Elements for a Vision Of Where the World of Learning is Going

Jan Visser

Learning Without Frontiers: What's New?

"Education is increasingly necessary and less and less possible, due to its cost." This consideration can be found in a piece of advice¹ given to UNESCO's Executive Board at the end of 1993 with the recommendation for UNESCO and the international community to work towards a "world system of open education: Learning Without Frontiers". Such a system should enable "all people throughout the world to obtain access to all forms and levels of education within the context of lifelong education which would establish a continuum between universal primary education and higher forms of education."

Why would such advice be anything special? What had the world, what had UNESCO and other such organizations been doing if at the end of the second millennium such advice was still necessary? Hadn't the world been in the business of providing education for centuries? Wasn't it quite well known what needed to be done? Granted, there are those who don't go to school and there is still a whole lot of illiterate people, but doesn't that basically mean that more schools need to be built, more teachers trained, more textbooks produced? And for those who missed the boat, doesn't the more than a century old experience with distance education prove that alternatives can be found to cater for their needs? And even for those educated people who, at a later stage of their life need supplementary training or occasionally even retraining, basically, that problem has also been mastered. Open universities have very successfully filled a gap in the market. Isn't what is needed just an expansion of the existing provisions?

Looking at what the world has achieved in terms of education, one sees an impressive institutional infrastructure linked to a firmly established network of interests. Berenfeld (1996) refers in this regard to the monopoly of education. Teachers constitute the "largest single group of trained professionals in the world" (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1996, p. 1). Within the existing structure, they are not only a major facilitating factor, whose importance, incidentally, is less and less reflected in the social and material recognition they receive, they are also a leading force against change. Referring to education as a major bulwark of conservatism has become a mere cliché. No wonder that any alternative to the mainstream modality of educational provision, the teacher-classroom-textbook modality, had to fight a hard battle to achieve even a minimum of recognition. Against this background, it is to the credit of distance education that it has been increasingly successful in positioning itself as a valid alternative.

An Alternative As Good As The Real Thing... But How Good Is The Real Thing?

To establish its validity, however, distance education had to model itself on the same ideological underpinnings that also condition mainstream educational provision and show that it was equally or more effective or at least nearly as good. Thus it should be no big surprise that the probably best known definition of distance education as "an educational process in which a significant proportion of the teaching is conducted by someone removed in space and time from the learner" (Perraton, 1986) is based on the same assumption that underlies the mainstream educational process, i.e. that a main condition for learning is that there is someone who teaches. Moore and Kearsley (1996) advance the following more elaborate definition of distance education: "Distance education is planned learning that normally occurs in a different place from teaching and as a result requires special techniques of course design, special instructional techniques, special methods of communication by electronic and other technology, as well as special organizational and administrative arrangements." While this definition clearly puts the emphasis on learning and while it does not explicitly refer to a person who teaches, it is no less based on the notion that teaching is a necessary condition for learning to take place. For this very reason, the two authors express a clear preference for the term 'distance education' over that of 'distance learning'. It is argued in this paper that such a position is unnecessarily restrictive as it is based on the notion that the best distance education can do, is to approximate as closely as possible the learning-through-delivery-of-teaching model inherent in the face-to-face mode. It perpetuates the culture of teaching and frustrates the development of a culture of learning.

Past And Future Challenges

Centuries of educational development have not succeeded to avoid that close to a billion people in the world are illiterate, that more than 130 million school-age children do not go to school and that many of those who do, often end up with learning achievements that fail to sustain or that are irrelevant to their needs. There is thus a clear indication that yesterday's educational solutions are inadequate for today's problems and there can hardly be a stronger signal that doing more of the same is not a valid solution.

It is equally apparent that today's solutions are an inadequate option in response to the challenges of the future. The main conception underlying education continues to be that learning is something one does once in a lifetime and that it is essentially undertaken in preparation for the rest of one's life. It is thus best done during the early stages of one's life. For those who, for whatever reason, missed the boat, there are second chance opportunities, often via the distance education mode. Whatever is done in addition to this boils down to learning every now and then in the course of one's life in response to specific needs to maintain or upgrade professional skills or to adapt to new demands of the work environment. There is no strong notion of lifelong and lifewide learning as an essential ingredient of life itself, as something which is more than, for example, a simple means to acquire a particular skill or to become familiar with a specific area of knowledge. Mainstream educational thinking is still far removed from the "vision of the coming century" expressed in the report of the 'Delors Commission', i.e. "of one in which the pursuit of learning is valued by individuals and by authorities all over the world not only as a means to an end, but also as an end in itself" (International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, UNESCO, 1996).

