Distance Education in Transition - Master of Distance Education ...

The Educational Paradigm Shifts
Pedagogical Shifts in Digitised Learning
Really dramatic paradigm shifts will occur in the digitised learning environment. There
the fundamental pattern of teaching and learning in distance education will become a
different one, an entirely different one. This shift will reduce the dominance of expository
teaching, a tradition which is several thousand years old. It will also open a perspective,
which is new, entirely new, and so new, that we still do not yet know what it is all about
and where it will lead. The reasons for this shift are, of course, as has been mentioned
several times already, the technological advances in computing and networking. They
enable students, in principle, to have access to all the information in the world, to all
teaching programmes, to electronic books and to electronic libraries and intelligent expert
systems. They have to study and learn in a situation and under circumstances, which are
fundamentally different. This is not simply an addition of new technical media to the
well-known traditional pedagogical structure, as was the case in its audio-visual era in
the sixties and seventies, when the pedagogical structure was changed only temporarily
and in a superficial way. Rather, it represents such an impact on teachers and students
that they have to redesign teaching and learning. If we become aware of the unexpected
consequences of the changes ahead of us we will be shocked. This phenomenon can be
illustrated by dealing with some aspects of these particular pedagogical shifts.
Example 1: The New Approach
So far it has been natural for us that teachers design "courses", a word which literally
means ways, routes, tracks, roads with a beginning and an end as well as with regular
stops at given intervals. If teachers want to make the students to follow a particular
"way" in which the contents are to be "transmitted" these contents have to be chosen
and defined clearly and then they have to be articulated, which means that the contents
of the course have to be portioned out, and to be subdivided into workloads to be
mastered at given times. In addition, the contents have to be presented to given persons,
at given places, and at given times. Only in this way teachers could teach and students
could learn. Hence, we have developed the notion that knowledge must always be
transmitted by means of such articulated courses, whether it is a lecture, classroom
instruction or distance education with prefabricated "course"-units. And this notion is
embodied deeply in our consciousness.
We are now confronted with another major irritating and disturbing paradigm shift, this
time a pedagogical one. In the digital learning environment many of these important and
necessary prerequisites of traditional teaching and learning are obsolete and irrelevant.
Students are now able to get hold of any information they need without the traditional
preparation, assistance and expository acts of a teacher and outside predetermined
places and times. This shift means that teaching and learning is quite a different process
in which teaching behaviour and learning behaviour have undergone a radical change.
Students have to develop their abilities of self-instruction and of becoming autonomous
learners. They have to develop activities unknown before, for example: quick data
retrieval, data management, choosing among vast numbers of central sources, choosing
from multiple forms of representation, browsing, navigating or following a guided tour
in hypertexts or collaborating with other students in a knowledge building community,
learning by using models and simulations, meeting other students on-line, in order to
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