从无线电广播到虚拟大学：美国远程教育历史亲历者的反思

From Radio to the Virtual University: Reflections on the History of From of American Distance Education from One Who Was There!

目前因特网通信技术被应用于各层次的教育中,因此有必要了解过去教育领域引进其他技术的情况,尤其是教师、管理者和决策者对技术应用的态度。过去半个世纪,美国远程教育有诸多重要创新之举,其中最为重要的创新涵盖三个方面:在教学法领域,威斯康星大学首创课程组机制,把课程组作为教学的系统论方法的一个组成部分,而宾夕法尼亚州立大学则在20世纪九十年代初开展了交互式在线教学;在理论领域,把远程教育当成一种教学法现象研究,提出交互距离理论;在组织领域,加强远程教育在传统双轨模式大学的地位,发展校际合作和联合体,出现独立的、通常也是营利性的单轨模式大学,以及最近提出的不依托某一所具体学校的虚拟大学系统这个理念。诞生于20世纪七十年代的理论是实证研究的基础,促进实证研究的发展、远程教育工作者的专业发展培训以及学术期刊和其他文献的增长。所有这些都是奠定现代远程教育极其重要的发展的基础,无论是教育研究者还是决策者和管理者都应该研究这些创新成果。

As Internet communications technologies are adopted at every level of education, it becomes essential to know what happened when other technologies were introduced in the past, especially how teachers, administrators and policy makers responded. In American distance education, among key innovations of the past half-century, the most important include: in the pedagogical domain, the invention at the University of Wisconsin of the course team as part of a systems approach to teaching, and the development of interactive online teaching at Pennsylvania State University in the early 1990's; in the theoretical domain, the conceptualization of distance education as a pedagogical phenomenon, defined as transactional distance; in the organizational domain, the strengthening of distance education in established dualmode institutions, development of inter-institutional cooperation and consortia, emergence of independent,usually for-profit single mode institutions, and the recent conceptualization of virtual, institution-free systems. The foundation for an accelerating body of empirical research was the birth of theory in the 1970's, also supporting professional training of distance educators and a growing number of scholarly journals and other literature. These were all profoundly important developments in the foundation of the modern field, and should be studied not only by educational researchers, but also by policy makers and administrators.