1 An Old Buffalo SpeaksReflections on My Years of Leadership in Distance Education and Online Learning
Lori Wallace
As I reflect on my 40-year career in university distance education (DE), I realize that I’ve been in the field longer than many (perhaps most) of our current students have been alive. However, I’m certainly not an ancient oracle, stroking my flowing white beard and presenting myself as an expert in all things distance education. Rather, I use the term “old buffalo” simply to reflect the fact that I have been around for quite a while now, have faced many challenges, some more daunting than others, and have gained useful experience along the way. I hope that sharing some of this experience will be of interest to the younger or less experienced buffalo in the herd.
I am now retired (or at least off the payroll) and enjoying what psychologist Erik Erikson (1950) would classify in his theory of psychosocial development as the “generativity stage” (a focus of which is mentorship). It occurs to me that the development of “distance education” as a field (my use of the term includes everything from correspondence to online learning) might be seen to have worked through some of the earlier stages of Erikson’s framework, such as the stages of “autonomy vs. doubt” and “identity vs. role confusion.”
Background
The growth of distance education at the University of Manitoba (UM) has been part of an ongoing national and international trend, and online courses have become a strategic part of the offerings of most universities in Canada (Johnson, 2019). When I began working in distance education at the university in 1985, there were 495 students enrolled in degree courses (then titled the Correspondence Program), and no full DE degree programs were offered. In 2013 (my last year of direct involvement), DE enrolment had grown to over 8,500 students, with three degree programs offered and twice the number of units participating. The University of Manitoba also introduced the first MOOC, “Connectivism and Connectivity Knowledge,” in 2008, facilitated by Stephen Downes and George Siemens, with over 2,300 learners participating.
The Accidental Distance Educator
I don’t know anyone of my vintage who had planned distance education as a career goal. I fell into it, as did most of my colleagues. Our work was often undervalued, as was the field itself. My colleagues at other institutions were mostly women, drawn into distance education from other teaching fields, many of them having been distance learners themselves. Those colleagues were far more likely to share stories about their disasters than crow about their accomplishments, and their generosity, energy, and openness were essential to my development as a practitioner and leader.
In 1984, during my first year in an academic position, I was approached to move into the role of director of the Correspondence Program. That approach came, I believe, not only because of my university background but also because of the instructional design experience that I had gained in the private sector.
Lessons from the Private Sector
In the late 1970s, I worked in a human resources development firm that used Robert Mager’s Competency-Based Instructional Design model. I am struck that, 40 years after Mager’s model was popular in the training sector, these frameworks are increasingly being used to build measurable outcomes and micro-credentials for university programs.
Working in the private sector provided me with two important pieces of learning that put me in good stead: first, projects always had tight timelines and were focused on results; second, any topic can be designed for successful adult and distance learning. The former piece of learning helped me to move projects along and focus on results when I led university units, and the latter helped to carve the enduring dent in the middle of my forehead formed from having content specialists insist that their curricula simply wouldn’t fit a DE design model.
Working to Achieve Parity of Quality and Esteem for Distance Education
In the early days, a colleague at the Open University of the United Kingdom spoke about the need for distance education to achieve parity of quality and esteem with conventional face-to-face teaching and learning. It seems that we’ve been doing that work for too many years, but progress has been made. Some of that progress has been fuelled by research and scholarship, lobbying and policy change, development of graduate programs in instructional design (ID) and distance education, as well as appropriate adaptation of technology for teaching and learning.
At my institution, developing partnerships with other academic units and collecting data were key to raising the esteem and quality of distance education. I had a sign in my office that read “you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” and with commitment to that principle our unit collected, analyzed, and shared with other academic units comparative data on every course (withdrawals, student and unit evaluations, revision history, etc.). In some cases, departments did not analyze similar data on their on-campus courses, so they found the reports useful, and the process fostered credibility and confidence in the quality of our DE programs. This underscores the fact that change, especially in policy and attitude, requires not only powerful stories but also solid quantitative data and analysis.
Student Support
Student support was different before the internet: we developed student networks, offered toll-free telephone numbers and calling cards, and insisted on office hours for instructors. One episode in the late 1980s illustrates how important it was to understand learners’ needs. I received a phone call from an Indigenous student in northern Manitoba. He told me that he had been trying unsuccessfully to reach his instructor during office hours. I offered to track down the instructor. The student asked if that could be within 30 minutes because he had walked through the bush to use a telephone and still had to walk back to his home before dark. Similar issues arose with our incarcerated students since telephone privileges in prisons can be precarious.
Although the internet has changed for the better many aspects of the geographically distant student experience, access to reliable and affordable high-speed internet is still an issue, especially in northern and remote communities. Indigenous learners in particular face barriers in terms of technology, geography, financial resources, access to high school courses in their communities, equity in K–12 school funding, a first language other than English, dislocation, racism, and the colonial culture of the university and its bureaucracy.
