OZ 2009/4

134 ORGANIZACIJA ZNANJA 2009, LETN. 14, ZV. 4 dual-mode universities. These are institutions that teach both on campus and at a distance. Today that includes most universities, because very few universities have not attempted to introduce some form of distance teaching – with greater or lesser success. Once I have set the stage I shall look at the provision of library services from both the students’ and the faculty’s perspectives, bearing in mind the distinction between open universities and dual-mode universities that I have just made. DISTANCE EDUCATION: THE ESSENTIALS The term distance education applies to forms of education where a student follows a course of study leading to a qualification but has little or no face-to-face contact with the teachers in the institution offering the course. This means that various forms of communications technology have to be used to bridge the gap between the institution and the student. The history of distance learning is the history of the evolution of the technologies that today offer a wide range of communications options for students and institutions. We should see the evolution of technology as a cumulative process. Each new communications technology adds to the richness of the environment rather than replacing previous developments, just as aeroplanes have not put an end to trains and cars have not eliminated bicycles or walking as ways of getting around. The earliest form of distance education was by correspondence. I like to trace that back to St. Paul’s epistles to the young churches of the 1 st century, but correspondence education really took off in the 19 th century when countries began to introduce universal postal services. Since then we have had a succession of technologies: radio, film, television, computers, DVDs, the Internet, and all the social communications media like FaceBook and YouTube that so engage people today. But before we focus on particular technologies let us reflect on the essential nature of technology. The advantage of using technology is that it enables us to extend our reach and to do things better and more cheaply. In the 18 th century the economist Adam Smith, in his famous book The Wealth of Nations, described how making pins in factories, rather than by hand, allowed much larger volumes of pins of consistent quality to be produced at a fraction of the cost of having individual artisans make them by hand. Adam Smith identified the four essential principles of technology that drove the industrial revolution of the 18 th and 19 th centuries and continue to define how most of us work today. Those principles are division of labour, specialisation, economies of scale, and the use of machines and communications media. TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION The question is, can technology have the same impact on education that it has had on the manufacturing of products and the offering of other services. In my work in intergovernmental organisations I have met many ministers of education. They tell me that the essential challenge they face is to pursue three goals simultaneously. They want to widen access so that education and training can be available to all citizens that aspire to it. Second, that education must be of good quality. Third, the cost must be as low as possible so more people can take advantage of it. So governments seek three outcomes from their education systems: • Access: to be as wide as possible • Quality: to be as high as possible • Cost: to be as low as possible Expressing this as a triangle of vectors makes the challenge clear. With traditional methods of face-to-face teaching this is an iron triangle. You want to stretch the triangle like this to give greater access, higher quality and lower costs. But you can’t! Try extending access by packing more students into each classroom and you will be accused of damaging quality. Try improving quality with better learning resources and the cost will go up. Try cutting costs and you will endanger both access and quality. This iron triangle has hindered the expansion of education throughout history. It has created in the public mind – and probably in your own thinking – an insidious link between quality and exclusivity. This link still drives the admission policies of many universities, which define their quality by the people they exclude. THE TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION The good news is that technology can transform the iron triangle into a flexible triangle. By using technology you can achieve wider access, higher quality and lower cost all at the same time. This is a revolution – it has never happened before. This is what educational technology can achieve if used properly. This is why more and more countries, especially in the developing world, are creating distance education systems to operate at scale.