Fifth Generation Dis Tance Education

FIFTH GENERATION DIS TANCE EDUCATION

Professor Jim Taylor
Deputy Vice-Chancellor
(Global Learning Services)
The University of Southern Queensland
Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia 4350
E-mail: taylorj@usq.edu.au
Introduction
Over the past twenty years, the transformation of a relatively simple computer
network used by a few researchers into a global Internet, involving hundreds
ofmillions of people and generating a new economic order, took government,
business and education, by surprise. Given the well-established tendency for
people to underestimate the extent and rate of technological change, it seems
reasonable to suggest that the extent to which the Internet created economic
and social upheaval in the past ten years is likely to pale into insignificance by
comparisonwith the changes occurring in the next decade. The next few
years will encompass the significant impact of broadband, wireless, smart
cars, smart fridges, streaming media, voice recognition and the inevitable
growth of new Internet applications. In the present context, change is the only
constant!
How might institutions of higher education respond to such a dynamic external
environment? Theneed for institutions to not only do things differently, but to
do different things was encapsulated by Dolence and Norris (1995), who
argued that to survive the transition from the Industrial to the Information Age
organisations would need to change from rigid, formula driven entities to
organisations that were “fast, flexible and fluid”- adjectives not typically used
to describe the salientfeatures of universities! Given the predilection of
educational institutions in general, and universities in particular, to either wait
and see and do nothing for the moment, or to add something new to an
already overcrowded program of activities, it could well be that institutions of
higher education could become a threatened species. This is a somewhat
surprising consideration, sinceuniversities are overflowing with clever,
innovative students and staff, yet as organizations, universities are often
considered to be primarily moribund.
The traditional inertia of longestablished institutions is reflected in the well-known cliché, “Trying to change
a university is like trying to move a graveyard – it is extremely complex, and
you don’t get much internal support!”
If theInternet is changing everything, will the Internet also have the power to
change universities? Maybe, maybe not. Organizations don’t change
automatically.
Organizational development requires proactive human
intervention. It sometimes benefits from the implementation of explicit change
management strategies.

As Katz and Oblinger (2000) highlighted when reviewing the potential impact
ofe-business on higher education, “The dominant issues facing the leaders of
today’s colleges and universities are what aspects to change and how fast
can they be changed?” (p.xvi). Further, as Schlender (2000) recently pointed
out, the Internet has already “ …reached a stage that isn’t so much about
vis ion and proprietary innovation as about execution and competition “ (p. 90).
This emphasis onexecution and competition is a particular challenge to the
typically slowly evolving institutions of higher education, which need to find the
means to “e-volve” rather more rapidly in the Internet Age. Indeed, many
universities are still struggling to come to terms with the imminent challenges
posed by competition for online students through the emergence of the global
lifelong learning economy.Universities with a significant role in distance
education, however, are different: they have always been, and will always be,
in the vanguard of innovation and institutional change.
Fifth Generation Distance Education
For many years, universities with a significant commitment to distance and
open education institutions have been at the forefront of adopting new
technologies to increase...