 Michael Moore, thank you for coming in to speak to us today on the 25th anniversary of Eden. Now you've been given the final plenary spot to speak on. What are you going to speak about? The theme of the conference emphasizes innovation. And quite recently I wrote the editorial for The Preface for a new book on social networking and education. And as editor of the American Journal of Distance Education, I'm aware of the great amount of activity and interest in research on social networking in distance education. I'm aware, of course, as is everyone of the evolution in recent years of constructivist theory and pedagogy and connectivism. And as I thought about the conference and innovation and awareness of the current mood in the field, it came to me that some of the other views about distance education are being overlooked. If that is correct, then there is ample opportunity for innovation in these other views. So, you might ask what are the other views? Firstly, the tradition in distance education that's based on the tutorial as compared to the contemporary tradition which is based on the idea of the virtual class. The class is a group. But for most of its history, distance education was not teaching distance learners in groups. It was teaching distance learners who were individuals. So the model for a long time was the Oxford Cambridge tutorial of one tutor and one learner. I want to draw attention to that. In my own experience, well, I had a memorable experience at one of the first Cambridge conferences. There was a discussion of whether money could be saved by cutting the number of face-to-face tutorials at the British Open University. And I'd been teaching there for some years. Or to save money by not developing computer-assisted instruction. Computer-assisted instruction at that time was essentially a one-to-one, almost like a programmed instruction kind of methodology. Someone spoke at some length about the importance of the face-to-face tutorial. And when that person sat down, there was a big round of applause. I edged to the edge of my seat and stood and I said to the audience, you may have noticed that I was a little diffident about standing to say this, but I think there is research that shows different personality styles. The research shows, for example, a continuum of persons who are more impulsive in their learning style and more reflective in their learning style. The class, I said, rewards the impulsive. Online, we would say today, well, the tutorial, the programmed instruction, the computer-assisted is more rewarding of the reflective. And I think therefore we should not too easily dismiss the computer in favour of the social group, the class. And I sat down and half the audience erupted in applause, because what I think I had done was spoken on behalf of that different personality, different learning style. Now, I was aware of the psychological research on personality, which is actually on a continuum. And so my thesis now is that we are being very, very generous to those kind of learners who do well in the class, and we've forgotten the methodology that we had before of teaching learners one-on-one, reinforced by constructivist theory at the neglect of personality theory, individual differences. So that's part, I would say that's part one of two. The other is the neglect of the systems approach to teaching. What I just said refers to learners, but there's a neglect of the systems approach to teaching. We're reverting to a craft perspective whereby a teacher, a person in a classroom, just like a hundred years ago, is an expert in content, is an expert in designing course, is an expert in evaluating, is an expert in learner support, is an expert in communicating. Now, with the development of the systems approach in the 1970s, most obviously in the British Open University and other universities, we broke that down into its component parts and delivered in a system that Otto Peters famously called an industrial system, not a very kind or gentle term, but applying all the principles of industrialization, division of labor, specialization, to produce high quality, high quality I emphasize at lower average cost to more people. And we seem to be drifting away also to that. Why? Because the numbers in our field of teaching are increasingly persons coming from conventional university classrooms, they understand the craft approach to teaching and they're comfortable with it, they understand the class method of teaching, but they are not experienced in or knowledgeable of the systems approach or of the tutorial approach that we use for many years traditionally in distance education. So, and let me say, I have been as much an innovator as anyone. I was an innovator in group teaching. In the 1980s, before the browser, I was linking groups of students in different places in different countries and researching on the dynamics of learning within groups and between groups. So I'm all for the group method, but I think the pendulum has swung so far that my voice is going to call for some rethinking about independent learning and about the systems approach to teaching. Well, we look forward to hearing you tomorrow. I mean, as we're talking here, there's a very large thunderstorm going out overhead and I don't know if this is being picked up on the mics, but it gives me the kind of the idea that actually there's a big storm going on in terms of things like massification of education and MOOCs in particular is part of that storm. How do you see that in relation to what you've just called the personalized? Well, I think that it's a good question that I hope I can use to illustrate the point because the MOOC, if a massive open online course is designed and delivered by a craft teacher as compared to being designed and delivered by a systems approach, inevitably the quality of such a course cannot be what it ought to be or what it can be. And if it was delivered through a systems approach within the team of specialists will be individuals whose full-time job it is to conduct the one-on-one interaction and provide one-on-one learner support. But one person acting as content and designer and