INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
The ICDE 13th World Conference in Melbourne in 1985 would appear to have offered a classic opportunity for confrontation between, and comparison of, the single mode distance education institutions and the dual mode institutions. Yet, for me at least, this theme did not emerge as of major significance although it may well have been the topic of some discussion groups.
Within Australia, there is almost universal acceptance of the view that distance teaching is best done by academic staff within the faculty who will thus teach both off campus and on campus (the 'New England model' as it is sometimes popularly called). Only in Queensland is there something of an exception to this, namely a separate department within the University having its own teaching staff responsible for external students—and even in Queensland this was not always so. It was in 1949 that the change to the present system in the University of Queensland took place because of dissatisfaction with the then existing system and a fully fledged academic department was created although the content of Its programs remained closely linked to those taught to the conventional students in the University. This has become known as the 'Queensland model' and seem to have arisen from a view that the writing and servicing of external courses could best be achieved through the recruitment of specialists. generica
lly separate in practice from the 'New England model'. The University of Queensland has continued to use the staff of several other departments for its off-campus teaching, usually in areas where numbers of students were low. In practical terms, external numbers at Queensland rose to a relatively stable total of approximately 3000 and this was simply too small a number to maintain a broad academic range within an External Studies Department. The 'Queensland model' is therefore something of a hybrid between the 'New England model' and the single mode institutions of more recent vintage.
The decade of the seventies saw phenomenal developments worldwide in distance education and while developments in Australia itself continued along the lines of the 'New England model', in particular Murdoch and Deakin, the characteristic of this new interest in distance education was the rise of the autonomous national institution dealing exclusively with external students. In Europe, amongst the most widely known of these are the Open University in the United Kingdom and the FernUniversitat in West Germany, with the Open Universiteit in Holland following in even more recent times. In other parts of the world, the Alama Iqbal Open University in Pakistan, Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University in Thailand and developments In South America and China, Sri Lanka and Korea have provided variations on the same theme.
SINGLE OR DUAL: THE UNFINISHED DEEBATE
In the scramble to get distance education off the ground in the seventies, there is little or no evidence of rational discussion or debate on the advantages or disadvantages of single mode or dual mode institutions. More recently, however, proponents of each system have begun to appear although, as yet, no serious research on the question has been undertaken.
In brief, those advocating that the same staff should be used to teach both off-campus and on-campus students suggest that the teachers themselves benefit from the dual mode and these benefits are automatically passed on to the students of both types. It is suggested that teachers meeting on-campus students appreciate more fully the difficulties faced by their students and, learning from this experience, are able to provide much more comprehensible presentations for their off-campus students. The on-campus students are, as it were, the guinea pigs for the development of better teaching materials for distance teaching. By the same token, on-campus students benefit from the fact that teachers realise from their contacts with off-campus students the need for coherent presentation and preparation in all their teaching. Such arguments are indeed seductive and would seem to be, in theory at least, wholly sound.
On the other hand, those advocating single mode institutions and perhaps, too, those advocating the 'Queensland model' argue that the skills required for teaching off-campus students are wholly different from those required for conventional students. Thus, there is need of a specialist cadre of teaching staff who either possess or can be trained to acquire these wholly different skills. At this point, proponents of the single mode philosophy move from defence of their own system to attack on the alternative philosophy alleging that teachers cannot be expected to obtain in adequate measure the different skills needed to teach on and off campus; that some teachers will tend towards the off-campus and others the on-campus students and in this case both sets of students will suffer; that generally, however, the proximity and daily contact with on-campus students will render a lower priority in the minds of dual mode teaching staff for off-campus students; that consequently off-campus students will become and
will be seen to become second class students. Once again the arguments are seductive. Few would question the view that, for distance teaching, a range of skills have to be developed which have not been the major characteristics of traditional teaching, certainly not at least at tertiary level.
How is this debate to be concluded and who are likely to be the victors? Would that the question were as simple as that! I have already hinted that there might not be such a thing as the pure single mode or the pure dual mode.
If the dual mode system were to have received wide acceptance in the world or even in one country, we might expect to find at least one institution which offered all its courses to on- and off-campus students, thus deriving the maximum benefit for students of all types and teachers alike. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, there is no such example. If, therefore, we were to accept that the dual mode philosophy is the best, we must nevertheless accept that it is a relatively unimportant element amongst teachers and administrators concerned with the whole range of activities which we classify as teaching. Economic policies, geographical factors or some other range of activities seem to downgrade this philosophy in practice in some instances in all the dual mode institutions. If the 'Queensland model' is impure, the same must be said for the 'New England model' since It nowhere exists throughout an institution.