Back in the day when our support staff mailed all course materials, assignments, and feedback via Canada Post, there was always the risk of delays. If there was a strike or labour disruption, then the process became very challenging indeed. For example, in 1987, rotating strikes at Canada Post meant long delays in the delivery of course materials (print manuals, audiotapes, videotapes—in both Beta and VHS!), assignments, feedback, and exams. Students’ academic progress was threatened. My colleagues across the country shared contingency plans and strategies. As I was figuring out how I might arrange delivery of the rock samples that we had purchased from the Geological Survey of Canada, I spoke with a colleague at another university who wondered how the frogs that had been ordered for dissection might look after spending weeks stuck in a Canada Post facility. Suddenly, my rocks seemed to be a much easier problem to deal with.
Consortia and Formal Collaboration
By 1984, Athabasca University was booming. Provincial governments had awakened to the benefits of distance education in reducing barriers to postsecondary learning, and funding to expand distance education was available (the largest provincial grant ($250,000) that we received for UM DE course development was in 1985).
Distance educators have always been a very collaborative bunch, and the bilingual Canadian Association for Distance Education (CADE, created in 1984) and the subsequent development of the Journal of Distance Education provided great opportunities for sharing practice and scholarship. CADE conferences offered both formal professional development and many informal huddles in which we swapped issues and strategies and offered much affectionate support. In a reflection, a former CADE president, Joan Collinge, spoke to “CADE’s power for collegiality and sustenance, especially for the lone practitioner who does not have a local critical mass of colleagues” (quoted in Roberts & Umbriaco, 2007, p. 199).
My CADE colleagues were a vital professional network for me. Women leaders and colleagues who come to mind include Liz Burge, Joan Collinge, Margaret Haughey, Margaret Landstrom, Betty Mitchell, Grace Milashenko, Ruth Epstein, Margareth Pederson, Anna Sawicki, and Barb Spronk, and UM colleagues include Anne Percival, Kathleen Matheos, Bonnie Luterbach, and Cheryl McLean.
In the days when course materials were print-based with audio and video components, we were able to develop course leasing protocols that allowed us to adapt courses developed at another university to be offered as one of our own courses. Leased courses allowed us to test the market for new topics, expand majors by leasing courses that had enrolments too low to justify in-house development, or fill short-term gaps when one of our courses was undergoing revision. Leasing fees were kept low (quid pro quo) and charged on a per-student-enrolled basis. When courses went online, such arrangements became less attractive because students from across the country could easily be recruited as opposed to just those in one’s own province. We worked instead to reduce barriers to course transfer and credit recognition.
The First Year by Distance Education Program (FYDE, now Campus Manitoba) was a Manitoba government initiative that began in the 1990s with the objective of increasing access to university via distance education and through a consortium of all publicly funded Manitoba universities. The project supported course development, consortia infrastructure, a single student portal, and student service centres in rural Manitoba. A key student mobility policy was that all participating universities recognize for credit and residency requirements DE courses successfully completed by Campus Manitoba students. Government grants rarely come without political compromises, but the FYDE/Campus Manitoba programs nudged universities to collaborate and resulted in policy changes previously resisted.
Similar policies in the UM Canadian Forces University Program allowed members of the Canadian Forces and their families to complete degrees despite career transfers and international deployments. Other DE consortia in the 1980s and 1990s in which we were involved included the Prairie Horticulture Certificate Program and the Certificate Program in Adult and Continuing Education consortium.
At the national level, the creation of the Canadian Virtual University (CVU) consortium in 2000 brought together the expertise and offerings of public universities with large DE programs. Innovations included an online course and program database, the development of common forms for visiting student application and letters of permission (we considered this quite an accomplishment given that we worked with registrars’ offices at 12 universities!), the waiving of all non-tuition fees, student advising, and a national and an international exam invigilation network. The consortium also conducted research projects, and its work highlighted both domestically and internationally the quality of Canadian DE programs. Vicky Busch, the executive director from the inception of the CVU until 2014, deserves particular mention here for her outstanding commitment and skill in running and representing the consortium. The CVU was dissolved in 2019, its work promoting distance education on national and international stages deemed complete, as evident from the increased prevalence of online learning programs in Canada.
It has certainly been my experience that women in university distance education in Canada (undervalued professionals working in an undervalued area) form strong support networks and achieve exceptional cooperation and results. That is also true of my experience with international projects. In the 1990s, distance education was a primary vehicle for education development projects. With the exception of education ministers or university presidents, each of the projects in which I participated was run by a woman, with women being the target learners. A distance education project in Southeast Asia trained teachers in Teaching English as a Second Language, and the coordinators—Audrey Ambrose-Yeoh and Rachanee Senisrisant—worked tirelessly in support of the project. We remain close to this day—pulling the plow together does that! Likewise, my nursing colleagues at the South West China University of Medical Sciences, led by Li Jiping and Li Xialing, somehow carved out time from heavy work and family responsibilities to develop China’s first distance Bachelor of Nursing degree. The trust and commitment brought by leaders and participants to these projects created relationships that strengthened the projects, achieved results, and fostered great learning for everyone involved.
