule l'enseignement.
Il est inévitable que les concepteurs de cours considèrent la qualité du matériel auto-éducatif comme un indice de qualité de l'enseignement. Des variables plus difficiles à exposer - comme la qualité du "feedback," la réceptivité du personnel, l'efficacité des systèmes de transmission et la qualité des conseillers - reçoivent souvent moins d'attention même s'il s'agit d'éléments susceptibles d'être considérés comme ayant beaucoup d'importance par les apprenants. La présomption voulant que les priorités éducatives traditionnelles des enseignants doivent être ajustées lors de la planification et de la transmission des cours est basée sur l'assertion qu'une approche didactique par des systèmes déterministes est automatiquement supérieure. Elle ignore la portée des changements survenant présentement dans plusieurs domaines de l'éducation centrés soit sur l'enseignant soit sur l'apprenant, plutôt qu'orchestrés par les concepteurs de cours. Cet article incite ceux qui oeuvrent dans cette profession à réexaminer leurs rôles et leurs présomptions et à élaborer une identité professionnelle fondée sur une compréhension des relations entre enseignants et concepteurs, sur une appréciation des qualités importantes pour les apprenants dans une expérience d'apprentissage et sur une analyse des variables ayant trait aux contextes - tant politique qu'institutionnel - qui affectent la pratique de l'enseignement.
Academic teachers used to exert almost total control over their distance teaching activities, but today course preparation and delivery is often mediated by a team of non-teaching professionals. Educational developers play a key role in this process, under titles such as educational developer, educational technologist, course developer, course advisor, course assistant, instructional designer, educational designer, and so on. This change in distance education methods has been most evident since the establishment of the British Open University, which has had a major impact on distance education worldwide.
A systems approach, incorporating input from educational technologists, challenged the adequacy of existing methods of distance education in traditional institutions. So pervasive has been this influence that institutions that do not employ at least a small team of non-teaching professionals are often regarded as somewhat backward by the rest of the distance education community.
However, attempts to mediate course preparation and delivery are not always viewed favorably by academics, particularly in institutions that have been in operation for some time. In the day-to-day business of course preparation, the educational developer is frequently called on by academics to justify his or her role and in particular to provide reasons why established methods of teaching at a distance are inadequate. This paper examines the justifications that stem from the major assumptions underlying educational development as a profession.
The onus of these justifications is often one-sided. The teaching practices of academics are seldom submitted to such close scrutiny. But this is a separate issue and does not remove the burden of justification from educational developers as they continue to develop a professional identity.
Clearly the activities of educational developers are varied, and not all members view their roles in the same way.
Individuals invariably will adopt
principles and practices consistent with their background, education, and experience and appropriate to the institutional context in which they find themselves. This seems particularly true of a young profession like educational development, which draws on individuals from a variety of educational backgrounds and that as yet provides few opportunities for qualification in the profession.
Nevertheless, a new professional group is emerging with origins in the Open University's systems approach to distance education and, more generally, in the educational technology profession.
The aim of this paper is to stimulate discussion on the following major assumptions underlying the educational developer's role in distance education. These are:
If these assumptions are well-founded, then educational developers may legitimately claim full support from institutions that teach at a distance. However, if these assumptions are shown to be open to question, then members of the educational development profession will need to consider what justification there is for their mediating role in distance education.
In this paper I will examine the origins of the educational developer's role in the educational technology profession.
Next I will examine potential areas of influence of educational developers within distance education systems. The assumptions outlined above are then called into question. I will argue furthermore that the conflicting interests of academics and educational developers, stemming from attempts by educational developers to impose their professional priorities on the academic community, can only be understood fully by an examination of the institutional context of these two professional groups.
Educational Technology as a Profession Educational technology is a composite of two major strands of professional development: one emphasizing the hardware of instruction and one concentrating on human behavior in the teaching-learning context.
On the hardware side is a concern for the devices used in teaching: computers, teaching machines, audio and video cassettes, television, and so on. Insofar as there is a research literature in this area, it concentrates mainly on comparing media effectiveness or devising taxonomies for media selection (e.g., Heidt, 1975; Meredith, 1965; Tosti & Ball, 1969).
The behavioral approach, on the other hand, stems from several different streams of research, particularly experimental and individual differences psychology and analyses of teaching-learning processes. Out of these diverse influences, several theories of instruction were developed in the 1960s: for example, Ausubel (1967) and Bruner (1966) from a cognitivist perspective and Gagné (1965) and Skinner (1968) from the behaviorist view. The clearest example of the link between the behavioral sciences and educational technology is the development of programmed instruction based on the work of Crowder (1960) and Skinner (1968).
As the profession of educational technology developed, a systems approach unified the two separate streams and provided a professional identity. This approach was significant in the history of education in that it implied development of a total program of instruction rather than the grafting of isolated innovations onto existing educational structures, as had been the case previously. The idea of systems stems from the work of Bertalanffy (1968) with its applications in weapons technology and industrial contexts. The concept gave rise to a management technique concerned with an input-output feedback loop, which is not surprising given the industrial context in which it was applied.
