Introduction
With the development of teleconference technologies and their power to communicate instantaneously and cheaply across national borders, the practice of teaching and learning internationally through such media is growing. As individual instructors and educational institutions begin to experiment with such distance teaching, they encounter technical, pedagogical, and administrative problems. They also encounter some rather difficult-to-define problems and, perhaps, misunderstandings between the people they teach and themselves that appear to originate in differences in perspectives, differences in values, even differences in the significance given to certain words. Sometimes foreign students appear to resist what U.S. distance educators are offering; this resistance is not apparent in the U.S. students and does not seem to be attributable to technology, administration, or pedagogy. At other times, the U.S. distance educator may be frustrated with what appear to be unsatisfactory responses on the part of the
foreign students when compared to those of their domestic counterparts. Under such circumstances, the educators typically will first check the technical arrangements to see that the students are receiving the signal. Then, perhaps, they check the instructional design to ascertain that the quality of the messages is satisfactory. Perhaps they also check the administration of the course. When neither technical, administrative, nor design explanations can be found, they may be tempted to blame the students themselves.
The technical problems in such communications are fairly easy to recognize and solve. Usually these problems are solved quickly because there is much competition for the international market in telecommunications; telecommunications corporations are highly motivated to deliver an effective service and will trouble shoot quickly. Administrative problems that develop within higher education institutional partnerships are considerably more difficult to solve because most U.S. higher education administrators are not subject to the same external pressures felt by the telecommunications corporations. Within the universities, administrations are sensitive to the opinions of their faculty, and the majority of faculty members involved in university governance are wary of issues such as granting credit to out-of-country students who take a course by teleconference, even a course identical to that taken by their resident peers.
As for instructional design, those individual professors who attempt to involve themselves in international distance education may experience unfamiliar pedagogical problems in teaching students in foreign cultures. Calling for individual, personal responses, for example, usually leads to competitive behavior among the U.S. students and an unenthusiastic reaction from international students.
Eventually, most of these pedagogical, technological, and administrative problems will be resolved since they are difficult, often impossible, to ignore. For example, if noise interferes with a teleconference transmission, or if the planned interaction in class does not occur, or if the university does not print the promised credit or a noncredit diploma, the problem has immediate impact on the learners or the instructor, who will make sure that something gets done about the problem.
Problems that are neither technical, administrative, nor pedagogical are much harder to identify, let alone solve. These problems arise from the differences between the cultural perspectives of the teacher and learners in the two or more countries involved in the distance education project; they are likely to affect short-term success and to have more long-term effects than will the technological, pedagogical, or administrative problems described earlier. Even to identify these cultural issues, to recognize them for what they are, requires unusual sensitivity on the part of instructors, administrators, and, indeed, national policy makers.
The most important of these intercultural issues are not those that primarily relate to how we provide and participate in international distance education, but rather those arising from why we do what we do. They are issues concerning our purposes, our intentions, our motives, our assumptions. They are questions concerning our personal, institutional, and national values, as well as the merit and quality of our values as perceived by those in other countries whom we would wish to be our students. They are issues about how we value the cultures of other countries and about the extent to which we organize our technology, administration, and pedagogy so to be ready to learn from those cultures.
A truly international distance education course should have the effect of leading us to consider and re-examine our own educational philosophies. We have seldom looked at the teaching-learning transaction from this perspective. Rather, we have tended to be arrogantly unreflective and uncritical about the assumptions that underlie what and how we teach, about whether, as a society, we are culturally fit to be teaching across national borders; we have been unthinking about the effects of our teaching on people in foreign countries. Because we have developed powerful new technologies and lead the way in the practice of international distance education, we of North America and Western Europe, particularly, are culpable for rushing too fast into this arena and for proceeding without closer scrutiny of the values that motivate our enterprise.
Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to suggest that we are behaving like the technicians and scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb; we are excited by the power of our new technologies and excited by the technical challenges of using them. However, we may not be thinking enough about the consequences of our technological successes, both for our own society and for those of other countries.
Do We Really Know What We Are Doing?
To identify the central concern of this discussion, I will repeat some views I expressed in 1983 at the FernUniversität in Germany:
In distance education we are faced by the same value judgments about freedom and control as were our predecessors in more simple forms of education, but because of the impact of modern communication media and large scale delivery systems, the consequences of our choice or indeed our failure to choose are more wide reaching. It is important that those of us who believe in the importance of individual freedom be on our guard. It is important that we not only design and teach good programs, but that we think, write and argue for learner autonomy, to ensure that distance education works in the interests of learners, not of teachers alone, nor institutions nor is used as a means of state control and social direction....