UM Organizational and Policy Trends
At the University of Manitoba, since its inception and until recently, the Correspondence (DE/Online) Program was a centralized unit, housed within the academic unit of Continuing Education (later Extended Education). Double-digit increases in UM distance education enrolment began in the late 1990s, driven largely by students enrolled concurrently in DE and on-campus courses. In 2004, a tuition-sharing agreement was developed in which tuition revenue was shared with participating academic units. It was the first such agreement in Canada and increased interest in developing new distance and online courses and programs.
In our unit in the 1980s and 1990s, instructional designers were in great demand for external consulting. We agreed that any consulting work that came to any of us as a result of our university positions would be brought through our unit, and the resulting income would develop our unit. That would be a much harder sell these days, but at the time it contributed to a very cohesive team.
Our centralized DE unit was well established and efficient with high-quality results. However, after internal consultation, the unit was disbanded in 2015, and staff and functions were transferred to other units. In my view, two issues contributed to the decision: first, control of tuition revenue; second, faculty control of development processes. Regarding the latter point, I can see that our systems for quality control sometimes frustrated last-minute revision to and individualization of courses by each term’s instructors, and in retrospect I think that we could have done a better job of developing more flexible processes. However, we also had the experience of instructors revising their courses just before the term began. This strained our staff (e.g., copyright clearance and video production don’t happen overnight), caused grief for staff of the bookstore and library, and sometimes weakened the integrity of the design. Nevertheless, user-friendly educational technology has facilitated just-in-time course development and revision, funding models have changed, and perhaps the trend toward decentralization can be seen as evidence of distance education becoming mainstream in universities’ strategic priorities and having achieved the parity of esteem and quality that we sought in earlier days.
Until decentralization, all instructional designers were members of academic staff, putting them on an equal footing with content specialists: both the instructional designer and the department head of the content area had to approve the course before it could be offered. This reinforced that the design of the course for student learning was as important as other aspects of curriculum content. Advances in educational technology and budgetary constraints over the years have meant that instructional design work is done increasingly by non-academic staff at our institution and elsewhere. My concern about this trend is that the focus might shift more to the mechanics of educational technology with less expert learning design knowledge being brought into the process. When in 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic thrust all courses into virtual/online learning, I felt for both instructors and students. I know how much work and time go into successful online courses, and resources were in short supply in the early months of the pandemic. Although the exposure to online learning might have been a help in some ways to students and instructors, I can’t help but worry that Zoom lectures and voice-over PowerPoint presentations did little to support student learning, ignite enthusiasm, or meet instructional design quality benchmarks.
National Trends
In the 1980s, DE development and delivery often occurred in centralized units, especially in universities, where distance education originated in the “extension” unit to meet the needs of rural learners (e.g., University of Manitoba, University of Saskatchewan, University of British Columbia) (Haughey, 2013). However, distance education and online learning are now supported more typically by teaching and learning centres.
A demographic trend that became a piece of critical learning for my unit came to light in 1989 when one of our staff, Darleen Courrier, mentioned to me that many more students were dropping by to pick up course materials rather than having them mailed. That casual observation became a major research project for me, and the results demonstrated that in universities across Canada distance education no longer served a homogeneous student population of adult learners (over age 25), primarily female, part-time learners, at a geographic distance from the university and with full-time work and/or family responsibilities (Wallace, 1996). The DE student population had become heterogeneous, with a growing cohort of younger, urban, full-time students who enrolled in distance education not because of the barriers of geography, full-time work, or family responsibilities but because they were working an average of 20 hours a week in “McJobs” in which they had little control over their shifts. This new group of learners had geographic access to courses on campus but needed flexibility in the time and place of their learning. They often combined DE courses with on-campus courses to have that flexibility and stay on track to graduate. This demographic shift represented something of a distance education “black market” with word-of-mouth between students rather than any marketing generating enrolment. The trend also generated some resistance from academic departments that considered distance education inferior and believed that urban students should be compelled to enroll in on-campus courses. Thankfully, those attitudes changed over time as distance education continued to demonstrate high-quality results.
Another trend relates to copyright. Over the past two decades, there has been a shift in some universities from copyright ownership of DE courses held by the institution to copyright ownership held by course authors. Historically, copyright was owned by the university to ensure access to courses in which it invested considerable resources. However, that model also limited flexibility in revisions, and some instructors felt hobbled by having to teach courses that gave them few opportunities to add their perspectives. The adoption of technology and the move to online courses have also facilitated the personalization of courses by instructors, and ownership of online courses is now vested in some faculty collective agreements.
