LORRAINE CARTER

My journey into online education involves connections to geography, continuing education, and the grit of extraordinary women.

My career began in Sudbury, northern Ontario, where life, work, and education are influenced by long winters, a small population, and service limitations. Not surprisingly, these variables affect the learning experiences of adults in the North, a reality that became stark in my work as an instructional designer in continuing education (CE) at Laurentian University beginning in the early 1990s. Composed principally of women, the CE team worked tirelessly to develop course materials and support instructors and students. Reaching our objectives was challenging with instructional designers and learning technologists hired on soft money, inadequate staff to carry out operational tasks and respond to learners’ questions, and a small leadership team to work with the faculties and guide the unit. The bilingual nature of the university meant that many courses were prepared in both English and French. Despite these variables, there was a determination among the CE staff influenced by the leadership of John Daniel, who served as the university’s president from 1984 to 1990. After leaving Laurentian University, he went on to be a global leader in distance and open learning.

During this time, I worked closely with the director of the School of Nursing, Dr. Ellen Rukholm, and other nursing and CE colleagues on the university’s first federally funded online programs called Cardiac Care on the Web and Nursing Health Assessment on the Web. Although none of us had experience designing and delivering online programs, we were strongly motivated and brought a “how hard can this be?” attitude to the process. We needed that attitude.

These projects cultivated my research acumen since, in addition to doing design work, I served as a co-investigator on two studies of online education involving working nurse-learners. I was also the lead designer of online courses for post-diploma nurses seeking degree status before it became an entry-to-practice requirement in Ontario in 2005. Complementing my reading of nursing literature was work by Liz Burge and Margaret Haughey (2001) about women leaders in distance and early online education. This portfolio of work served as the basis of my doctoral work in education, completed in 2006. Working with the late Dr. Larry Morton from the University of Windsor, I investigated the critical thinking, writing, and online learning experiences of post-registered nurses whose complex professional lives were augmented by their families, community responsibilities, and inability to attend in-person classes. Both Larry and Ellen were exceptional mentors, with Larry seeing the access that online education affords and Ellen recognizing how online nursing education was a game changer for the profession. She and I presented and published in many national and international contexts as champions of online nursing education.

I likewise had the chance to work with motivated women as part of the launch of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. Although the senior leadership of the school was male dominated, women played a major role in designing and developing courses for medical students distributed across northern Ontario. Later I became the education manager for the Ontario Telemedicine Network, a provincially funded organization that uses technology to support clinical consultations across distance and to respond to the continuing educational needs of health professionals. Again, the Ontario Telemedicine Network “doers” were principally female. The same pattern continued in my faculty days when I joined the School of Nursing at Nipissing University and served as director of the Centre for Flexible Teaching and Learning. In each setting, women—and particularly those in nursing faculties—saw the potential of online education and were committed to actualizing it.

Throughout my career, I have learned a great deal from female leaders with the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education (CNIE) and the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education (CAUCE). Eventually, I served as president of each organization. The CNIE and CAUCE tend to attract women who understand that online education is vital to the achievement of educational access and accessibility. In a recent informal count of deans and directors representing university continuing education units belonging to CAUCE, 70% of these leaders were female (CAUCE, 2023).

Recently I retired as director of McMaster University Continuing Education, a unit that has more than 90 years of history in adult education and a staff that is 75% female. As part of my core work, assuring others in the academy that teaching and learning accomplished “a little differently” is a valid educational methodology, and advocating for services afforded to undergraduate and graduate students for adult learners were no easy tasks. I continued to be an actively engaged scholar in the online and continuing education sectors since not doing so would have been negligent in advancing the credibility of both fields. This work followed my editorship and co-editorship of the Canadian Journal for University Continuing Education and the International Journal of e-Learning & Distance Education, respectively.

DIANE JANES

I stumbled into instructional design and online learning at a time when it was open to women from different backgrounds and histories. I was also the first person in my family to finish high school and pursue postsecondary learning. Along the way, I took every course in every discipline that I could and still graduate. This became the metaphor for my life’s work: exploring and drawing “outside the box.”