The way in which a systems approach meshed with educational applications such as programmed learning is illustrated by Nickson (1971), who wrote:
Good programmes nowadays give an explicit statement of objectives, specify for whom the programme is intended (the target population), ensure that the learner has the necessary knowledge to embark on the programme by giving a pre-test and attempt to measure attainment of objectives in a post- test. (p. 38)
This approach, together with statements like the following, would now be
considered too simplistic in their assumption that behavioral outcomes in education should be specified completely. For example:
The behavioural approach elicits the inevitable conclusion that the quality of an educational system must be defined primarily in terms of change in student behaviours. Thus every factor in the educational system must be evaluated as to its ability to modify either directly or indirectly the behaviour of the student. (Tosti & Ball, 1969, p. 6)
Learning is a change in behaviour and can be prescribed, produced, and guaranteed like any other product. It is now possible to specify the desired performances of learners and arrange the circumstances of learning such that these performances will be developed and exhibited by learners. The behavioural products, explicitly delineated in advance, can and should be guaranteed. (Fraley & Vargus, 1975, p. 2)
Nevertheless, the elements of the behaviorist/programmed learning approach remain a dominant part of the educational technologist's tool kit: specification of behavioral objectives; identification of the target audience; pre-testing; design of instruction; post-testing in the form of assessment; and course evaluation.
In the minds of some authors, the title "educational developer" is really a synonym for educational technologist. For example, in his book Educational Technology in Curriculum Development, Derek Rowntree (1982, p. 255) advocated a name change from educational technologist to educational developer in order to "circumvent much understandable suspicion among potential colleagues, and gain ourselves a more open hearing." Rowntree also argued that the implications of a systems approach for education is a complete reversal of the customary order and priorities in planning and teaching.
In planning their courses, teachers have customarily begun by thinking up ways of motivating their students and providing acceptable classroom activities. Only later, if at all, would they go on to spell out the purposes or objectives of this teaching and consider means of evaluating whether those purposes or other activities had materialized. Programmed learning reversed those priorities and educational technology now revolves around the idea of evaluation, and usually, but not exclusively, evaluation in terms of objectives. (p. 5)
The instructional materials prepared for distance education students with input from educational developers demonstrate the impact of the educational technology movement as Rowntree described it. Salient features of these materials include a clear statement of objectives, frequently in behavioral terms, together with self-assessment questions related to these objectives, progression through a topic in small steps, and a linking of formal assessment items to behavioral objectives. Other features may have been added, derived from research in behaviorist and cognitive psychology. These features may include hierarchical structuring of text, signposting, insertion of frequent activities, overviews, cognitive maps, and so on.
These are the criteria by which the quality of self-instructional materials is determined within the distance education community. They are seldom observed in distance educational materials prepared by academics working unaided. This is not to deny that in practice educational developers perform a variety of other roles, such as editorial services or student advocacy. However, the dominant model derived from educational technology is the one we observe in the materials produced.
Rowntree acknowledged that educational outcomes cannot be identified precisely. Nevertheless, he assumed that the various aspects of education do interact in a regular and predictable way. For example, although he eschewed the doctrinaire approach of hard-line educational technologists and attempted to replace this with a more even-handed look at the process of education, the same topics appear: aims and objectives, the design of learning activities, assessment, media selection, evaluation, and improvement. This is the case, even though systems theory with its connotations of human engineering, becomes "a systematic approach," and behaviorist psychology with its connotations of programmed learning and teaching machines is broadened to "behavioural psychology."
An alternative view of systems, which acknowledges that they may be either determinate, stochastic, or indeterminate, not only accords with Bertalanffy's own conception (1968), but also allows educationalists to examine systems other than the deterministic kind assumed by early behaviorists.
Writing in this vein, Hughes (1979) comments:
...those educational movements which deny the value of preplanning and prespecification of experience, and emphasise the intrinsic as well as the instrumental value of classroom experiences, would appear not to be recognising any measure of regularity or lawfulness, and thereby would appear to be viewing systems as indeterminate. At present, the state of knowledge in the curriculum field would suggest that we have reached that point where the system must be viewed as lying somewhere in the stochastic range. (p. 198)
Whether Rowntree sees educational systems as stochastic (i.e., probabilistic) or determinate, he argued that the implication of a systems approach for education is a complete reversal of teaching priorities in planning, to accord with the objectives-evaluation sequence.
What would a stochastic view of education include? In a stochastic system, learning is not totally under the control of teachers or educational developers no matter how sophisticated their technology. The responsibility for successful learning is shared between teachers and learners, and the definition of success in any course is not wholly determined by the teacher.
A statement of behavioral objectives might be replaced by a contract between teacher and learner that makes clear each person's responsibilities and forecasts the time frame involved. As well, both parties would acknowledge that there may be intrinsic and lifelong learning outcomes that are not directly assessable. There would be opportunities to review and modify this contract at reasonable intervals.
In such a system, the approaches to assessment would also be different from objectives-based assessment. Allowance would be made for unintended but valuable outcomes, and peer review may form a much more important role in formal assessment. In addition, learners may elect to strive for mastery in some areas but minimal competency in others, consistent with their particular goals.
The design of the course itself might not consist of the design of self-instructional materials but of development of appropriate resources that students might use to fulfil the agreed goals. The educational developer might then become a negotiator between students and teachers or a facilitator, providing access to a range of educational resources. The possibilities inherent in a stochastic system are numerous precisely because it is not deterministic.