instructor, well, most MOOCs have very, very little learner-to-instructor interaction simply because the scale of the learners is so great and the resources of the teachers is so little. And this goes back to your theory many years ago of the three levels of interaction and we're now looking at peer-to-peer interaction or peer-to-content. So it's more than we are student-to-teacher interaction, aren't we, with MOOCs? I think that's what we're seeing. Exactly. With MOOCs we hear the stories of the minimal interaction that most of the students have with the instructor. Now, I have no problem with there being a master, some people do. I have no problem with there being a master on doing this because I see it as a hierarchical and hierarchical is not always a bad thing. In this case, I think it's a good thing. Having a master at the top and then specialists at each level but at the interface of the student with the system, it should be extremely personal. Every student should know the advisor or the facilitator or whatever term within the system on a personal level. Not knowing the people at the higher levels of the hierarchy but it should be a very personal experience. Unfortunately, most of the institutions about MOOCs are coming out of that same classical university department professorial system that are taking a professor and saying don't teach 20 people or even 200 people a typical lecture but teach 20,000 people. That can't be done, not with quality. It can't be done with quality. A system can do it. A system can teach with quality and with good cause to large numbers. One final question, Michael. You've been in the business now, as we say, for quite some time and you obviously have a long memory of some of the events maybe back in the 70s when distance education, in its kind of industrialized version, the Open University of the UK and UNISO and so on, were starting to be founded in the late 60s, early 70s. Could you give me your view on what you think the watershed moments were that bring us to the point we are now? I have two years to my 80th birthday. I have been around longer than anybody else around here. Even some of the other distinguished people that you'll speak to. I wrote my first paper about distance education published in 1972. It's in the Journal of Higher Education in the United States. Go and look it up. It's there in 1972. I've lived through this amazing evolution. In fact, I wrote a little note on my pad when I listened to the keynotes this morning. I said declare victory and retire. Because the world, we wanted the world to change and the world has changed. And criticisms, what I said just now was I hope a constructive criticism. I see areas that we could be innovating that perhaps we are not looking at and I hope some of the young people, researchers will go look there for more research questions. So the field, we've been successful beyond our imagination. Technology, of course, has helped our success. We could not have imagined. But the turning points, Charles Wettemeyer. This morning I attended a session and they were talking about self-directed learning. And I stood and said, I wonder how many people here know Alan Tuff. Alan Tuff, who wrote the Adult Learning Project, defined self-directed learning as, he put in arbitrary numbers, seven hours or more of deliberate plan learning. And only the presenters said that they even knew of this seminal foundation work. One may say the same about Wettemeyer. You cannot know distance education. If you don't know the work of Charles Wettemeyer. With the Madison, Wisconsin system. Wettemeyer first conjectured if we take the teaching process in the way that Henry Ford took the process of building automobiles, broke it down into its component processes, put specialists into each one and reassembled, would we end up with a teaching program that would be at least as good and we would hope better. And he did that. He got a grant of money in 1963 to 66 to do a prototype. And that worked. He was invited to England somewhere around 1969, 68-69 on a Kellogg Foundation fellowship. Gayson talks about this was heard by Walter James, who became the first director of student support at British Open University. Introduced him to Walter Perry. Walter Perry invited him to come to his home, Swan Cottage in Milton Keynes before there was an open university. Wettemeyer lived with Perry and on the back of envelopes sketched out those same ideas to be developed on a large scale. It's one of the few cases, well, one of the cases anyway, where the Americans had an idea and the British took it and ran with it. But Wettemeyer's articulated instructional media project in the 60s was the beginning of modern distance education. The Open University was the next step in the development of modern distance education. I can't believe we would be here today if we were not for the OU doing what it did and it wouldn't have done what it did. I don't believe if they hadn't had the good fortune to become acquainted with the work of Charles Wettemeyer. So Wettemeyer, the OU, I suppose then we have to come to the technology, I mean the development of the web, the browser, that opening up access to information resources, opening up the facility for learner to learner peer virtual group interaction that we've been discussing. One could say the contributions, organizations like Eden, which has certainly been a powerful motivator in Europe and the ICDE worldwide. Wettemeyer was president of ICDE and did more than anyone to get ICDE on the map back in the 1960s. So I think the two international, those two in particular, there were others, yeah. So that's a wonderful history lesson for the history of distance education. Toss in one other word, the few graduate teaching programs are tremendously important and please can we have more. There are so many people who are stumbling into the field and stumbling into learning intuitively. I think the development of masters and doctoral teaching programs is another important, not quite the scale of those others I mentioned. I think that's important too. Well, thank you very much. We have to stop there Michael, but thank you Michael Moore.