Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Open and distance education is changing. Distance education (DE) in higher education is changing in size, location and shape. Generally speaking, the size of distance education is growing in many parts of the world as more people are enrolled in DE offerings. In Brazil, there was an enrolment growth of 900% from 2000 to 2010 (de Oliveira Neto and dos Santos ). In Russia and Turkey, nearly 50% of all higher education students enrolled in open or distance education programs (Zawacki-Richter et al. ). The number of people enrolled in DE courses and offerings may have never been higher in many countries.

Australia is a large, sparsely populated country defined by distance. As such, distance education been important for over one hundred years to provide access to educational opportunity. Correspondence education and external studies were the main form of DE until 1970. Since the mid-1980s, open, flexible and, later, internet-based online learning have dominated distance education design and delivery. Since 1993, all universities are allowed to offer courses by whatever means they wish. However, six universities are the main providers of education to off-campus students. Australian higher education has a substantial number of international students, mainly from Asia. They enrol in online education in lesser numbers than domestic students do. Australian universities continue to be at the forefront of using and promoting Open Educational Resources, are developing their own MOOCs, and have a growing demand for lifelong learning. The chapter concludes that increased use of digital technologies has blurred on-campus education and distance education in Australia.

Distance education in Australia around the turn of the 20th century was a distinctly different mode of learning and teaching. And as Colin Latchem points out in his contribution to this volume, it was intended for a distinctly different group of learners who lived very far away from large urban centers and removed from where the bulk of the educational institutions were located. It was an alternative solution to educational opportunity, and as such its learning and teaching methods were different from what was conventional practice in face-to-face campus-based educational contexts at the time, appropriately devoid of the thrills and frills of the campus-based educational experience. This alternative solution to learning and teaching had several remarkable attributes which have, over the years, gradually found their way into campus-based educational practice. Foremost among these attributes is the very public nature of the operation. In this mode, unlike what usually occurs within the four walls of a classroom, all communication between the teachers and the learners is out in the open. And because of this exposure, the distance education course material is subjected to higher standards in terms of the design of the instructional transaction it embodies.

Distance education began slowly and relatively late in Brazil, but has expanded exponentially in the past 15 years. Education is heavily regulated in Brazil and DE began to expand substantially after 2000 when the federal government authorized increasing number of institutions to offer distance learning. In 2002, there were 25 institutions allowed to offer distance education serving less than 50,000 students. By 2016 there were 331 institutions with over 1.3 million students enrolled. Nearly 90% of online and distance education enrolments in private institutions. Distance education will continue to grow in Brazil because of growing demand for education and high rates of digital adoption. However, distance education has grown so rapidly, there are strong concerns about the quality of courses and programs. The chapter concludes that despite this growth, there has still not been the same level of acceptance of DE in Brazil as there has been in many other countries.

The Brazilian population of 210 million people are concentrated along the cost, in the northeast, south and southeast regions. In the countryside, we find a population where information, information and communication technologies, and education are harder to access. Yet, from 2000 to 2014 the number of students in higher education rose from 2.6 million to 7.8 million. These numbers were divided between on campus courses (presencialmente) with 83% of enrollments, and open and distance learning (ODL) with 17%. The majority of ODL courses were offered by the private sector. Still, public sector ODL achieved an enrollment growth of 93.9% between 2005 and 2009. This decreased to 19% for the following five years. The rise and fall in public sector ODL enrollments is connected to Open University of Brazil system (Universidade Aberta do Brasil or UAB), whose importance is the subject of this commentary.

Canada is the second largest country in the world by total area, yet its population is only 35 million. Even though nearly 80% of the Canadian population live near the southern border with the USA, and in its larger cities, Canada is still in general a sparsely populated country, with long distances between urban centres, and between urban centres and their vast hinterland. There are therefore strong geographical reasons for distance education.

Tony Bates, Canada’s pre-eminent distance education expert formally retired over 20 years ago—but he forgot to tell those who have relied on his insights and publishing ever since. Thus, Tony is the most qualified Canadian to overview the past but more importantly to forecast the emerging needs and opportunities for distance education institutions, students and researchers in Canada and abroad.

In reviewing the history and current state of online distance education in Germany, two separate developments are noticeable. Firstly, private initiatives can be traced back to the 1850s, ranging from correspondence to traditional distance and modern online distance education endeavors. In contrast, developments in the public educational sector are more recent, dating back to the 1950s after the Second World War, when Germany was divided in East and West Germany, and later from 1990, when the country was reunified. Distance education in East Germany was fundamentally different from developments in West Germany. East German structures were controlled centrally by the State, whereas in the Federal Republic of West Germany, eleven (states) decided autonomously on educational policies, thus resulting in multiple developments.

In just a few pages, Bernath and Stöter have offered a comprehensive overview of the emergence and development of distance education in Germany, one that describes in detail all the important milestones and structural elements in the history of distance education, from its early beginnings to the present day. The way in which they describe the conflicting and often extreme circumstances under which distance education in Germany has developed is particularly instructive, as is their observation that German distance education originated in the non-academic field and entered the world of academic education at a relatively late stage. One of the unique features of German distance education and its historical development is that, because the country was divided into two German states, there were two different approaches: a socialist-style of distance education in the east and a more western-style distance education in the west. It goes without saying that the socialist-style system of distance learning was no longer viable following the reunification of the two German states, and its demise was inevitable. Another factor highlighted by Bernath and Stöter is that distance education is divided into state (public) and private (commercial) sectors.

For nearly 160 years, the United Kingdom (UK) has provided Higher Education (HE) opportunities to students learning at a distance. The University of London (UoL), founded in 1826, was the first University to offer truly distance teaching from 1858, when the residential requirements previously in place for Universities were abandoned. Over a hundred years later in 1969, The Open University UK (OU), still the UK’s only single-mode distance teaching institution, received its Royal Charter.