Editorial in English |
VOL. 5, No. 1, 1-2
The primary role of the Journal of Distance Education is to encourage scholarly work in distance education of an empirical and theoretical nature. Sometimes this means that the Journal may seem less than welcoming to many of its readers. Most of us, after all, are busy practitioners in the field, preoccupied by coping with rising enrollments on static budgets, distracted by space problems, staff shortages, telephone bills and so on. At first glance, articles about formative evaluation, andragogy or studying research may seem tiresomely irrelevant to our busy professional lives. Nevertheless, beneath all this preoccupation we are all aware that our concerns and our activities are aimed towards our students and their success. The Journal of course has the same ultimate goal: increasing understanding should eventually increase effectiveness.
This issue of the Journal shows especially strongly the direct concern of distance educators and distance education institutions with students and their success. Two of the items arise from a strategic academic plan developed by Athabasca University in 1988. Powell, Conway, and Ross discuss a study by Athabasca's research centre, which established a significant relationship between student success and nine predisposing characteristics. While the authors point out that the predictive ability of these particular characteristics may well apply to Athabasca students in particular rather than distance education students in general, nevertheless these findings must be of interest to all distance educators. In a similar vein, Brindley and Jean- Louis provide an item for the Dialogue section that may well provoke some debate; their work in student services at Athabasca has convinced them that what they call an "interventionist" model of support services is necessary, that students who are at risk of dropping out or failing can and should be identified and directed toward study skills services.
Other articles show a similar direct concern with the student, though naturally this concern is expressed in different ways. Burge and Lenskyj look at a very specific group of students - women graduate students in a distance education women's studies course. Like Powell, Conway, and Ross they are concerned to indicate the risks of over-generalizing. For instance, they point out the different concerns of rural students from those in metropolitan Toronto, and the important difference made by levels of fatigue. Indeed, one impressive quality that the writers in this issue of the Journal share is a strong interest in who the students are - their identity and their needs.
Burge and Lenskyj discuss students with a high level of commitment to their studies. Thompson's article, however, is concerned with students who are negatively disposed toward correspondence study. As he suggests, in dealing with their concerns distance educators increase access for students who cannot attend classes - a vital issue.
While the article by Kember et al., dealing as it does with the naturalistic evaluation of courses, might seem to be less directly related to questions of student access and student success, in fact it has the same underlying concerns. The paper reports on part of a larger research project examining student progress in distance education courses. Altogether, in fact, this issue of the Journal is concerned with the most important realities of a distance educator's professional life - students.
Not all habits are bad habits, so I want to end this editorial as I ended my last by thanking our contributors and the editorial board who put so much knowledge and hard work into the Journal. Thanks are also due to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its generous grant and to Simon Fraser University for financial support that is much appreciated.
June Sturrock