I discovered a Master of Educational Technology program at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador in the late 1980s. Taught by Dr. M. F. (Mary) Kennedy and others, the degree program was one of the first in the country to focus on instructional design, educational technology, and distance education. My thesis evaluated the first course offered by the university via distance education (paper, email, and audiotaped lectures). Mary had completed her doctoral studies at Indiana University with some of the biggest names in educational technology. She was the first Canadian to intern as a graduate student at the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (Ives et al., 2023). In turn, she influenced me and the next generation of educational technologists and educators.

In 1996, I went to the University of British Columbia (UBC) under the mentorship of Dr. A. W. (Tony) Bates, who had joined UBC from the Open University in the United Kingdom the previous year. I was his first hire for the new department, Distance Education and Technology. Working with other UBC colleagues, we moved distance learning from correspondence to technology-enhanced to fully online. At UBC, I was a member of the team with Tony and Dr. Mark Bullen that, with Mexican colleagues, created the post-graduate certificate in Technology-Based Distance Learning—a collaboration between Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, and UBC. One of the first certifications in online learning offered to academics and practitioners globally, by 2002 it had become the Master of Educational Technology, the first online master’s program at UBC and a program in which Mark and I continue to teach. I completed my PhD at UBC, where a key member of my doctoral committee was Dr. Jean Barman, an amazing mentor in engaging graduate learners and a mentor in writing, having been an award winner for her own academic writing. I have been writing ever since. Between our time at UBC and other new ventures, such as serving as president of the CNIE, Mark and I edited Making the Transition to E-Learning: Strategies and Issues (Bullen & Janes, 2007).

My first faculty position at the University of Saskatchewan in 2003 was the beginning of the pathway to where I am today. After I was tenured and promoted, the university closed my division, and I went on to teach graduate students at a distance for six universities. By 2009, I had moved to Cape Breton University to become the inaugural chair of the new Department of Education and to establish a new BEd, one of the first to incorporate educational technology methodology into its core offerings. In 2013, I joined the Donald School of Business as its inaugural associate dean. There I led the creation of the first provincial post-baccalaureate blended credential in international business. After faculty roles at the University of Alberta and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, I returned to British Columbia in 2021 to join Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops as a coordinator for the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. There I mentor colleagues in teaching, design, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Most of my current work involves blending traditional university face-to-face delivery methods with online and design thinking in addition to co-editing the International Journal of e-Learning & Distance Education.

Over my years in distance education, I have discovered a few things about myself and the influences that these different institutions and the women and men within them have had on my life and career in online and technology-enhanced learning. Mentoring and supporting women as they accomplish their goals has been the mainstay of my work. To teach means to understand design, flexibility, and scholarship. These core areas guide all of my work. Finally, teaching and learning are political acts. To bring this work into the spaces of others, especially when working with new faculty, is to change how they engage with and even see the world. This work is transformative in all ways imaginable.

KATY CAMPBELL

My career path from instructional designer to dean was fashioned from disorienting dilemmas. It was Dr. David Mappin who declared me an instructional designer and had me lead design teams in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. There I had two epiphanies: first, I had no idea what an instructional designer was, although I knew that the practice described in the theoretical literature was embedded in masculinist traditions; second, instructional design was a social process of storytelling. My doctoral supervisor, Dr. Jean Clandinin, encouraged me to reshape instructional design as relational practice, and I began to see instructional design as a strategy for social action. Dr. Margaret Haughey further encouraged my identity transformation into a scholar of instructional design, and I began to shape a feminist instructional design practice. After my PhD, I began working with Dr. Rick Schwier and others to develop a “theory” of instructional design as socially agentic practice, and in 1992 I accepted my first academic position at the State University of New York, where I was expected to lead technology integration in the teacher education college. This was my first exposure to the World Wide Web, and I linked elementary school students around the state with my pre-service practicum students. It was awkward, but it opened up possibilities in our teacher education program, particularly with students from vulnerable communities.

In 1995, I moved to Keewatin Community College in Manitoba as a distance education coordinator. Sadly, the college was not ready for this vision, and my daughter and I were bullied mercilessly. I was not welcome as an agent of change and deeply suspect as an academic. The president’s goal to make the Thompson campus a distance education centre did not sit well with faculty members, although the community was enthusiastic. I struggled to build rapport and launch programs. Ultimately, the “distance” in “distance coordinator” meant visiting fly-in communities to talk with First Nations leaders about the learning needs of their communities, very few of which, such as child care, we could meet (see Kirkup & Von Prümmer, 1990). I was faced with the realities of colonization; from that time on, I actively sought ways to be an ally in my academic roles, especially as a dean.