Does this give the victory to the proponents of the single mode? Not at all. Here again, I am aware of no 'pure' system amongst the many nominal single mode institutions which have arisen. The Open University in the United Kingdom offers regular face-to-face contact between its students and tutors and a large proportion of its students, though by no means the great majority, regularly make use of this. Thus its teachers are regularly reinforced by their contacts with students; not that in the case of the Open University there is too much need for this since the teachers marking assignments and teaching in the study centres are almost exclusively part-time staff who are simultaneously employed full-time in conventional universities and polytechnics where they teach the same or very similar subjects. Nor are the full-time Open University academic staff who actually write the courses allowed to live In a sanitised world free from student feedback. Many will from time to time act as tutors on the courses
they have written, most will be exposed to their students through at least two weeks of Summer School each year and none will escape the complex and wide ranging student and tutor feedback which is built in as part of the Open University's course presentation system. While this particular system is unique to the Open University, each single mode institution seems to have designed its own peculiar system based upon the same objectives. In a very real sense therefore the 'single mode' institutions are in fact 'dual mode' institutions.
DISTINCTION WITHOUT DIFFERENCE
In the space of this brief article I would like to suggest that the differences between the dual mode and single mode philosophies are not real differences and perhaps are only apparent because we are asking the wrong question.
The objectives of the founding fathers of all our distance education systems seem to have been very similar. There has been a wish to provide an educational facility to those who otherwise would be prevented from this for geographical, domestic or other reasons. There has been a concomitant wish to establish the academic credibility of the educational offering that is made to those who are learning at a distance. Without this, the operation becomes self-defeating since students will not continue to enrol for courses which have no value. There has been a further wish to try to offer to off-campus students an educational facility which makes up for the lack of personal face-to-face contact which does-or at least can-exist in the traditional education model.
It is, I would suggest, through the pursuit of these similar and wholly laudable objectives when seen against the practical provision within a given country or region that the so-called single mode and dual mode systems have evolved and, within each of these general headings, particular systems have been developed to meet particular exigencies, some political, some economic, some social, some geographic.
Thus within Australia the federal system together with the geography have dictated a requirement for universities in every state, most of them very small by European and American standards, and a pattern of distance teaching systems based upon them. The unique features of Queensland, Western Australia, New South Wales and Victoria have shaped the particular styles of distance education in their universities. The decade which saw the rise of the large so-called 'single mode' institutions all over the world dawned upon an existing tradition of distance education in Australia. Thus the Kanrel Report (1974) suggesting the establishment of a National Open Institute of Tertiary Education and recommending the development of a national system of study centres, was dismissed in favour of expansion and copying of existing tried and tested system in Australia. How could it have been otherwise at a time when there was no unsheathed sword of political force majeure or dire threats of economic stringency? Th
e more recent Johnson Report (1983) is a child of a very different age and its emphasis on coordination in which it draws quite heavily on the Karmel Report, might be more difficult to resist.
The Open University in the United Kingdom, the first of the national single mode institutions, was born as a wholly political initiative against a completely different background. The extra-mural offerings of the traditional universities in the United Kingdom could not be compared with the established distance education in Queensland and New South Wales. An institution therefore arose defined in such a way as not to compete with the traditional institutions and drawing upon the longstanding and unapproachable academic traditions. Each course was publicly validated through the external examiner system and teaching standards were assured through the employment of conventional university and polytechnic teachers on part-time contracts. The so-called 'dual mode' system was anathema to tertiary education in the United Kingdom as 'single mode' systems were in Australia. Further examples of the single mode system rapidly followed throughout the world, firstly because of the example in the United Kingdom, sec
ondly because of the comparable educational background (i.e. no history of dual mode) and thirdly for economic reasons since the very large single mode institutions appeared to offer to developing and developed countries alike a cheaper alternative to conventional education which the dual mode institutions did not.
CONCLUSION
It would appear that distance education system now in existence are single mode or dual mode because of historical accident and external factors rather than as a result of educational debate. Only the 'Queensland model' could in any sense be said to have arisen from such a debate and even in this debate the external factors of student population and range of courses played a predominant part. On closer examination, I believe that the benefits alleged by the proponents of the dual mode can normally in practice be seen in the single mode institutions and vice-versa and I remain to be persuaded that this particular chamleon is worthy of further study.
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