Within a systems approach to education, potential areas of influence include curriculum planning, setting educational objectives, design of instruction, student assessment, and course evaluation. The logic of a deterministic systems approach requires the development of a total program of instruction. The actual influence of any educational developer will be affected by several variables: size of the insti tution, opportuni ties for role diversification, level of employment, special interests, and individual skills. Insofar as they occupy middle management positions in distance education, however, educational developers are in a position to influence the full cycle of events. The nature of their intervention warrants close scrutiny even though such intervention is often less successful than educational developers would desire, as is discussed in subsequent sections.
One of the most sensitive areas of influence in designing educational systems is the curriculum. Although few educational developers would question an academic's expertise in the subject matter area (even if qualified to do so), questioning the curriculum is rather a different matter, involving judgements about what is and is not of value in education.
Members of the educational technology profession have been interested in curriculum planning for some time. Indeed, several have lamented the failure of their profession to be more active in this area. For instance, Rowntree (1982, p. 28) discussed the possibility of educational technologists not just assisting teachers to clarify objectives but questioning the objectives themselves: that is invading the area of curriculum planning.
Although such a move is logical within the framework of a systems approach, curriculum planning is a politically sensitive area that needs to be approached from a broader perspective than that provided by the traditional approach of educational technology. There is evidence that educational tech-nologists have been slow to appreciate the literature on curriculum, and that curriculum theorists have been equally slow to appreciate the contributions that educational technologists have to offer. For instance, in a paper that explores the degree to which educational technology has penetrated the curriculum area, Wilkes (1978, p. 80) concluded that "curriculum theorists do not read the works of educational technologists." At the same time, Wilkes acknowledges that educational technologists do not read the works of curriculum theorists either. Given the arguments that have been advanced by curriculum theorists against the educational technologist's approach to education (e.g., Hamilton, D., Jenkins, D., King, C., MacDonald, B., & Parlett, M., 1977; Kemmis, 1980; Stenhouse, 1975) and given the alternatives to a technologist's model of curriculum design and evaluation that have been proposed, educational developers interested in curriculum planning would do well to examine the existing literature from several perspectives in order to appreciate the scope of the issues involved.
Behaviorist psychology once provided the dominant theoretical and re-search basis for models of curriculum, but there are now a variety of bases: humanistic, sociological, literary, and ethnomethodological. As long as these alternatives are ignored, the assumptions of professional groups like educational technologists and developers will remain unexamined.
The basic arguments against the technologists' approach revolve around the distinction between educational practice derived from theory and practice derived from experience of teachers. On the one hand is the assumption that the results of research may be generalized to practice, and on the other that practice must be guided primarily by contextual variables. The results of research in a variety of areas should not be ignored, but they should not be
the primary source of guidance for educational practice.
A further assumption that has been under attack for some time, is that a link between science and technology in the curriculum area lends an aura of objectivity to curriculum studies. This assumption leads to the belief that input from educational technology to the curriculum area is apolitical and hence value- free, a belief that has been questioned vigorously by several authors. For example, Travers (1973) wrote: "The belief that the development of technology is necessarily an outgrowth of the scientific enterprise leads to the belief that technology is quite remote from politics" (p. 992). Travers argues that the kind of scientific work that is applied to education may be highly dependent on the power politics of the day and on those government bureaucracies that are prepared to sponsor the technology. Hard-line educational technology of the kind described earlier would, for example, appear to mesh well with current attempts at educational rationalization in the name of efficiency and effectiveness.
Educational developers who themselves hold a more liberal view of education need to be aware that the intellectual history of the educational technology profession is far from liberal. Without considerable reorientation it may virtually rule out some educational alternatives such as student-driven or negotiated curricula. It is in this context in particular that educational developers need to clarify the assumptions underlying their role. They also need to be aware that whatever position they adopt with regard to curriculum making, it will not be value-free.
Even if we acknowledge that the educational developer plays a role in assisting teachers to formulate educational objectives, the question of imposition of a value system does not disappear. Clarification of objectives is not merely a matter of rewording text in language that students will understand but of devising an appropriate taxonomy that indicates the type and level of performance required.
Ormell (1975) suggests that "what we cannot do with intellectual credibility is to assume that the business of classifying educational objectives is a purely technical matter, which is independent of the central philosophical questions relating to the aims and values of education" (p. 4). Ormell cites as an example the hierarchical nature of Bloom's (1956) well-known taxonomy of educational objectives, pointing out that the value systems of several fields of endeavor (for example creative writing and mathematics) in no way conform to this hierarchy.
Educational developers also need to confront the possibility that some desirable outcomes cannot be readily observed or measured. Thus, for example, although both teachers and students might agree that "understanding" is a desirable outcome of some learning experience, and although both groups might possess tacit knowledge of what "understanding" means, its inclusion in a list of objectives is generally frowned upon by educational developers because it cannot be readily linked to specific behavioral outcomes.
Rowntree (1982) argued that behavioral objectives are an antidote to "woolly thinking" on the part of teachers and curriculum planners and that they are a means of helping students to move toward a clearly defined out-come. At one level it is difficult to argue with this approach. Clear guidelines of what is expected of the student assist both teachers and students in planning their activities.
