Digital Delights

At a time when the “mainstreaming” of distance education with campus instruction is pervasive across higher education, Beaudoin takes a calculated risk in today’s ubiquitous information and technology age to suggest that distance education researchers, practitioners, and leaders must pause and reflect on the field, where it’s been, where it’s going and how we are going to get there. He asks some very candid questions:

• Where is the literature on “leadership” in distance education? Do we, in fact, know very much about effective leadership in distance education and the skills and attributes that the next generation of leaders will need to move the field forward?
  
  
• In an era of unprecedented information and research via the Web, is research that was conducted five years obsolete and irrelevant to today’s distance education environment?
  
  
• Have faculty roles changed due to technology adoption and/or have faculty roles changed because our views and philosophical basis for what constitutes effective teaching and learning changed? Or both?
  
  
• Given the accelerated access to information, research, and other resources, is the quality and precision of today’s distance education research lacking in terms of methodological and assessment approaches?
  
  
• Has the distance education field made a critical error in viewing distance learning as synonymous with “online teaching and learning” only? We have been combining technologies in course delivery for decades, yet today we throw around words like “blended learning” as if we have created this in the past five years.