14.7 A LOOK TO THE FUTURE

14.7.1 Electronic Networks and Future Education and Training

The development of telecommunications and digital data transmission is revolutionizing the way business is performed. People are working and communicating ever more by means of computer-based workstations that support databases, electronic mail, and a host of other information tools.

As electronic communication networks become more ubiquitous, easier to use, and more powerful, the trend towards electronic, networked business communications will grow rapidly. As a result, people will spend an increasing proportion of their time at workstations and proportionately less at live meetings (Vallee, 1982; Zuboff, 1988).

This trend is also liable to spread to meetings with educational or human resource-development aims. The U.S. telephone company AT&T, for example, has already moved towards the massive use of teleconferencing in place of conventional classroom-based courses for most of its sales and management training needs. The major part of sales and management training in AT&T is now delivered by this method (in 1989, over 69,000 employees participated at least once in some form of teletraining), and results overall are considered to be quite satisfactory (Chute, 1990).

Of course, the rapid expansion in use of electronic teletraining is being driven, as always, not so much by effectiveness, but rather by economic factors. AT&T has reported an overall reduction of over 50% in the costs per student hour of training. This cost saving comes almost entirely from savings in travel and subsistence costs when employees participate in centrally organized "place-based" courses, as well as from reduced loss of productivity due to a reduction in the time that employees are away from their jobs (Chute, 1988, 1990).

14.7.2 New Forms of Education and Training

There are also other pressures, both organizational and philosophical, that are increasing the amount of autonomy, self-directedness, and responsibility that learners have in respect of their own education and development. From the philosophical side, there is the viewpoint that people should have more control over what they learn and how they learn it. These viewpoints are embodied in the principles of modern adult education, or andragogy. They also reflect earlier humanist traditions. They are further strengthened by the modem concepts of continuing or "permanent education," which spring from the realization that change in society, and particularly in the workplace, is now so fast that everyone is of necessity involved in a process of lifelong learning.

This need for updating may in some respects be very specific and personal for each individual. Hence the growing popularity of the "open learning" concept as a modular approach to education that can take anyone from wherever they are at present in a given domain to wherever they need or want to be, relatively independently of the needs or wants of other people (Paine, 1988).

Given the increasingly competitive nature of business in the international marketplace and the critical importance that access to and use of up-to-date information and methods play in a company's competitiveness, it is not surprising that the concept of human resources development as "self-development" is taking root. This concept sees keeping up-to-date and employable as the responsibility of every employee. The employer's responsibility is to make this possible, by helping to identify the needs of the individual and by facilitating access to the resources necessary to satisfy those needs. Doing so will call less frequently for lengthy courses organized either within the company or by outside providers, but will instead make much more use of networking, access to external databases and electronic libraries, small specialist group teletraining, and self-instruction in all its forms (Enrich, 1990).

As the trends outlined above expand through the business community, similar trends will be seen in relation to adult education, especially in the growing use of distance education in formal educational institutions. To some extent, similar economic factors may lead to a greater use of distance education and electronic networking as the prime delivery media for certain courses. More ubiquitous, however, will be the use of electronic communication media as support to conventional courses. This will be brought about partly by organizational and pedagogical benefits that such systems can offer conventional courses and partly because it will be seen to be the duty of education to use such systems in order to prepare its graduates for the realities of a workplace where they will be obliged to use them.

This last point really brings home the importance of examining now how to get high-quality educational experiences and effective learning from future networked communication systems. The particular focus should be on the effective implementation of group discussion or "conversational" methodologies on electronic telecommunications networks. This focus is particularly important, as we know much less about bow to converse effectively on electronic networks than we do about electronic self-instruction. There is a long history and fairly developed technology of the design, development, and delivery-at-a-distance of self-study materials. There is much less known about the running of effective group discussion sessions at a distance.

Such teaching methods as seminars or case studies are traditionally implemented in small or medium-sized groups, led by skilled and experienced "facilitators." Much of the success of these teaching methods is ascribed to the facilitators and the skill with which they focus discussion; guide the approaches adopted by the participants; use natural group dynamics to stimulate interest, participation, and deep involvement; pull together what has been learned in the final debriefing discussion; and so on. Can such participatory discussion methods be effectively orchestrated at a distance? How might this be done?

14.7.3 Two Paradigms Compared

In order to answer these questions, let us review a little theory and also some of the research already available on this topic. It may help to compare and contrast two alternative paradigms, or perhaps philosophies, which are current in education: the "instructional" and the "conversational" paradigms. These are summarized in Table 14-1.

The instructional paradigm is the one that has driven much (though by no means all) of the research and development of the past 30 years that has been performed under the label of educational (or instructional) technology. The conversational paradigm may be seen as the basis of much of the work done on small-group study, group dynamics, experiential learning, and so on.

In relation to distance teaching specifically, one may notice at the bottom of Table 14-1 that the more conventional "study module" or typical correspondence model may serve as a good example of the instructional paradigm. Synchronous teleconferencing, both audio and video based, is on the other hand a good example of the conversational paradigm in action. CMC, however, is seen as being able to support both conversational and instructional procedures. For example, joint cooperation on the analysis and development of a hypertext document satisfies all the basic requirements of a conversation between the participants. The study of an on-line version of a maintenance manual for an airplane in order to learn a particular set of troubleshooting procedures satisfies the requirements of instruction. This versatility of CMC systems and their potential integration with on-line information sources such as hypertext makes them particularly interesting systems to study with a view to their rational adoption in education and training (Horn, 1989; Romiszowski, 1990).

14.7.4 Future Trends

The future of computer conferencing is undoubtedly one of great mergers: with synchronous media, with multimedia, and with the whole panoply of desktop facilities. Some would say, the sooner the better! While this merger is already happening at the leading edge with integrated text, sound, and graphics being exchanged on higher-speed modems, the growth area for CMC lies with the resources available over the Internet. The role of the on-line teacher will increasingly be that of guide to these resources. It will be interesting to see what needs computer conferencing fulfills with the advent of cheap audio and visual connections. If messages remain asynchronous (like telephone-answering machines), will text be relegated to formal papers and documents? Will the stimulation of voice and visual communication overcome learners' inertia and be more compelling to respond to than text?

Another trend predicted to continue is international on-line connections, for example, collaborations among students studying similar courses at different institutions. School children carrying out multicultural investigations are a powerful and inexpensive resource for extending the classroom walls.

It would be naive to think that communication will automatically lead to greater knowledge, increased respect for individual and cultural differences, and a new appreciation of similarities. But a more peaceful world will not evolve without communication. The technology of CMC does not lead directly to the answers, but the dialogue it supports is a significant way for people to begin to embrace the common questions (Wells, 1993, p. 85).

As "pure" computer conferencing falls increasingly towards the trailing edge of technology, it will continue to find specialist uses in education and training. Old computer equipment will be perfectly adequate for textual communication, and could be used with those who currently cannot afford access. By comparison with multimedia conferencing, computer conferencing will be an inexpensive technology, which will continue to grow at the grass-roots level.

In the short term, conferencing systems with improved interfaces will find increasing markets, and learners will increasingly have to adapt to the interactive and collaborative paradigm they represent. However, this technology-led growth will eventually meet a new generation of users reared with the computer and schooled in international communication, and then tele-learning will become the norm rather than the exception.