However, we need to draw a distinction between clear planning and goal setting on the one hand and use of a behavioral objectives approach on the other. The two are not synonymous and should not be regarded as such. Certainly, in the first instance, the behavioral objectives approach did much to draw attention to loosely defined approaches to teaching. However, in extending this approach so that it becomes the benchmark of "good" educational practice, the danger exists that those teachers who are non-conformist with regard to behavioral objectives will be labelled "woolly thinkers." It is not necessarily the case that the quality of a student's learning experience will be affected negatively by a failure to set behavioral objectives at the outset and hence to predetermine the path of learning and assessment. Such an alternative may well do violence to a deterministic systems approach but it does not necessarily constitute bad education.
Once curriculum issues have been decided and objectives set, the task of the educational developer is to influence the design of materials and the program of events that constitute instruction. In distance education as it is currently conceived, following the model set by the British Open University and other distance education institutions, this amounts to preparing a package of self-instructional materials and incorporating selected one- and two-way communications episodes into course presentation.
In theory, a first stage in the design process consists of choosing appropriate media for the course. In practice, the choice of media is limited by the types available, by time and budget constraints, and by student and staff access to the media chosen (see Bates, 1984). Pri nt and audiotapes are still the basic media of instruction in distance education because of their ease of production and almost universal accessibility. This virtually defines the basic skills that an educational developer needs when assisting in the design of instructional materials.
In practice these skills embody a good deal of technical knowledge, and this knowledge is sufficiently complex and esoteric in the eyes of academics to reinforce the claims of educational developers that distance education teachers are subject matter experts who do not know how to teach (see Shaw and Taylor, 1984).
Correctly translated, however, this usually amounts to the claim that teachers do not often have the technical skills necessary to translate their ideas into the media most often used in distance education.
At a less superficial level, there is a sense in which the design of self-instructional materials goes beyond mere technical knowledge. Educational developers analyze course content in order to derive appropriate learning sequences: for example, concept analysis giving rise to logical ordering, chaining, hierarchical ordering, and so on. Furthermore, it is important to write instructional material which provides students working in relative isolation with a source of ongoing motivation. Activities that lead the students out to various resource materials and bring them back to analyze learning experiences can enhance learning and maintain motivation. Developers need to design learning materials that are instructional, interesting, and informative; the task is basically an exercise in the clear and imaginative presentation of ideas and showing an empathy with the student.
There is no reason why educational developers who do not actually teach the course should possess these skills to a greater extent than those academics who do teach it. The fact that academics who prepare distance education courses frequently produce materials that are pedestrian, poorly structured and signposted, and inadequately referenced, provides fuel for the argument that they do not know how to teach. This conclusion is often accepted by educational developers without regard for either the institutional context in which the materials are prepared or the possibility that teaching at a distance is seen as a second- rate academic activity compared with other work such as research and face-to-face instruction.
Just as educational developers are in a position to influence curriculum planning, set educational objectives, and design instructional materials, they are also in a position to influence methods of student assessment and course evaluation, crucial components of the instructional process in formal education systems. Working within a deterministic systems approach, assessment should be a premeditated and objective process. It is a way of knowing whether objectives have been met and of evaluating the effectiveness of instructional design.
Rowntree (1982) argues that a systems approach that embeds assessment into the cycle of curriculum planning, objectives, design, assessment, and evaluation places responsibility for the effectiveness of a course of instruction on the teacher. "Historically speaking, programmed learning made this particular moral breakthrough, by firmly accepting such responsibility for the students' attainment. If students did not learn from the programme, then the fault lay in the programme rather than in the students" (p. 198).
In a teacher-driven curriculum, where students play no part in program design, one would expect teachers to assume a major part of the responsibility for educational outcomes. However, this is only one view of the educational process. Alternatives exist whereby responsibility shifts along a continuum from learning as the teacher's responsibility through learning as a teacher-student responsibility to learning as predominantly a student responsibility. Hence, assessment will not always be premeditated or teacher- designed, and objectives may be modified depending on the student's own perceived learning needs.
The problem with Rowntree's analysis is that a teacher who is not prepared to accept a specific systems approach is in danger of being labelled "irresponsible," regardless of what alternatives he or she might espouse. Open-ended approaches, student-driven or negotiated learning, and problem-based learning are all effectively ruled out by this approach. This opens up the question of the evaluation of effectiveness in distance education, a question that distance educators have been slow to address even using the objective assessment measures that they advocate. Alternative approaches to evaluation emphasizing critical self-reflection by teachers (see for example, Hamilton, et al., 1977; Kemmis, 1980; Stake, 1975; Stenhouse, 1975) are virtually ignored by educational developers, who espouse the rational, objective approach of educational technology.
The attempts by educational developers to reorder the customary priorities of teachers in line with a systems approach rests on several basic assumptions, as follows:
There is a valid distinction between content and process in
education such that teachers are subject matter experts specializing in content and educational developers are non-subject matter experts specializing in process.
The study of education in all its aspects certainly is a legitimate area of expertise. For example, one would not expect a teacher of chemistry to have encountered the same set of ideas at the same level as a teacher of education, though both may be expert in their own fields. However, the content-process distinction goes beyond acknowledgement of different areas of expertise. All academic teachers, educationalists included, are viewed as experts in subject matter. Educational developers frequently assume that teachers lack under-standing of the process of education, even though they are engaged in the act of teaching whereas educational developers are not.
All those engaged in education are continually in the process of learning about teaching. Part of this process stems from a cycle of action, reflection, and modification of teaching approaches. Yet another aspect of this cycle relies on communication with others, including educational developers, who have made a study of specific aspects of teaching.
