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Volume 4 Issue 8September 2000

Asking The Right Questions:

Preserving academic values in distance education

Virginia McBride
Project Director, System Think Tank

Over the last several years, external threats to the future of California’s community colleges have emerged on the academic horizon. Within the distance learning environment, these threats have agitated and, to some extent, terrified academics throughout the system. They feared the:

• loss of jobs
• loss of control over decisions affecting their performance
• loss of contact with students
• loss of degree-based education
• imposition of courses in whose development they had no voice usage-mandates regarding course-materials in whose creation they had not shared
• intrusion of outside businesses that were creating their own universities

True, the threats that gave rise to the fears really do exist. However, the question remains, how should the community colleges deal with the threats and fears? The answer lies in quality assurance, an assurance in which accrediting bodies play a major role.

Judith S. Eaton, President of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, in her article entitled “Core Academic Values Quality, and Regional Accreditation: The Challenge of Distance Learning” explores the problem in a very thoughtful and level-headed manner.

To each of six core academic values, she attaches a distance-learning-related challenge to that value. These values, and their related challenges are:

Value	Challenged By
1. Institutional autonomy	Consortial arrangements
2. Collegial and shared governance	Dispersion of faculty and students
3. Intellectual and academic authority of faculty	Commercial courseware, standardized courses, part-time faculty, disaggregation of faculty responsibilities
4. The degree	Competition from credentials: reduced domination of degree-granting
5. General education	Pervasiveness of training
6. Site-based education	The diminishing importance of place

After addressing each of the six core values and their respective challenges, Ms. Eaton explores the question of ‘appropriate regional accreditation responses to the challenges.” She proposes a transition “framework for rethinking values and accreditation standards” which has four principles as a foundation:

• Maintaining the core values is important to higher education
• The purpose of each core value should govern our response to change
• Distance learning is a change worth accommodating
• Defining and enhancing the intersection of core academic values and distance learning can be a key strategy for meeting distance learning challenges.

Ms. Eaton contends that these principles are useful for “review of programs and degrees that rely heavily on a combination of technology-based and site-based education experiences.” Within this framework, she identifies each of the six core values, its associated purpose, its related challenge, and the possible strategy for the future.

Beyond the transitional framework, Ms. Eaton sees the need for “recalibrating traditional capacity and process standards of accreditation.” In this recalibrating, she sees the need to "develop standards that address consequences: outcomes, results, and competencies.” She closes her article by admonishing, “We will not lose those values if we ask the right questions about their preservation.” The biggest question, then, is what questions need to be asked to assure quality. Answers to those very questions reduce the fears and eliminate the threats.

These questions need to be shaped, discussed, and answered with major input from practitioners in the distance learning area especially from those who have taught, as well as taken, distance learning courses. Ms. Eaton has established a structure for the discussion: the six core values. Who then has a question?

Virgina McBride would welcome your questions, sent via email to vmcbride@ix.netcom.com.