(Moore 1983)
When writing about the values of distance education in the early 1980s, I was particularly bothered by the apparent lack of concern about the growing imbalance in Western Europe between the individual and the State. In Britain, I found among some Open University colleagues a careless acceptance of Marxist ideology and an impatience with the democratic-liberal ideology that gave them their intellectual freedom. The threat to the individual that was posed by Marxist Statism has receded; is the new threat that of forces able to take over and repress the individual by controlling distance education? If there are such forces, the argument that distance education must be carefully managed because of its scale and potential power becomes even more compelling as distance education is used more widely, as media become more powerful, and, perhaps, as the anti-liberal forces become more subtle during this post-Cold War period.
Consumerism and Philistinism
I now want to explore the view that we are in a time both of new opportunity and severe trial for international distance education because of the emergence of a new threat to the growth and freedom of the individual. This new threat comes from what has been called the Industrial-Consumerist complex, a new world order built on a philosophy of consumerism that is anti-liberal, anti-intellectual, and opposed to social justice when that goal conflicts with corporate interests. One might argue that this phenomenon is hardly new; however, the power of new technology gives it a more powerful impact than ever before. I realize that the value of individualism is also culture-bound, and would not be accepted as desirable by people in many other cultures; it is subject to the same critique as are other Western values. However, what is most troubling to me at the present time is the threat posed by the philosophy of consumerism to both individualism and to the more social or community-oriented philosophies.
There is a philosophy of consumerism and there are advocates of consumerism. The philosophy troubles me more than do the advocates: advocates can be argued with. The problem with this particular philosophy is that many Western educators are so imbued with it that few even acknowledge its existence, thus becoming unwitting agents of its propagation. Consumerism is influencing our domestic education; additionally, we may be uncritically exporting it abroad through our distance teaching programs. This export is accomplished not simply by promoting the sales of particular products, but more subtly by promoting such market attitudes and values as interpersonal competitiveness, the view of teaching as mere labor rather than vocation, or the evaluation of courses by the number of Full Time Equivalents (FTEs), i.e. the number of bodies in the class. In the consumer-oriented program, the major, perhaps ultimate, purpose of education is to train workers at all levels to both fit a slot in the productive economy and,
equally important, to become consumers of mass-produced goods and services. The pursuit of a marketable diploma, and the higher consumer status it endows, replaces the satisfaction of personal enlightenment and the reward of intellectual achievement. The Consumer-Industrial complex distrusts intellectual development, which leads to critical facility; this quality does not fit well with the need to maintain a demand for fast food and popular magazines, radio, and movies.
This view of the world as a marketplace and the purpose of life as producing and consuming is seldom challenged and seems to be taking over, not only in higher education, but also in social services fields such as health care, education, transportation, and geriatrics. These services are no longer offered as the common decencies of a civilized society, but are increasingly viewed as commodities to be bought and sold. We talk in a matter-of-fact way about education in terms of supply, demand, and costs; there are those who refer to students as customers. Many of our institutions of higher education regard themselves as competitors trying to attract business and to provide their services, rather like competing movie theaters. In the United States, almost uniquely among nations, higher education of a kind is available to almost anyone who can pay a tuition fee. The services of education are offered to a mass market, with a concomitant effect on the quality of what is provided. One of the distinguishing charac
teristics of consumerism is marketing, and in the consumer society, even ideas are regarded as objects to be marketed, to be sold. Ideas are less for the purpose of debate, examination, analysis—and, perhaps, compromise—than for packaging and selling in what Lance Morrow, in Time magazine (May 16, 1994), describes as a pervasive culture of spin and hype, the agitated drooling and unembarrasable twin children of publicity. Distance education is in danger of becoming not only an agent of consumerism, but also a victim of the market philosophy. For example, one of the biggest problems we face is the fragmentation of resources and the accompanying effect on both quality of programs and on costs. It makes no more sense to leave the provision of distance education to competition among numerous producing organizations than it would to defend the country with private mercenary armies. Just as in the case of war, many areas of social service, including higher and distance education, would be better co
nducted by a planned approach using systems principles. Nevertheless, in our consumer society, distance education is often one of the services left to market forces.
References
Moore, M. 1983. Self directed learning and distance education.ZIFF Papiere 48. Hagen, West Germany: FernUniversität.
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