Learning And Empowerment

To respond to the dual challenge to on the one hand overcome the failures of the past and on the other to be responsive to the demands of the future, the world needs to move beyond fixed modality delivery options based on the teaching-learning dichotomy. It needs to put learning and the learners at the center of its concerns. It needs to break through the barrier of looking at learning as the consequence of something that is being done to people instead of something that is done by and with people. The relationship between learning and empowerment is a dialectic one. Learning leads to empowerment, but it will do so only if the learning process itself is premised on the notion of the empowered learner. The learning-through-delivery-of-teaching model, whether face-to-face or at a distance, is contrary to that notion.

Learning To Live To Learn

Until a couple of decades ago, learning in preparation for the rest of one's life was still generally a valid option. School systems provided the main mechanisms to put that option into practice. A ministry of education could claim it had things under control if an adequate school system existed and people pertaining to the various socio-economic strata of the population felt they had access to that school system according to their aspirations and needs. People could be reasonably sure that, after completing their education, they were well prepared for the rest of their life. The time to learn was over, and real life could begin. This, however, is no longer the case. In today's world, and that of tomorrow, the notion of learning to earn a living, and even that of learning for life, is no longer a valid one. Learning is no longer for life, but learning is life and life is learning. Learning is pervasive. It is as essential as eating, both for the rich and the poor.

Learning To Change

We live in a world of change. Individuals and societal entities - organizations, local communities, cities, whole nations even - are in constant need to adapt to change. While they do so, they generate change themselves. Learning is not only an essential requirement to allow people and groups of people to adapt to change, it is at the same time the most effective mechanism to ensure that change is being generated in a way that takes into account the ecological dimensions of its impact on others.

Change occurs at a pace which has brought an essential dimension of unpredictability in the lives of people. It has become impossible to foresee one's life and thus to plan one's education accordingly, as if it were part of a linear sequence of events. Adaptation to change can no longer be managed as a generational process - it has become intra-generational. Most of the existing educational establishment is out of tune with this reality. Hartwell (1995) refers in that context to schooling as "the most conservative of social systems" (p.1). He points towards the tremendous time lag between the emergence of new scientific theories and conceptions and their effective impact on content, process and structure of schooling. He cites the work of Reich (1991) and Drucker (1993) who stress the crucial importance of knowledge creation - and thus of learning in a constructivist sense of the word - as the basis for growth. He therefore calls for the replacement of positivist, equilibrium-based models, such as those underlying Keynesian economics, by ones that are based on the notions of non-linearity, chaos theory, self-similarity and complex adaptive systems.

The notion of learning as an essential condition of growth of complex adaptive systems is currently perhaps best exemplified by the learning organizations (see e.g. Senge, 1991; Garvin, 1993; Marquardt and Reynolds, 1994). Survival, gaining and retaining competitiveness, are obviously much more immediately felt urgencies in the business environment than in the traditional closed school environment and its supporting institutions. It is there that one sees complex adaptive systems in action at a scale that may generate interesting models for the reconceptualization of learning environments in general and the diffusion of organizational learning beyond profit making institutions. This should lead us to think of learning communities - rather than just learning individuals - as crucial elements in the conception of facilitating environments for learning. Most schools, and for that matter also the traditional distance education institutions, are not learning communities. They are simply closed organized structures designed to turn uneducated individuals into educated ones. They do themselves, as social entities, not learn and are not designed to do so. Quite to the contrary, if one considers their tremendous capacity to often totally ignore and resist change, the conclusion would seem to be justified that they have been designed not to learn.

The notion of learning communities as advocated in this paper is also closely related to the recognition that "all learning involves socially organized activity" (Greeno, 1997, p. 10), posing the challenge to devise propitious complex social environments within which learners can grow toward "mature participation in valuable social practices and ... [develop] their identities as responsible self-directed learners" (p. 9).

Open Learning Communities

Learning communities in the sense referred to above are essentially open systems. They interact and are in dynamic equilibrium with their environment, i.e. with other learning communities. They are not fixed. Individuals may be part of different learning communities depending on context and circumstance.