By 1996, I was recruited as an instructional designer and later a tenure-track academic in the Faculty of Extension at the University of Alberta by Dean Dennis Foth. The faculty had taken a plan for the Distance Learning Initiative (later the Academic Technologies for Learning) to the provost, who agreed to fund it as a “skunkworks” for faculty members interested in exploring learning technologies. As the lead designer, I was challenged to change the culture of “face to face is always best.” For several years, we worked to change the discussion, and most of the time I was in a zone of proximal development, until our director, Dr. Terry Anderson, accepted a position at Athabasca University. I became the interim director, but I struggled. I was resented by staff in the Academic Technologies for Learning, not respected by peers who doubted my technical chops, and discounted by the male-dominated central administration. Like other women who aspired to leadership, I was never named as the permanent director. With budget cuts in the mid-1990s, our funding was discontinued.

Although we developed our first graduate distance degree, the Master of Arts in Communications and Technology, the Faculty of Extension always struggled for credibility as a degree-granting faculty. I became the associate dean, charged with bringing new credentials forward, and I became more passionate about the access to learning upon which the faculty was built. In 2007, because of a failed deanship, I was appointed dean of the faculty (again in an interim capacity) as it moved to the city’s core. The move escalated the chaos that faculty members felt, and the feelings of marginalization were strong. Yet the crisis opened up creative space in which to build social capital in new communities.

The newly appointed associate dean, Dennis Foth, and I led the faculty through an intensive reorientation and revisioning and alignment with the evolving “movement” of engagement scholarship (see Boyer, 1996). As a “boundary organization” or an “experimental incubator” since 1912, the faculty’s research and teaching were intended to promote innovation in engagement, including prioritizing Indigenization in our programs and activities. In 2017, the faculty established the Master of Arts in Community Engagement, to our knowledge the first graduate program of its kind in the world.

Despite the growing academic reputation of the Faculty of Extension, deans of other faculties (a.k.a. predatory deans) protested the development of for-credit engaged programs in various formats, the establishment of two related research centres, efforts to secure donors, and the tiny budget from central administration. In 2013, with severe budget reductions, all faculties were pressured to prioritize revenue generation. Faculties that had worked collaboratively with our faculty to develop accessible programs were now encouraged to develop their own. Other deans thought that engagement scholarship was not a legitimate intellectual domain and that our learners were not university-level students. The faculty would be “decommissioned.” Although my intensive lobbying and overt resistance resulted in the acting provost reversing the decision, it was merely forestalled. In the fall of 2019, the new provost moved to disperse the faculty’s academic staff and research centres to other faculties. The University of Alberta deinstitutionalized the academic mission of community-engagement scholarship, conceiving of it as a community relations and advancement function. The emotional labour of over 20 years, in many ways the “women’s work” of relationship building, did not diminish the precarity of a marginalized practice (online learning) and scholarship (of engagement) in a faculty committed to access for adult learners.

Shared Findings

Through the act of reflecting on our experiences, we perceive six principal themes. We provide some summative remarks on each theme below.

References

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• Bates, A. W. (2022). Teaching in a digital age: Guidelines for designing teaching and learning (3rd ed.). Tony Bates Associates. https:// pressbooks .bccampus .ca /teachinginadigitalagev3m /
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• Ives, C., Janes, D. P., & Crowley, C. (2023). MemoryKeepers—Profiles and interviews: AMTEC History Project—Dr. Mary F. Kennedy [Video]. YouTube. https:// www .youtube .com /watch ?v = VZvtaYIO4Eo
• Kirkup, G., & Von Prümmer, C. (1990). Support and connectedness: The needs of women distance education students. Journal of Distance Education, 5(2), 9–31.
• McMaster University Continuing Education. (2023). https:// continuing.mcmaster.ca
• Nesbit, T. (2011). Editorial: Keeping the flame alive. Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, 23(2), ii–vi. https:// cjsae .library .dal .ca /index .php /cjsae /article /view /949