English
Is International Distance Learning Compatible with the Social Sciences?
Katherine Kuhns Institute for International Studies
Equal access to education worldwide is going to play an even greater role in the 21st century than in centuries past. As the population in many developing countries grows younger, but resources to provide basic education do not grow in proportion, how can access to education be provided to the millions who crave it? Given the revolutionary growth in distance learning technologies in the past several years and the search for improved methods of communication, distance learning has the potential to play a strong role in the global education sphere. However, the question remains as to which is the most pedagogically sound, technologically viable, and easily adaptable distance-learning model to be used in the multitude of international educational settings. The Institute for International Studies is making a modest contribution to this knowledge base. Our Initiative on Distance Learning (IDL) seeks to establish a viable distance-learning program to teach international security courses to Russian regional universities. Our interest in this endeavor is multi-fold. First, the social sciences, in particular political science and international relations, were the disciplines hardest hit under the former communist system. Many universities are re-building and strengthening their departments of political science, and are searching for new curricula to offer to their students. Second, we focus on Russian regional universities because those are the most in need of course development, given that their budgets are no longer fully financed by the central government in Moscow. Third, we want to empower the universities to explore new technologies and methodologies without facing financial constraints on educational creativity. We were excited by the prospect of creating a distance-learning program that would support courses in the social science disciplines. Social science courses require a great deal of interaction, principally conversation, to drive the learning process and enhance critical thinking among the students. However, most distance learning programs do not require, nor provide for, real-time interaction. Therefore, the question before our group was how to create a distance-learning model that would support synchronous and a-synchronous interaction among participants, but at the same time would be technologically accessible to the Russian universities. IDL sought the advice of e-learning experts in Russia and at Stanford, the result of which is a program based on the idea of Distributed Tutored Video Instruction (DTVI). DTVI was first put forward by the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL) (formerly known as the Stanford Learning Laboratory). DTVI is a suitable model on which to build social science courses. This is because the "tutored" in DTVI supports the need for conversation in the learning process of social science curricula. It is also supported by our Russian colleagues who firmly believe that communication be at the heart of any distance learning endeavor. The lectures are first filmed at Stanford while they are being offered to Stanford students. They are then digitized and turned into CD-ROMs by our colleagues at Yaroslavl State University, Russia using SMIL technology. The only technological requirements for the Russian universities are RealPlayer and audio cards. The lectures appear in the upper right hand corner of the screen. An index, or table of contents, is located directly below so that the students can jump to any part of the lecture that they would like to repeat. To the left of the video portion and index appears a white board, on which is displayed an outline of the lecture, synchronized to correspond to the speaker's presentation. We also provide buttons on the CD so that the students can access a pdf format of the outline for note-taking purposes. In our DTVI model, the 'tutored' function is carried out by the local Russian instructors at each of our seven partner university. The students have to watch the assigned lectures and complete the readings for those lectures prior to meeting with the local instructor once a week for an in-class discussion. This enables the instructors, who know the students and their abilities, to assess their participation in the course, address any questions the students might have, and to engage the students in an active discussion of the issues presented in the lectures. This is the crucial 'interactive' mechanism - providing the students with direct feedback on their understanding of the issues and trying to draw them out in their attempts to formulate their own opinions of the issues and to defend those opinions objectively. In addition, the students must submit weekly written policy papers to Stanford teaching assistants using our a-synchronous bulletin board forum. This allows for further communication between the Russian students and Stanford proper. The teaching assistants are concerned with how well the students are learning to formulate and express objective arguments - essentially helping them learn how to write critically. And lastly, we conduct monthly synchronous, on-line chat sessions between the Russian students and the Stanford professors so that the students have a chance to address questions directly. To date, we have offered three courses to seven Russian universities; next year we plan to expand to ten universities and four courses. The feedback so far is very encouraging, both from the students and the instructors. To conduct a more formal study, we are collaborating once again with SCIL. The focus of the study will be how well the students develop their critical thinking skills in this distance-learning model given the true distance of the educational setting, and whether we have effectively created a model that allows for sufficient interaction between participants given the rigors of the social sciences. We are also interested in learning whether our program could provide a future model for other such courses to be potentially offered in other countries. For more information, please visit our website - http://idl.Stanford.edu