Thanks to the leadership of Rory McGreal, Michael Geist, and others such as the ABCopyright group, the grip (and expense) of universities’ contracts with Access Copyright have been loosened, and some institutions have begun to deal directly with copyright holders or to use open educational resources.
Reflections on Leadership
I’ve reflected on my leadership experiences as well as the qualities of leaders whom I most admired, qualities that I try to instill in myself. Some of these qualities might seem at first glance to be self-evident, but I believe that they warrant mention.
Having a DE leadership position did not always bring respect or recognition. In 1985, the dean of Continuing Education and I were interviewed for a piece in the Winnipeg Free Press on how our unit was extending access to students. Not only were none of my comments included in the article, but also the caption under my photo read “Lori Wallace is all set for a correspondence course from the U of M.” I was in fact the director! I had refused to have my photo taken pushing a course package into a mailbox, but the result in the published article was even more humiliating. Dealing with the media is something that most leaders learn by trial and error, and I was a rank beginner at that time. As time went by, I learned to ask interviewers to share drafts with me for fact checking and was pleased that many of them obliged.
Lots of grey matter is needed of course for leadership, but leaders also need strong moral compasses and stiff spines. That type of leadership is hard under the pressures of politics and resources and harder still if your values aren’t always in sync with those of the organization. Your teams can also become insular. That’s why I found it vital to have people who were sympathetic, informed listeners but, most importantly, incorruptible judges of my ideas and actions.
Leading means working harder than you ask your staff to work and putting your unit first. Early on, I developed an understanding that the teams we lead often have Teflon or Velcro members. One challenge of leadership is to find ways to make work stick to our Teflon staff members and ensure that the Velcro folks don’t collapse from overwork.
I’ve learned that keeping your sense of humour, especially about yourself, is key: “Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused.” I now laugh at my rather unsuccessful attempts to achieve record levels of efficiency in my personal and professional lives. I even bought a book entitled Life’s Too Short to Fold Fitted Sheets, which had a section listing 17 meals that could be made from a deli chicken.
Another key aspect of leadership is to lead without ego or self-interest: “At the feast of ego, all leave hungry.” Teams are just another form of relationship, and in all great relationships we know that we are stronger together than we are separately. Leadership is about achieving collective goals, and to do so, we must recognize the moral role of a leadership position.
I’ve seen discussions, decisions, and projects usurped by ego or self-interest, and the results rarely have been good. ‘Academic politics produce such bitter squabbling because the stakes are so meagre,’ is a classic phrase on the matter–usually attributed to Henry Kissinger but reiterated by many–and I would add that some of the egos are so large. Projects sometimes have been derailed because the funders lost confidence that their interests were being placed first, and too much attention was paid to the “elevator pitch” and “branding” and not enough to honouring the relationship. It’s worth remembering the adage that “people may forget what you accomplished, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”
Conclusion
Our workplaces and learners certainly have changed over the decades. We have addressed many challenges and had many successes, perhaps the greatest of which have been to put a dent in pious notions of the superiority of face-to-face learning and to support faculty members and instructors to improve teaching and learning, wherever and whenever they take place. We are now less likely to hear statements that riled Postman and Weingartner (1969) such as teachers declaring “I taught them that, but they didn’t learn it,” to which these authors retorted that we don’t hear salespeople saying “I sold it to him, but he didn’t buy it” (p. 34). The fact that Teaching as a Subversive Activity is still in print suggests that there’s still more work for us.
This old buffalo is enjoying remaining in our DE and ID herd within a more relaxed time frame and without any requirement to “dress for success.” Mentorship is such a great way to share and learn.
References
- Erikson, E. (1950). Childhood and society. W. W. Norton.
- Haughey, M. (2013, December 15). Distance learning. The Canadian encyclopedia. https://
www .thecanadianencyclopedia .ca /en /article /distance -learning - Johnson, N. (2019). Tracking online education in Canadian universities and colleges: National survey of online and digital learning 2019 national report. Canadian Digital Learning Research Association. http://
www .cdlra -acrfl .ca /wp -content /uploads /2020 /07 /2019 _national _en .pdf - Postman, N., & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. Delta.
- Roberts, J., & Umbriaco, M. (2007). CADE: Looking forward by glancing back. International Journal of E-Learning and Distance Education, 21(3). https://
www .ijede .ca /index .php /jde /article /view /33 - Wallace, L. (1996). Changes in the demographics and motivations of distance education students. Journal of Distance Education, 11(1), 1–31. https://
www .ijede .ca /index .php /jde /article /view /245