 I'm Steve Wheeler and I'm here at the Technical University of Budapest in Hungary to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the European Distance and e-learning network. Now many people have contributed to the success of Eden over the years and I'd like to mention to you three men in particular. When I was in Turkey about 20 years ago I was at a conference and I met three men, Sir John Daniel, Michael Moore and Tony Bates, three of the founding fathers of modern distance education. We caught up with them at this conference and I interviewed them. Here is the story, enjoy. Gentlemen thank you all for coming in today to spend time talking to us about distance education. You've all had a long illustrious career in distance education and I'd like to take you back to the start of your careers and ask you what were your individual visions for distance education and has distance education panned out as you expected? Have there been any surprises along the way? We'll start with Tony. Well I didn't have a vision when I came to the university I was looking for a job as a researcher so what happened was it turned out to be that the university provided a philosophy and an approach that I was really comfortable with particularly the ability to give access to people who weren't able to get access at that time through a very selective higher education system. What's changed since then is that most countries have opened up their higher education systems considerably so in a sense that the original need of the university has changed a great deal so the change has come about because of widening access through government policy making more university, conventional university places available and what's happened now is that many of the things that I was doing in the open university have now become almost standard practice within conventional universities such as online learning, use of technology for teaching and so on so that's the way it's changed for me. So John the same question how has distance education panned out for you? Well I first came across it I was doing some part-time studies in educational technology and had to do an internship and this was when everyone was talking about the open university back in 1971 I was working at the University of Montreal at the time anyway I did an internship at the Institute of Educational Technology and it just blew me away. The scale, the enormous enthusiasm of these students the what seemed very very strong dedication of not just the fatality but all the people in the university too moving the students along and it was just a complete new experience. I decided you know this is what I want to spend my life doing it just as TSA said I was no longer at ease in the old dispensation so I went back to Montreal and was lucky enough to get a job very quickly at the tele-university which is Quebec's open university. What has been I suppose a complete surprise is the way that it has been adopted generally because in the early days someone said the main effect of the opening of the open university is to mean to close all the other universities even more fully. A lot of people predicted back at that time that this was going to make all universities change the creation of the OU but actually it didn't it almost sort of slowed that change down and I suppose it was later technology and then pressure from governments that created the situation that we have now. So a bit like Tony I mean I didn't come in there with a vision I was just so impressed by the reality of a large open university doing things at scale with media I thought you know I'm going to I want to be in this part of it and I don't really care what happens in the other part provided I can go in this part of it. And Michael you started at that very early stage in distance education it must have been very primitive technologically in them days but what was your vision then? I was a school teacher at the beginning of my career. The kind of class I taught had two sections in those days they called it the grammar school and the others. My heart I found always went to the others the kids who came from the less deprived. This is now looking back I wouldn't have been able to say this back then but I then went for seven years into Africa and I was introduced to radio in Africa and again it was the people who could not have opportunity that I found that as I learned about radio it was possible to get learning opportunities out to people who were otherwise otherwise deprived and it was all I never I my career became an academic career but after I left university I never expected to go back into university education but it was the opportunity it was the way of getting out to the people who were otherwise not able to to be in education. I had a stroke of luck and was invited to go to the US and my mentor there his book was called learning at the back door and that again kind of all sums it up you know the the method we in distance education in those days were on the outside we were outside the mainstream we weren't very highly regarded and we were attending to the people who were also wanted to learn outside outside the mainstream so that was when you use the word vision that was always my personal kind of motivation vision attachment so I'm getting the impression from Oliver that it's about making education more accessible that that's the key element of what distance education has been all about these past few years now I'm seeing a lot of digital technologies emerging we're having we've even got them in our pockets computers in our pockets now digital technology seems to be ubiquitous is distance education still a term that is useful our good friend first Michael asking me first I do rather regret the confusion the conceptual confusion that I think we know labor under I think the the colleagues sitting here we do really speak the same language it's a pleasure for me to come to an international conference and run into John Daniels and Tony Bates because we start off with a common vocabulary a common worldview we can we can accommodate terms like e-learning and all the rest that comes along because we've got our basic conceptual structure I think is pretty solid with solid historical roots I worry a little bit about the about the generation following us in this huge you know tsunami is an overused term but essentially this is a tsunami of change of everybody coming into the field and they need help I think in sorting