The term 'distance education' is now often associated with that of 'open learning'. 'Open and distance learning' is thus frequently used as a single concept, suggesting that distance learning is by necessity an open process and that open learning is mainly accomplished in the distance education mode. The use of terms such as 'open university' and 'open school' adds to the confusion. The dimension of openness of such institutions is often limited. In addition, both 'open learning' and 'distance education' are frequently presented in contrast to and as separate from so-called conventional or traditional education.

Distance education has as such little to do with the notion of openness as it appears in the concept 'open learning community'. Systems that use it as a modality can be equally traditional as and no more open than many conventional systems, based on the face-to-face mode. Yet, distance education has much to contribute. Thanks to the development of distance education we now have important experience of self-directed and self-motivated learning and increasingly also of multi-channel approaches (see e.g. Anzalone, Ed., 1995), which often include distance learning modalities.

Open learning communities, by nature, cannot be established by an outside agent. They are constructed by those who pertain to them. They are themselves the result of a constructivist learning process, involving a variety of partners whose roles can best no longer be dichotomized as either those of learner or teacher (see e.g. Visser & Jain, 1996). The process of their construction is helped along by the existence of a facilitating open learning environment which contains the essential ingredients and building blocks that learning communities will want to make use of. It is such environments that we must build.

Building Environments Conducive To Open Learning

In building up propitious environments that are conducive to the generation of open learning one faces a dilemma. There is important existing infrastructure and practice that one would like to build on. However, part of that same infrastructure and practice reflects much of what is in urgent need to be changed whereas another important part of it has hardly received recognition as belonging to the learning environment.

It is perhaps in the first place necessary to consider the broadness, complexity and unpredictability of learning. At the theoretical/conceptual level, Greeno, Collins and Resnick (1996) note the complementarity of views on the nature of knowing, the nature of learning and transfer, and the nature of motivation and engagement offered by the behaviorist/empiricist, the cognitive/rationalist and the situative/pragmatist-sociohistoric perspectives. The authors assert that, however different these perspectives, "all three traditions emphasize the importance of organized patterns in cognitive activity" (p. 16). Bandura's (1977) social learning theory stresses the observational nature of learning and thus the role of modelling of desirable and undesirable behaviors, an issue that has much relevance if one recognizes how much learning occurs almost 'incidentally', by being part of the community and media context. The case for real-world based learning is made by authors such as Resnick (1987), Collins (1991), and Jonassen, Mayes and McAleese (1993). Other authors (e.g. Sternberg and Detterman, 1986; Sternberg and Wagner, 1986; Gardner, 1993) have raised awareness about the thinness of learning processes that are mainly based on the recognition of but a small slice of a wide spectrum of intelligences.

Yet others note the limitations inherent in the prevailing view that cognitive and meta-cognitive development terminate in early adulthood, an assumption which urgently needs to be reviewed in the light of research on life-span development (e.g. Baltes and Grim, Eds., 1984; Baltes and Smith, 1990; Kuhn, D. and Meacham, J. A., Eds., 1983; Labouvie-Vief, 1990; Pascual-Leone, 1990). Perrin (1996) refers to the non-traditional learner as the biggest untapped market for education. He quotes in that connection Hansen, Silver and Strong whose 'Learning Styles Inventory" identifies four different learning styles, i.e. directive, interactive, inquiry based, and creative. Most of what goes on in the educational establishment favors learners with a directive learning style and encourages the development of teachers and teaching styles that are effective for such learners. Yet others, like Burnett (1996) refer to the ephemeral and unpredictable nature of learning. However much we plan, or forget to plan, in the final analysis it is the learner who decides to derive from the learning environment what suits her or him best.

In exploring to move from where we are to where we want to get, by moving away from an environment that was constructed out of a concern to deliver effectively fixed-modality instructional options to one that is oriented towards the demands of a multiplicity of learners and their varied range of goals and circumstances, one needs to have an open eye for opportunities. A willingness is required to look around for those instances where the current reality starts transforming itself into something new, as some of the cases referred to in this paper will highlight. Thus one undertakes a discovery journey, building the road while going along.

References

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Footnote

1. The advice in question emanated from the work of the so-called ‘Ad Hoc Forum of Reflection’, which deliberated on UNESCO’s role in the last decade of the twentieth century. The French philosopher Michel Serres played an important role in advancing the particular recommendation. - back

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