Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy

Terry Anderson and Jon Dron
Athabasca University, Canada

Abstract

This paper defines and examines three generations of distance education pedagogy. Unlike earlier classifications of distance education based on the technology used, this analysis focuses on the pedagogy that defines the learning experiences encapsulated in the learning design. The three generations of cognitive-behaviourist, social constructivist, and connectivist pedagogy are examined, using the familiar community of inquiry model (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) with its focus on social, cognitive, and teaching presences. Although this typology of pedagogies could also be usefully applied to campus-based education, the need for and practice of openness and explicitness in distance education content and process makes the work especially relevant to distance education designers, teachers, and developers. The article concludes that high-quality distance education exploits all three generations as determined by the learning content, context, and learning expectations.
Keywords: Distance education theory

Introduction

Distance education, like all other technical–social developments, is historically constituted in the thinking and behavioural patterns of those who developed, tested, and implemented what were once novel systems. The designs thus encapsulate a worldview (Aerts, Apostel, De Moor, Hellemans, Maex, Van Belle, & Van Der Veken, 1994) that defines its epistemological roots, development models, and technologies utilized, even as the application of this worldview evolves in new eras. In this paper, we explore distance education systems as they have evolved through three eras of educational, social, and psychological development. Each era developed distinct pedagogies, technologies, learning activities, and assessment criteria, consistent with the social worldview of the era in which they developed. We examine each of these models of distance education using the community of inquiry (COI) model (Arbaugh, 2008; Garrison, 2009; Garrison, Archer, & Anderson, 2003) with its focus on teaching, cognitive, and social presence.
Given the requirement for distance education to be technologically mediated in order to span the geographic and often temporal distance between learners, teachers, and institutions, it is common to think of development or generations of distance education in terms of the technology used to span these distances. Thus distance education theorists (Garrison, 1985; Nipper, 1989), in a somewhat technologically deterministic bent, have described and defined distance education based on the predominate technologies employed for delivery. The first generation of distance education technology was by postal correspondence. This was followed by a second generation, defined by the mass media of television, radio, and film production. Third-generation distance education (DE) introduced interactive technologies: first audio, then text, video, and then web and immersive conferencing. It is less clear what defines the so-called fourth- and even fifth-generation distance technologies except for a use of intelligent data bases (Taylor, 2002) that create “intelligent flexible learning” or that incorporate Web 2.0 or semantic web technologies. It should be noted that none of these generations has been eliminated over time; rather, the repertoire of options available to DE designers and learners has increased. Similarly, all three models of DE pedagogy described below are very much in existence today.
Many educators pride themselves on being pedagogically (as opposed to technologically) driven in their teaching and learning designs. However, as McLuhan (1964) first argued, technologies also influence and define the usage, in this case the pedagogy instantiated in the learning and instructional designs. In an attempt to define a middle ground between either technological or pedagogical determinism, we’ve previously written (Anderson, 2009) about the two being intertwined in a dance: the technology sets the beat and creates the music, while the pedagogy defines the moves. To some extent, our pedagogical processes may themselves be viewed as technologies (Dron & Anderson, 2009), albeit of a softer nature than the machines, software, postal systems, and so on that underpin distance education. Some technologies may embody pedagogies, thereby hardening them, and it is at that point that they, of necessity, become far more influential in a learning design, the leaders of the dance rather than the partners. For example, a learning management system that sees the world in terms of courses and content will strongly encourage pedagogies that fit that model and constrain those that lack content and do not fit a content-driven course model. The availability of technologies to support different models of learning strongly influences what kinds of model can be developed; if there were no means of two-way communication, for example, it would prevent the development of a pedagogy that exploited dialogue and conversation and encourage the development of a pedagogy that allowed the learner and the course content to be self-contained.
In this paper, we introduce a simple typology in which distance education pedagogies are mapped into three distinct generations. Since the three arose in different eras and in chronological order, we’ve labeled them from first to third generation, but as in generations of technology, none of these three pedagogical generations has disappeared, and we will argue that all three can and should be effectively used to address the full spectrum of learning needs and aspirations of 21st century learners.