Interviewed by Sirje Virkus in the Pennsylvania State University, USA, 6. June 1997.
1.There is a lot of talk about a paradigm shift in education and a new learning environment. What is the new learning environment and what is the role of distance education in it?
Talking about the paradigm shift in education I would say that it's major characteristic will be the increase of the autonomy of the student. Meaning, that until now, teachers and professors were the only source of knowledge to the students, and now we imagine that students have access not only to teacher but also to different sources of information that they can have access through electronic means. That is the major change we expected even in conventional schools, there will be a lower number of hours dedicated to classroom teaching and a number of hours that will be freed from this process will be located to students so that they can learn by themselves by using electronic means. That is a major change - it has nothing to do with distance education, it just means that students will be more autonomous and professors will be on one hand the sources of knowledge, but not a single one and on the other hand they will be managers and facilitators of information on behalf of the students.
2. What is the distance education and what are the basic principles of distance education?
Distance education is the general expression that means that the way of learning is flexible enough for the student. It means that they are not necessarily having the learning activities inside the school, but they can learn even outside the school, they can learn at home if they have facilities to access information, they can learn in different places, alone or in groups if they have access to information. That's why it is distance education, it doesn't mean necessarily that student is away from the centre of knowledge, it's just that the student has more flexibility to have access to information. That is the meaning I assign now to the current expression of distance education.
The first principle of distance education is that students can learn quite a lot by themselves if they are given appropriate learning materials they can use.
Second principal is that learning materials have to be well designed and suitable for self-learning.
Third principle is that you have to have a good distribution system so that these materials can reach the student wherever she/he is.
These are basic principles of distance education.
3. J. Bang have pointed out that distance higher education in Europe is at the third phase in its evolution. What are the main phases and trends in the evolution of distance education?
Well, we call it the third phase because we could consider that in the last century and in the beginning of this century the main distribution way was mail, books were sent to the students, students stayed at home. That was what I would call the correspondence learning phase of distance education.
Next phase came when we began teaching and distributing materials through television, radio, videocassettes and audiocassettes. That was the second phase.
We consider now that we are in the new phase because information is coming through computers, networks and through satellites and other sophisticated means of distribution of learning. But one thing should be said - technology does not make the older technologies unnecessary, what I mean is that new technologies just add to the value of older technologies, because we shall still be continuing to use books of old times, we'll still be continuing to use television , radio and cassettes, but we add more to these like computers, interactive video, teleconferencing, etc.
4. What is the role of technology in distance education?
The role of technology is to facilitate not to complicate things. If you consider technology is being a necessary facility to have, you have to consider that this technology should not chase away the students. I give you an example: supposing that in a country private ownership and use of personal computers is not so developed. In that situation are the developing countries, like in Africa, where few computers are available and individuals do not generally own them. If you are imposing the use of this technology you have the risk of selecting students on the basis of their wealth, their economic status and you are putting away all these students that cannot afford this technology. So you have to make delicate choices, because for the given country and the given region the most appropriate way to teach at a distance might be television and radio. If the economic development and technological development of this country become higher and computers are fairly common in homes then you can afford to use computers for teaching as a channel too, but not before.
5. What is the role of library in the new learning environment in your opinion?
Libraries will play the most important role in the information society. Not libraries as we knew them, just with thousand and thousand of books, but libraries that include besides books - please remember, books are always necessary - but they have also videotapes, audiotapes, CD-ROMs and they have the facilities to use them and tools for the students and the teachers to consult with these materials to make proper use of it. What I mean is that a library nowadays is more like we would call mediathek not just a bibliothek. Mediathek includes, besides books, everything that is useful for learners and users of this mediathek should be given an opportunity to hear audiotapes, to visionate videotapes and to use interactive materials. That's my notion of a modern library.
6. What will be the future scenario of the development of distance education and what will be the role of universities in the future?
Conventional universities were based mostly on classroom teaching and besides that experimental work in universities has to take place in a tecnological environment, like in a laboratory of chemistry, of physics or mechanics, of informatics, or of computer science. In distance learning you reduce the use of classroom teaching, but even so, you can't avoid to give the students experimental work, so they should spend some hours in the laboratory and actually work with their hands in everything that implies manual skills. So what happens is that there is a converegnce between conventional universities and distance learning universities.
Conventional universities will adopt distance learning materials, but open universities or distance teaching universities will have to provide students with opportunities for actual living in the technological environment, in a laboratory, so there will be a convergence between the two kinds of institutions.
We have to be careful about what I would call overemphasising the need for technology. The Internet for instance, is a beautiful and marvellous facility to have for people to have access to information from outside. But you cannot just leave the students free to use the Internet without guiding them. You still need to have a specialist in content or a person with special knowledge in management of information like a librarian, documentalist, you need to have those persons to guide students to find the adequate bits of knowledge through this marvellous instrument which is the Internet. Because if it will not be the case, the students would be lost, there is a funny word, a funny expression used "lost in cyberspace". It means that a person has access to so much different information that they just doesn't know what to make of it. So, the role of professor is to help the student to select the information, to structure the information, so that they can integrate the knowledge.
7. What is the mission of the ICDE?
I would say that the ICDE is a global organisation all over the world and being single, well-known and recognised instrument of a global nature in distance education. The role of ICDE is to promote the good development of practices of knowledge about distance education for every country in the world. This is a huge mission and it means that we have to organise among ourselves putting together the institutions so that they can compare experiences, find the best ways, the best practises to put in a shape their ways of teaching and to accompany on one hand and to promote on the other hand the evolution of distance education to make it more efficient, more general, more cheap, more accessible for everybody. I think that it is the main role of the ICDE.
8. Today is the last day of 18th ICDE World Conference. Would you like to give some evaluation to the conference now?
There are two sides. The first side is about content: I think in terms of content this conference was extremely rich, we had more than seven hundred contributions from different specialists: professors, researchers, decisionmakers and so on, in terms of content this conference is perhaps the richest we have ever had. In terms of organisation I think there were some, I wouldn't say mistakes, but some adjustments that need to be made in the future. In fact there were too many papers to be presented, that demanded a large number of parallel sessions to be organised. This is not good, because parallel sessions sometimes create the dilemma, you are interested in two or three different papers and they are given at the same time, and you can only participate in one, so we have to find other ways of doing this and in terms of the organisation we have to look carefully in how to organise things so that people can make the most out of such a big conference.
This conference was also of a very political nature, meaning that we try by our findings and by our statements to influence the evolution of distance education, and to influence governments, international authorities, international organisations, we try to influence them into supporting the development in distance education, most of all in the countries who need this kind of development because they have still a fragile or weak distance education system or even education systems in general need some improvement. So the political nature of this conference was important because we were able to have a large number of people, who were only on the fringe of distance education, but persons of very high responsibilities in terms of designing education either for their countries or for the regions of the world where they have influence. And I think, my evaluation of the results of this conference is, that it has been able to influence in the good sense these authorities and these decisionmakers, because it seems there is a large consensus in some of the tendencies we consider necessary to follow.
9. Is there something you would like to address to Estonian readers?
About the younger generation I think to say: the younger generation will be, I hope, much better educated than my generation was. They will know many more things that we don't, they will have a more critical approach to knowledge, because they have now the choice between many different decisions, many different opinions, so they will be more critical, they will make better use of information than we could do when I was a young man. I think the younger generation have enormous challenge for the future, and I imagine that in the world we will know peace, we will know freedom, we will know a better knowledge, we hope there will be more social justice for everyone and I think the root of this all, the key to all this is a better education for all. That's what I hope we will be in the near future.