When
Distance Education Meets Foshay's Curriculum Matrix
Introduction
As
distance education is gaining immense popularity and
attention in the arena of higher education, there is
an increased debate on its effectiveness and efficiency.
Educators and researchers are investigating whether
distance education can provide the same quality of education
as courses taught in traditional modes. Due to different
criteria applied, these comparative studies of distance
and traditional methods of education yield mixed results.
A debate continues between the advocates and skeptics
of distance education. Any educational institution wanting
to initiate a distance education program suffers from
lack of a comprehensive standard to evaluate the educational
quality produced by distance education.
However,
there exists a solution to this problem - Foshay’s
curriculum matrix. If placed in Foshay’s curriculum
matrix, distance education reveals its strengths and
weaknesses. Although Foshay’s curriculum matrix was
initially created as an action plan for curriculum development
and design, it can also serve as standard to evaluate
any educational program.
Foshay’s Curriculum Matrix
Based
on the work of Nagel and Kuhn, Foshay systematically
theorized the development and design of curriculum field.
Foshay proposed that curriculum field has three dimensions:
purpose, substance, and practice. In the following sections,
these three dimensions, will be elaborated respectively.
Meanwhile, the applications of these three in designing
and evaluating distance education programs will be discussed.
Purpose
The
first dimension of the matrix, purpose, or aim, is usually
referred to as general purpose of education is to bring
one’s humanness to reality. There are six aspects
identified: the intellectual, the emotional, the social,
the physical, the aesthetic, and the transcendent or
spiritual aspects (Foshay, 2000). The first dimension
in the purpose of schooling is the intellectual, which
involves many human mental activities, such as memory,
reasoning, creativity, and imaginativeness. Most of
what we do in schools is intended to develop the intellect.
The second is the emotional, which we know much less
about than we do the intellectual. The purpose of it
is to develop students' emotional maturity by encouraging
students to be aware of their emotions, discover the
roots of their emotions, and control those that are
destructive and exploit those that are constructive.
The third dimension is the social. All human beings
are social. Isolation leads insanity. The development
of social skills and attitudes are necessary for a successful
life in the human society. The physical, the fourth
dimension, deals with self-realization and physical
self, including body language, physical expressiveness,
the mind-body linkage, and others. This dimension has
a significant influence on self-concept and self-esteem.
The fifth, the aesthetic nature of human beings, is
a realization that the form, content, and style of something
fits one another exceptionally well, or do not. It involves
aesthetic judgment. The sixth and most ignored in schools
is the transcendent or spiritual. The transcendent experience
is a dramatic experience that is a sudden awareness
of one’s self as a part of a vastly larger whole.
While
evaluating a distance education program with these six
purposes, it is not difficult to discover its strengths
and weaknesses. In the intellectual and the physical
dimensions, many research studies indicate that the
distance students and on-campus students do not perform
differently in academic achievement tests. However,
with respects to the emotional and the social, teaching
over a distance has more difficulties reaching these
purposes because these two dimensions require intensive
communication, including verbal, non-verbal, and visual
communications, between instructor and students and
among students. But communication in distance education
is often limited and is not efficient in developing
students' emotional maturity and appropriate social
attitudes. Finally, the aesthetic and transcendent,
or spiritual, are often ignored both in traditional
courses and in distance education. But it seems more
difficult to develop these two abilities among students
over a distance.
Substance
The
second major dimension of the matrix, substance, is
usually referred to as “content". In the specifications
of this dimension of curriculum, Foshay included all
of the common school subjects. The substance of education consists of the organized school
experience (in most schools, the usual school subjects),
plus co-curriculum and the school culture. The organized
school experience often refers to the usual school subjects.
Co-curriculum includes the nonacademic, school-sponsored
activities, in which learning also takes place, such
as after-school clubs and sports. School culture, or
the “climate", such as the institution’s
customs, standards and hidden curriculum, has significant
influence over what students learn in schools.