No teacher qualified in and teaching a particular subject area is totally unaware of the process of education. Communication of ideas to others frequently sharpens perception of the subject itself, and reflection on the subject gives rise to new ideas for communication. Thus, content and process are woven closely together; it seems misguided to attempt to disentangle them. This is true even though teachers do not usually verbalize educational principles derived from their teaching experience.
Although educational developers may contribute to a discussion of the process of education, there is no reason to assume that they are the sole arbiters on educational processes and that teachers themselves do not have a significant contribution to make.
A distinction between content and process may satisfy the educational developer's need for professional recognition. Indeed, its simplicity is appealing. However it is neither valid nor workable. Insofar as educational developers in distance education espouse the distinction, it represents a major stumbling block to their effective communication with academic teachers.
The problem of developing effective teaching strategies cannot be solved by supplying a ready-made formula because this removes from the teacher not only any responsibility but also any opportunities for critical reflection and for professional and personal development. Changing teachers' planning priorities will not guarantee success if their own level of experience and the type of discourse that they use to describe teaching processes does not concur with the suggested change.
Distance education is a complex and demanding task, and those engaged in this form of education have a lot to learn about optimizing its potential. But this goal cannot be achieved by maintaining a content- process distinction in education. If the distinction is denied, then we need to examine carefully what skills and experiences educational developers should possess that can enhance the teaching-learning process. Underlying this question is the issue of the type of training and educational background that is most appropriate for their professional growth.
In what ways can educational developers play a significant role in the cycle of planning, preparation, teaching, and critical reflection? Some educational developers have already worked out roles for themselves that de-emphasize the content-process distinction. These include:
The important thing about these activities is that, for the most part, they are teacher-driven, and they are piecemeal rather than all-embracing. They cast the educational developer in a responsive role rather than in the role of controller of the educational process. In this sense they represent a radical departure from the stereotypic role of educational developer as process expert.
Principles of teaching and learning espoused by educational developers are superior by virtue of their having been derived from educational research and theory.
A corollary to this assumption is that the intuitions and experiences of academic teachers are not an appropriate basis on which to build teaching principles and practices. It is clear that a fairly straightforward relationship between theory and research on the one hand and educational practice on the other has been assumed by educational technologists.
Systems theory and psychological research have been used to support arguments for the most appropriate conduct of teaching in areas varying from curriculum planning to evaluation. I have also pointed out that the validity of this assumption has been questioned by educational theorists for some time. The relationship between research and practice is not a straightforward one and it is by no means a one-way street.
Certainly many of the intuitions of teachers about their task appear inadequate. They are frequently based on the way in which their own teachers behaved or on a partial understanding of influential theories and research efforts of the past or on pragmatic grounds tied to what they perceive to be the reward structures in their institutions. Yet it is the teachers who are doing the teaching and many have accumulated a mass of anecdotal evidence over years of interaction with their students. This evidence is largely ignored in the design of instruction by educational developers. Such an orientation inevitably places limits on creative teaching and devalues practices that are not in line with a deterministic systems approach.
Scientific research is certainly not irrelevant to education. For example, it is not irrelevant to adult education that the aging process is correlated with short-term memory loss or that adults increasingly use global rather than atomistic strategies in comprehending text. What is problematic is that scientific research, or rather a select body of research, should be used to support a particular technology without consideration of the politics of technology in education or other relevant contextual variables.
Academic teachers may combat the assertions of educational developers not merely by reasserting the traditional values of academic autonomy or by defending their teaching practices on the grounds of tradition alone. They need to verbalize and systematize the knowledge that they possess by virtue of their experience of the educational process.
Students learn better from a course designed by educational
developers. One of the goals of educational developers is not only to create a better quality of teaching but also to enhance the learning experience and learning outcomes: hence the variety of technological applications that go into the design and development of materials in distance education and the careful attention to assessment of students' learning.
Many students are more comfortable with a set of well-organized course materials that contain clearly stated objectives than with materials that are disorganized and ambiguous. With distance education students this is particularly true because of the few opportunities that they have to solve questions or problems.
However, a systems approach in distance education goes beyond the content of self-instructional materials to their packaging in such a way that students are provided with a complete and well-defined learning experience. The question that arises, however, is whether providing students with a package of knowledge and minimizing opportunities for debate and exchange of ideas provides adequate opportunities for learning and personal development. We have become so accustomed to this model that we seldom ask whether distance education can be conducted differently.
The assumption that students learn better from completely packaged materials is questionable. The kind of intellectual and personal development that should result from higher education will best take place in an environment that encourages not only private study and reflection but also searching for new information and sharing of ideas through collective discussion. Added to this is the need for socialization into the academic community with which the student is connected (e.g., Tinto, 1975).
This is not to deny that distance education has the potential to achieve these ends. Educational developers could assist in this process by extending their areas of expertise beyond the design of objectives, instructional sequences, assessment, and evaluation to a consideration of the personal and social contexts within which adult students work and ways in which these interface with the institutions with which they are connected.
Course design may, for example, focus less on development of course materials and much more on design and promotion of interactive experiences among students and between students and teachers. The outcomes of these experiences may not be reflected directly in students' responses to assessment, but other less direct indicators, such as incidence of withdrawal, student satisfaction, and so on, may well demonstrate their effectiveness.
