Compromising Composition: Articulating Quality and Practice in Distance Education Policy.

Overview & Synopsis

Policies exist in every aspect of people's lives from the landlord's policy on pets to the government's policy on literacy. As such, policy becomes the ideal place to begin to examine the articulation of distance education because policy inevitably marks the site where different kinds of political discourses and social practices intersect. By examining the rhetoric of distance education policy, this paper traces the questions of power that lie behind the rules and norms of distance learning within higher education. Noting that in the 1980s public funding for higher education began to decrease, the paper states that shifting notions of the role of higher education form the contextual stage for the re-entry of distance education. With the increasing use of computer technology, distance education emerges in the 1990s as the means for improving access to higher education while containing the cost. The paper cites Indiana's creation of a policy for delivering degree programs through distance education technology; the policy's first purpose is to "ensure that distance learners have access to the same quality of instruction available on campus," while another purpose is to "use taxpayer dollars efficiently." The paper finds that the rhetoric of the policy translated institutions and faculty into producers, students into consumers and markets, and higher education into an instructional marketplace. It also states that research literature suggests that the use of computer technology in composition increases rather than reduces the interaction between students and between students and faculty. It concludes that if educators want to play a role in how they are constructed as subjects within distance education, they will need to begin with policy. Contains 24 references. (NKA)