The rapid growth in online higher education, in terms of course offerings and student enrollment, has often been celebrated on the grounds that moving education online is an innovative way to increase the accessibility of university education. This article problematizes a range of assumptions that underpin those claims. To do so, two concepts are deployed: -authentic accessibility‖ and -programmatic definition‖, each of which encourages us to examine actual practice rather than aspirations. This article further deconstructs the commonly held perceptions of online education by presenting conflicting discourses about the purposes of distance education, the characteristics of distance students, and the technologies that have mediated distance education throughout its historical development. The findings highlight the increasing multiplicity of online education practices and realities, and the limitations of typical conceptualizations of those phenomena, which have historically conceptualized distance education as a single domain. The article calls for a more sophisticated approach to considering the quality of online higher education, a value judgement which continuously needs to be understood and discussed in relation to the complex and multi-dimensional issues of increasing the accessibility of university education.
While much is discussed of the challenges that educators and their institutions have been facing during COVID-19, there is little reported about how students have been coping with the challenges. In this short piece, we present preliminary data on university students' perceptions of online learning and teaching during the pandemic. Our findings from a student course satisfaction survey, conducted in two universities during the 2020 summer term (June through August), reveal that students have been more resilient than is often assumed. In light of these findings as well as the reflections of authors in a previous issue of Distance Education, we will discuss some important implications for distance education scholarship.
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In this article, we aim to provide a developmental approach to understanding adult students' learning experiences of undertaking university-level study to completion at an open university, by employing a notion of "becoming". With the rapid growth of a number of online course offerings, there are an increasing number of adult learners entering or returning to universities. Despite the growing number of non-traditional adult students in online higher education, little is known about the dynamic processes of adult distance learning, through which adult students struggle to develop their learning ability, to balance their life and study, and to become self-regulated learnersultimately competent selves and lifelong learners. Therefore, this article describes ten adult students' learning experiences from their enrolment in a distance programme to their completion of the programme many years later and deconstructs common assumptions of adult distance learners: namely, that they are a homogenous group with intrinsic and static characteristics that spring from their adultness or matureness.
A constructivist learning paradigm emphasises authenticity as a required condition for learning. However, the design of an online learning environment is ultimately separate from learners' real-life environments, it is inevitably challenging to make online learning authentic. In this article, the author aims to propose an alternative way of conceptualizing online learning and its boundaries, based on a double-layered Community of Practice model as a means to facilitate authentically constructivist online learning. The model conceptualizes online learning as interlinked processes of participation and socialization in multiple communities across online-and offline-''layers'' of learners' lives. The model guides online course designers in expanding the perceived boundaries of the course environments they design to include learners' offline learning contexts. Instead of having an exclusive focus on providing learners with constructivist learning opportunities within a non-authentic course environment, the model suggests helping learners to engage in more personalized social learning activities situated in their everyday lives. The paper presents data from a series of case studies drawn from the author's work that has examined students' learning experiences in different kinds of online courses, unpacking and answering the central question of what authentically constructivist online learning looks like in each case. With a more holistic conceptualization of online learning, which recognizes and supports online learners' simultaneous presence across internal and external communities, instructional designers may be able to facilitate learners' more authentically constructivist learning experiences.
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