Unfortunately, it is the course material that most educational developers use to demonstrate their competence. The real danger exists that educational developers will direct most of their energies towards the products of a distance education system at the expense of the quality of those educational experiences that are difficult to document and display. This may result in a superficial improvement in the quality of distance education materials without any substantial improvement in the conditions that students value in their learning experiences. This may be to the detriment of those students who place emphasis on less tangible factors such as quality of feedback on assignments, warmth and receptivity of a department, efficient delivery of materials and return of assignments, courtesy of administrative staff, and so on.
It is the work of educational developers to reorder the customary priorities of teachers to conform to their own professional interpretation of education.
The problems facing educational developers and academic teachers in distance education are rarely viewed by either group as a clash of value systems or as a meeting of two equally valid perspectives on education. To the educational developer, it is the teacher who is uneducated in the proper way to approach education, who persistently shuns rational solutions to planning, and who perversely avoids becoming involved in the range of available media options. In general, the wisdom of educational developers as professionals is in no way derived from listening to what teachers have to say about education as they experience it.
This attitude is a source of perennial frustration for educational developers as they attempt to fulfil their goals of designing better educational materials. Academics are not particularly cooperative; they describe their experiences and those reported by their students in a language that is alien to the educational developer; they appear to be unable to grasp even the most basic principles of instructional design; they fail to plan adequately and deliver materials on time, and so forth.
Shaw and Taylor (1984) captured the essence of the educational developer's viewpoint when they wrote: "with the emergence of instructional design, it has become increasingly evident that subject matter experts in the various disciplines do not know how to teach" (p. 279). Furthermore, they noted:
Throughout history, it has been assumed that the essence of instruction is subject matter content, and therefore the subject matter expert has always assumed authority. Because of this traditional authority there is a danger that instructional design experts will find themselves in a subordi-nate position with the major responsibilities for teaching lying with the subject matter expert. (p. 280)
Yet educational developers are bound to the academics by the inescapable fact that they need "subject matter experts" in order to develop a course at all. When the conflict becomes particularly severe it is labelled a "staff development" problem rather than merely an instructional design problem. Academics are described as threatened by the public exposure of their teaching methods, and, as a consequence, of writing to impress their colleagues rather than teaching their students, and above all of clinging to an outmoded tradition of academic autonomy and freedom to the detriment of the quality of education. They seem to believe, for example, that the face-to-face lecture is a given in education, and alternatives proposed by educational developers for distance education or on- campus teaching are, by definition, inferior. Yet we have little information about how academic teachers view their role, how they plan, and why they adopt some priorities above others.
Clark and Vinger (1977) have written a paper that sheds some light on how school teachers think about teaching; it is directly relevant to the hiatus between the teacher's method of planning and the educational developer's/ technologist's view. On the issue of planning they comment: "until recently, the literature on planning in education has been mainly prescriptive. Many volumes have been written recommending specific principles for curriculum planning" (p. 280). There are, however, suggestions in the literature of negative effects of this type of planning, at least in the school setting. In an early study, Zahorik (1970) reported that teachers who planned according to the guidelines of educational technologists were less inclined to be sensitive to ideas put forward by pupils and to use these i deas in teaching.
In a study of actual planning methods used by secondary school teachers in Britain, Taylor (1970) concluded that the order of priorities in planning was as follows:
Research on the way teachers plan confirms Rowntree's (1982) claim that teachers see planning in a different light from educational technologists or educational developers. This intuitive planning accorded to those who are actually engaged in teaching is, however, given less weight in the eyes of educational developers than is their own conception of planning derived from programmed learning and systems theory.
Where educational technology is grafted onto traditional distance education institutions as is the case in Australian higher education and in some Canadian higher education, the educational developer has the brief to bring about change, away from traditional teaching methods toward a more objective and rational approach. That change must be reflected in the actual educational products (course packages) produced by the institution, first and foremost, because these are tangible products and a yardstick against which institutional development may be assessed. Other non-public aspects of education, such as the quality of teacher-student communication, feedback on assignments, or warmth and receptivity of a department, are likely to receive less attention from educational developers because their quality is difficult both to assess and to demonstrate to colleagues. Moreover, a change in the packaging quality can be achieved fairly readily by an institution that is prepared to budget for it.
To effect a change at a more fundamental level is much more difficult. To assume that educational developers are the ones to cause such change implies that academic staff are incapable of taking on new educational directions. The failure of large-scale educational innovations, where they have been attempted, lends credence to the view that teachers are in general resistant to change.
Writing on the subject of change in education, Kerr (1978) comments on studies of large-scale innovations in America in the 1960s. "One finding common to many of these studies of change is that a purely `rational-empirical' model (dissemination of empirically tested products) is rarely successful alone" (p. 154). Kerr goes on to discuss some reasons why teachers are unlikely to approach educational consultants on matters relating directly to teaching practices, as opposed to matters that could be viewed as peripheral to that role (librarians, media services units, and so on). He argues that approaches of this kind imply a lack of competence on the part of teachers and in this sense have a high "cost" for them.
Kerr then describes the kind of training that he thinks is necessary for educational consultants to achieve their goals:
...as local teaching personnel become more specialised, the consultant will need at least a minimum amount of training in these specialised fields in order to be able to discuss intelligently the instructional problems faced by specialists. The educational communications consultants will also need training in empathy, human relations, and/or counselling in order to overcome the natural hesitancy of teachers to enter discussions of instructional problems. (p. 59)
Here we have some elements for a blueprint for the training of educational developers. In the absence of such training, educational developers are selected as much for their qualities of empathy and skill in human relations as for their appropriate academic qualifications.