out you know the the the dimensions of the field and one of my regrets in a way I'm encouraged to see the the proliferation of journals and of teaching but I also worry about how little teaching there is and as far as the journals are concerned you know it is an awful mixture of quality in the literature so so I am concerned about the about the confusion of terminologies hmm so John same question really is distance education now an optimistic or is it the phrase we should still continue to use to describe it I think it's a useful term for the professional community a professional community has to identify with some word this may not be the best one and because as was pointed out this was a low prestige operation until quite recently everyone who went into it invented new terms it was distributed learning it was this it was that and you know virtual has now almost seemed to be dropped out you know it was virtual this so I think for the professional community it's good to have a word that we all know if it's the journal with distance in it that's probably for us but I think for the general public use what it takes you know if they switch on to online learning then fine use that but educational technology has always been very bad for trying to constantly change the vocabulary in order to give the impression that my little new my little thing is is so new that it has to have a new word so I'm bit relaxed about how you use the term distance okay Tony what's in a name I think it's a useful term I think it does differentiate those students who I think it's more useful for differentiating students and then teaching what kind of students you get into that who are distant students they tend to be very different from those that go on campus although even that's breaking down a bit now but I think it is a useful term I agree there's lots of confusion we're still trying to do a survey in Canada and we're arguing about whether it should be called a survey of distance education or a survey of online learning because online learning can be both distant and something else so it is very important that whenever somebody writes a paper or is discussing or arguing in this field that they make very clear what they're talking about and don't confuse the the terminology it may sound pedantic but it's not it's really important so we're agreed then that distance education as a term it still has some kind of credence to it some some kind of resonance to it but what about the theory behind distance education is it any different really from standard educational theory does is there a need to have distance education theory as separate or as different from standard educational theory I'll come to you first Tony I have problems we thinking of distance education as a separate theoretical field I think it's a subfield of general educational theory I think it's been overblown in the past I think there are things that are different about students who are studying at a different distance you have to be aware of that but it's you know you you could also say that about adult education and so on and I think you know 99% of general educational theory will apply to distance and there's just a one tiny one percent that that doesn't okay would you agree to John yeah and I come out actually through the the lens of quality I think the distance education perhaps because of its earlier low prestige tried to say that everything theory quality assurance had to be different in my view is that if it's quality education is quality education no matter what it is sure distance ed requires you to look at some different things and check that they're being done properly but I'm a strong believer that if quality is quality and you can achieve it as well or better from through distance than you can in other ways and the theory I think it's been very helpful to make people in distance education think about what they're doing but as Tony says you know that it's it they're really thinking about the general theory of education which most academics don't at all because they're more interested in physics or engineering and Michael well I I really began thinking about distance education seriously at first in the United States in the very early 1970s and when I I went as a student of education and in the literature of education there was nothing about the kind of education that I had personally experienced in the Africa experience I referred to I mean I knew that there were people learning at a distance through radio television and other simple technology but the educational literature defined it defined education as a process that occurred between a teacher and learning in a classroom so there was absolutely no theory so I mine is a slightly different perspective from my friends because perhaps my own personal story I felt that there was need to run up a flag and make some kind of statement about what it was that I knew some people were doing overlooked and disregarded and getting something into the literature about the kind of teaching and learning where teachers and learners were not in the classroom and the more you look at it or the more I looked at it the more it seemed that there was more something like a continuum in the behaviors of teachers and the characteristics of learners from those at one extreme where there was shall we say an extreme distance between the two and and those where there were less when you look at the extremes there are characteristics of people who respond to distance teaching methods somewhat differently than others and there are techniques of teaching somewhat different than others and I think they deserve some kind of classification categorization organization specification publication and so you know I've always been a little stronger on the virtue of of developing a theory of our own field and it does contribute to the research I mean when students are coming you know a student comes to begin a doctor research program I think having the title distance education helps because you tell them what literature to go and start to look for and then they'll find aspects that that lend themselves to research so I think there's a research value in in having ones not not one's own definition as the colleagues say it's all part of the whole but I'm a little more sympathetic perhaps in Tony is to the theory Michael Moore Sir John Daniel Tony Bates thank you all very much indeed for spending time with us today during this interview thank you