EXAMINING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF DISTANCE EDUCATION: RESULTS FROM MULTI-LEVEL MODELLING

The meteoric rise of information technology as a means of providing educational opportunities has resulted in a transformation of educational institutions such that distance education (DE) has moved from the periphery to the mainstream (Merisotis & Phipps, 1999; Abrami et al., 2006). A review of the history of DE illustrates this transformation. Educational institutions first offered courses and programmes by correspondence as early as the 1800s, with the creation of the Chautauqua Correspondence College and by the 1950s 60 American universities had departments of correspondence courses (Moore, 2003). As the technology has changed new forms of DE evolved. While DE was text based in its early stages, radio and television created new opportunities for DE, which included the formation of public broadcasting (Moore, 2003). The intention of this “movement in the United States was to economize on teaching resources and subject matter expertise by distributing live lectures ” (Bernard et al., 2004). This eventually gave way to tele-learning, and on-line learning which can include both the delivery of content and access to University materials. Concomitant to the formation of University departments responsible for the delivery of DE were the creation of Universities with entire programmes on-line (Moore, 2003), with a commitment from governments to the development and implementation of on-line learning (Council of Ministers o