At the present time, there is a significant amount of change in approaches to education in traditional institutions. This has often been initiated without the intervention of educational developers or educational technologists. Computer-assisted learning, televised instruction, and library audiovisual services have been commonplace in on-campus teaching for several years. In terms of computer literacy for staff and students, several institutions have made significant advances. These movements do not include the numerous teachers in tertiary institutions who are attempting to alter their teaching practices by negotiating learning content and assessment procedures with their students. The important point is that those changes arise from teachers and departments who then bear responsibility for the outcomes. This applies to innovations in both on-campus teaching and distance education.
Those who work primarily in the field of distance education are often blind to these developments on-campus, assuming that distance education is both distinct from and more innovative than on-campus teaching. The truth is that distance education workers have been much more enthusiastic about a systems approach, and all that this implies, than have on-campus educators.
It is not difficult to see that these beliefs could lead to a failure to interpret the significance of change in so-called traditional institutions. Many of the changes that do occur are local and piecemeal and not always in directions that educational developers would view favorably, in that teachers' priorities in course planning and design may not have changed markedly or in the desired direction. Such innovations may not be viewed as changes at all. This is owing to the limitations of the approach of educational developers in distance education rather than to the inherent conservatism of academics.
In summary then, the goal of educational developers to change the priori-ties of academic teachers is currently without justification and will remain so unless it can be shown that a systems approach is clearly superior. In the area of teaching, the idea of content experts versus process experts is spurious. Although both the variety of delivery media and different administrative procedures in distance education do pose problems for academics accustomed only to on-campus teaching, this does not mean that academics are unable to participate in educational processes. If opportunities to participate in this aspect of teaching are removed from teachers, then opportunities to develop teaching skills in distance education are likewise removed.
In assuming that the customary priorities of teachers in planning and developing courses should be changed to conform to a deterministic systems approach, intuitions and practices of teachers which conflict with this approach are thereby devalued. Such a move may well serve the professional aspirations of educational developers, allowing them to assert that academics do not know how to teach, but there is no reason to assert that the educational developer's priorities are superior to the teacher's.
It is questionable whether in the long term students benefit educationally from using highly- structured, packaged materials of the kind produced by educational developers. Likewise it is debatable whether a model of technology derived from rational and objective science is wholly appropriate for shaping the teaching process. Rational science lends an aura of respectability and objectivity to the educational developer's role. It ignores alternative perceptions that view education as value-laden and political. Rather than assuming that educational developers are improving the quality of education by making it more scientific, we might consider that they are in a power struggle with teachers with both groups espousing different value systems. What we are then observing is a clash of perspectives and professional traditions. In practice the outcome of this clash is uncertain and depends ultimately on which group receives institutional backing.
Viewed in terms of whole institutions, employment of educational developers and a team of other non-teaching experts does not necessarily represent a major change in goals and direction. At the moment these professional roles are accepted in order to keep pace with developments in other institutions and to produce course materials that look more "up market." In fact, although educational developers and academics wrestle with conflicting viewpoints about teaching methods and priorities, the administrative infrastructure of institutions and their value systems remain largely unchanged.
What is missing from this approach is an appreciation of the institutional contexts in which traditional approaches to teaching are framed. Such contexts may operate not only to influence approaches to planning in teaching but also to determine the emphasis placed on teaching activities compared with other institutional demands (see Kelly, 1987). If teaching priorities are linked to institutional structures in this way, then the task of reordering those priorities cannot be assumed to be merely a matter of teacher reeducation. Rather it is primarily a matter of structural change within institutions; primarily changes in reward structures for teachers.
One area in which institutions of higher education are clearly conservative is in the reward structure available to academic staff who work within them. This is not an area that educational developers usually focus on in their quest for innovation. What they often fail to realize is that the academic teachers whom they attempt to convert and whose priorities they attempt to change are embedded within institutional frameworks that do not reward innovation or excellence in teaching to any significant extent. Combined with peer group pressure to maintain existing teaching methods, this would be sufficient to discourage all but the most determined academic.
Academic staff, particularly those who work in mixed-mode institutions, are frequently expected to put increased effort into preparing and revising distance education materials without any coherent system of time allocation or without a reward structure that recognizes their efforts. In some cases the additional teaching load imposed by distance education students goes unrecognized and the academic's whole involvement in distance education is viewed as an "extra chore." Add to this a devaluation of the teacher's value system by educational developers and a failure on the part of academics to learn the rhetoric of distance education, and the scene is set for the noninvolvement, or at best passive involvement, of academics in the whole enterprise.
The irony of this situation is that educational developers are themselves caught in the same reward- nonreward structure as their academic colleagues. They often find themselves being evaluated for promotion according to criteria that are unrelated to the tasks they are expected to perform.
The eventual outcome may be a superficial enhancement of the quality of teaching materials for distance education, along with modest improvements in student support services. The situation is not one in which educational innovation will flourish or where academic departments will invest the time or financial and personal resources needed to plan new directions in teaching.
Alternative institutional models could be developed that promote genuine rather than superficial advances in distance education and higher education in general. In designing an alternative system, we might examine teachers' perceptions of how teaching should proceed, design a reward structure that encourages further development of these ideas by allocating time for innovation in teaching, and publicly recognize significant advances in teaching.
