Review of Face to Face with Distance Education

Citation

Lippiatt, D. (1998), "Review of Face to Face with Distance Education", Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 6 No. 3, pp. 180-181. https://doi.org/10.1108/qae.1998.6.3.180.1

There is irony in the title: Face to Face with Distance Education, and there’s irony in the fact that for just £5 you can buy Gordon Burt’s most valuable book containing soundly‐supported discussion of many principal questions facing those concerned with the evolution of education and its methods. If distance education methods are to be of use in expanding provision and reducing costs, without harming educational quality, then what kind of trade‐off should be made with face‐to‐face contact, and how will we find the evidence on which to base our decisions? Burt recognises that these are not easy questions to answer, and the three parts of his book reflect this. Part I is a report on his investigations into tutorials and other teaching components at the UK Open University; its value does not just lie in the extensive data on teaching components, but more particularly in its demonstration of the kinds of inferences that might be made, and the kinds of questions that might be framed when investigating, for example, the impact of tutorials on assessment performance, or on broader educational goals. The final section of Part I underlines Burt’s view that “there is too much easy interpretation of data about”, and that while descriptive statistics can provide useful insights, proper inference demands more complex answers. “Because interpretation is embedded in a looser system of knowledge and values, and because different people have different systems of knowledge and different values, people will disagree about the interpretation of the statistical findings.”

Many other books might have left things at that point, but what is so pleasing about Part II, “A Literature Review”, is that it goes on to open up the discussion, addressing a series of 12 questions including “what is distance education?”; “is traditional classroom education good education?”; “can modern technologies substitute for face‐to‐face contact?”, and “what academic disciplines should be used to address these questions?”. Particularly if you are coming face‐to‐face with distance education for the first time, then I cannot imagine a more adequate, introductory discussion of these questions, nor a better source of reference to the literature in the field. Nevertheless, towards the end of this section Burt includes a critical postscript, indicating the bias to his own “cultural address”.

Part III: “The Evidence: Does It Make An Impact?” is a case study of the “impact” of Gordon Burt’s reports on his colleagues at the UK Open University. Who is to assess that and by what means? “In general, the comments note three broad characteristics of the reports: their usefulness, their clarity and the academic standard of argumentation.” “To conclude, the interpretation of the evidence about distance education requires: using the methods of statistical inference on strong data; applying looser forms of reasoning on weak data ‐ and making this reasoning explicit; and finally making due allowance for social bias.”

Whether we can afford to maintain the bias which distinguishes face‐to‐face and distance education is not an ironic question, and I hope that the arguments presented in Gordon Burt’s book might go some way to dispel it.