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

Online Learning: Visions, Hopes, Expectations
all the more important as the "individual bundles of qualifications" cannot be mediated
by means of traditional teaching, but have to be acquired above all through self study.
For this purpose a broad culture of autonomous self-directed learning will have to be
developed which will have to define learning in schools, universities and in the
workplace. What is amazing is the broad consensus in this question. Only a few percent
of the experts believe that these developments will "never take place". With regard to
the general use of the distance teaching system the contrary opinion was held by just 1.2
percent. These findings are sensational. Never before has distance education been
accepted to such a great extent as a regular form of learning.
In addition, an astonishing 99.4 percent of the experts who were polled agreed that
between the years 2008 and 2015 electronically stored information will be retrievable in
all the common languages of the world. If this trend is actually realised, the
globalisation of the education market would probably enter a more intensified phase,
whereby as far as the export of online courses is concerned there will be probably more
accentuated competition between those universities whose prestige is high. In contrast,
two other trend prognoses attracted a larger number of contrary opinions. Just over 15
percent (15.6) did not believe that between 2011 and 2022 computers will be able to put
texts together automatically and make automatic extracts from books and documents.
And 17.8 percent did not think that between 2010 and 2019 databases will have learned
to arrange their "knowledge" without any misunderstandings. At the same time, these
values show that the great majority of those who were polled have a positive opinion of
these developments in information technology.
The Delphi study by Klaus Beck, Peter Glotz and Gregor Vogelsang (2000) has shown
that the trends in online learning are in general regarded very soberly and cautiously by
the experts who were polled, and in some cases even sceptically. The chapter entitled
“Lifelong Learning in the Worldwide Web? Education through Computer Networks” is
based on differentiated surveys of 109 people mainly in Europe, but in other regions of
the world as well. The question was explicitly not about what will be technically
possible in the future, but how computers will change everyday life, whereby in our
context we are interested in the daily life of students and teachers.
On the whole this study forecasts the creation of a "specialised educational network"
(2000, p. 11) as a consequence of the digitalisation of teaching and learning, but this
will not have been formed until about the year 2010. Experts do not believe here in the
medium term in structural revolutions of an institutional nature, in other words, they
obviously do not believe in a rapid development in the direction of virtual universities,
as was forecast in the Delphi II study (Bundesministerium, 1998) and in the scenario
"University 2005". They tend to see decisive changes more in the publications and
libraries system.
If we assess the prognoses which were determined in this way under the aspect of their
pedagogical significance, the following individual results are particularly interesting:
Self-directed learning phases: by 2010 these will have gained considerably in importance
with online learning. Only 16.5 percent of those polled thought this would never be the
case (2000, p. 171).
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