The role of the educational developer might then be to provide technical advice on various media and communication technologies and to develop administrative systems for both on-campus teaching and distance education, expanding rather than restricting the range of options available to teachers. Such systems design is an unglamorous activity compared with the production of glossy course materials, audio and video materials, computerassisted learning packages, and the like. It is, moreover, a reactive rather than a proactive role in that it serves the perceived needs of teachers rather than attempting to reorder their priorities. However, it is a particularly important role, given the range of new technologies available to enhance one- and twoway communication between teachers and distance education students.
This would mean a major shift in orientation on the part of educational developers. They would turn away from the assumption that they are employed to teach academics how to teach toward a responsive role in which they implement or expand on the ideas that teachers and their students put forward. Not all ideas will be worthwhile or even feasible in every situation, and it might be the role of the educational developer to work with teachers in thinking through the implications of their proposals. Another valuable role would be to bring together teachers who have similar interests but different levels of expertise in order to facilitate mutual development.
This alternative model expands rather than reduces the methods that could be used in distance education. It is not prescriptive in the way that educational development is at this time.
Ausubel, D. P. (1967). A cognitive-structure theory of school learning. In L. Siegel (Ed.), Instruction: Some contemporary viewpoints. San Francisco: Chandler.
Bates, A. W. (1984). Selecting and designing low-cost media for distance education (Papers on Information Technology, No. 238). Milton Keynes: Open University.
Bertalanffy, L. V. (1968). General systems theory: Foundations, development, applications. New York: Braziller.
Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: David
McKay. Bruner, J. S. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Clark, C. M., & Vinger, R. J. (1977). Research on teacher thinking. Curriculum Inquiry, 7(4), 279-305.
Crowder, N. A. (1960). Automatic tutoring by intrinsic programming. In A. A. Lumsdaine & R. Glaser (Eds.), Teaching machines and programmed learning. Washington, D.C.: Department of Audio-Visual Instruction, NEA. Fraley, L. E., & Vargus, E. A. (1975). Academic tradition and instructional technology. Journal of Higher Education, 46(1), 1-16.
Gagné, R. M. (1965). The conditions of learning. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Hamilton, D., Jenkins, D., King, C., MacDonald, B., & Parlett, M. (Eds.) (1977). Beyond the numbers game: A reader in educational evaluation. London: Macmillan Education.
Heidt, E. U. (1975). In search of a media taxonomy: Problems of theory and practice. British Journal of Educational Technology, 1(6), 4-23.
Hughes, A. S. (1979). The potential of systems philosophy for theory and research in curriculum. Programmed Learning and Educational Technology, 16 (3), 195-199.
Kelly, M. E. (1987). Barriers to convergence in Australian higher education. In P. Smith & M. Kelly (Eds.), Distance education and the mainstream: Convergence in education (pp. 176- 200). London: Croom Helm.
Kemmis, S. (1980, 11-14 May). Program evaluation in distance education - Against the technologisation of reason. In Evaluation in distance teaching (pp. 23-49). Proceedings of a workshop held at Townsville College of Advanced Education in cooperation with the Australian and South Pacific External Studies Association.
Kerr, S. T. (1978). Change in education and the future role of the educational consultant. Educational Communication and Technology, 26(2), 153-164. Meredith, P. (1965). Towards a taxonomy of educational media. AV Communication Review, 4, 374-384.
Nickson, M. (1971). Educational technology: A systematic approach for teachers. London: Ward Lock Educational.
Ormell, C. P. (1975). Bloom's taxonomy and the objectives of education. Educational Research, 17(1), 3-17. Rowntree, D. (1982). Educational technology in curriculum development (2nd ed.). London: Harper and Row.
Shaw, B., & Taylor, J. C. (1984). Instructional design, distance education and academic tradition. Distance Education, 5(2), 277-285.
Skinner, B. F. (1968). The technology of teaching. New York: Appleton Century-Crofts.
Stake, R. (1975). The countenance of educational evaluation. In D. Hamilton, D. Jenkins, C. King, B. MacDonald, & M. Parlett, (Eds.), Beyond the numbers game: A reader in educational evaluation. London: Macmillan Education.
Stenhouse, L. (1975). An introduction to curriculum research and development. London: Heinemann.
Taylor, P. H. (1970). How teachers plan their courses. London: National Foundation for Educational Research. Tinto, V. (1975). Dropout from higher education: A theoretical synthesis of recent research. Review of Educational Research, 45(1), 89-125.
Tosti, D. T., & Ball, J. R. (1969). A behavioural approach to instructional design and selection. AV Communication Review, 17(1), 5-25.
Travers, R. M. (1973). Educational technology and related research viewed as a political force. In R. M. Travers (Ed.), Second handbook of research on teaching (pp. 979-996). American Research Association, Rand McNally. Wilkes, J. (1978). Theory in educational technology and curriculum. Programmed Learning and Educational Technology, 15(1), 79-82.
Zahorik, J. A. (1970). The effect of planning on teaching. Elementary School Journal, 71(3), 143-151.
Zahorik, J. A. (1975). Teacher's planning models. Educational Leadership, 33(2), 134-139.
Mavis E. Kelly School of External Studies and Continuing Education University of Queensland Australia