Distance
education has a salient contribution to the substance
dimension. In some rural or remote areas, because of
the lack of qualified faculties and resources, many
subject matters are not available to students. With
the implementation of distance education, the students'
accessibility to different subject matters increases
dramatically. Also, distance education is often empowered
by the Internet, which is said to motivate students
to learn content in greater depth because it offers
them resources beyond their classroom, more current
than their textbook, and more knowledgeable than their
teacher (Bonk, Hay, & Fischler, 1996; CAST, 1997).
To Foshay encouraging students to explore knowledge
in deeper levels is more important than merely teaching
subject matters. He believed, "If knowledge stops
with factual information and skills, school subjects
have little to do with future successful living"
(Foshay, 2000).
Concerning
the co-curricular activities and the school culture,
administrators and instructors cannot do much with them
in distance education mode. While taking courses, distance
students are scattered around various locations and
exposed to various stimuli, over which the administrators
and the instructors have little or no influence. This
is one of the pitfalls of distance education.
Practice
Practice,
the third dimension of the matrix, is the same everywhere
although certain details may be ignored or omitted.
There are nine specifics of school practice, which
may be stated as a question: who encounters what, why,
how, when, in what circumstance, under what governance,
at what cost, and according to what scheme of evaluation
(Foshay, 2000).
Probably
one of the most significant strengths of distance education
resides in its practice. In regard to the questions
of "when, how and in what circumstance" distance
education can take place at any time at any places.
This flexibility allows people with obligations from
work and family to have an opportunity to update the
skills and knowledge required by their jobs. This is
the major reason that distance education gains immense
popularity. In regard to who is the learner, the majority
of distance learners are adults with extremely diverse
educational experience. The adult students usually have
unique needs, motivations, goals, and self-concepts
(Ehrman, 1990). Foshay particularly emphasized the characteristics
of the students. Foshay believed who the student is
significantly influences the substance the teacher provides
the student and the purposes the teacher tries to emphasize
with the students. In light of this,
while preparing course
materials for these adults, the instructor should be
aware of these unique characteristics of distance learners.
Besides
learner characteristics, cost and evaluation are two
important specifics in Foshay’s curriculum matrix.
Reducing cost is a strong motive that drives many educational
institutions to offer distance education program. It
is said that utilizing distance education can save considerable
budgets on the infrastructure of brick-and-mortar facilities,
such as parking lots, classrooms and restrooms. However,
at the same time, distance education requires a new
infrastructure of administration systems and communication
technologies to function. This cost should not be overlooked.
As to the evaluation of student learning in distance
education, it has been a controversial issue. While
students and instructor are separated, standardized
tests are not practical and sometimes difficult to administered.
To alleviate this problem, alternative approaches for
distance education are suggested, such as authentic
assessment and portfolio assessment.
Conclusion
Distance
education is a relatively new area in the arena of education.
To date, any instructors or educators who attempt to
design courses for distance education suffer the lack
of solid guidelines. Foshay’s matrix, a three-dimensional
model of curriculum, provides a unique and powerful
way to examine and critique curriculum concerns in distance
education. It also offers a comprehensive standard and
guideline for developing and designing courses taught
over a distance. When using Foshay’s curriculum matrix,
a distance instructor can easily assess the strengths
and weaknesses of distance education. This also allows
the instructor to foster the strengths and eliminate
the weaknesses to improve his or her courses.
Reference
Bonk, C.
J., Hay, K. E., & Fischler, R. B. (1996). Five key
resources for an electronic community of elementary
student weather forecasters. Journal of computing
in childhood education, 7(1-2), 93-118.
Center for
Applied Special Technology (CAST). (1996). The role
of online communications in schools: a national study.
Peabody, MA: Author.
Ehrman,
M. (1990). Psychologicai factors and distance education.
The American Journal of Distance Education, 4(1),
10-24.
Foshay,
A.W. (2000). The curriculum purpose, substance, practice.
New York: Teachers College.
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