In the report to which Morrow contributed, Saide argued that the term 'resource-based learning' emerges as a logical consequence of the collapse of distinctions between contact and distance education, together with the increasingly exciting variety of media available and decline in production and reception costs of these media. In essence, it means that a significant but varying proportion of communication between students and educators is not face to face, but takes place through the use of different media as necessary. Importantly, the expensive face-to-face contact that does take place need not involve simple transmission of knowledge from educator to student; instead it involves various other strategies for supporting students, for example, tutorials, peer group discussion or practical work. In this respect, therefore, resource-based learning draws significantly from the lessons learned in international distance education provision throughout the 20th century. Critically, resource-based learning is not a synonym for distance education. Rather, it provides a basis for transforming the culture of teaching across all education systems to enable those systems to offer better quality education to significantly larger numbers of students in a context of dwindling funds.
Thus, to summarize:
- Distance education describes a set of teaching and learning strategies (or educational methods) that can be used to overcome spatial and temporal separation between educators and students. These strategies or methods can be integrated into any educational programme and potentially used in combination with other teaching and learning strategies in the provision of education (including with strategies that demand that students and educators be together at the same time and/or place). More information on components of well-functioning distance education systems is provided in Appendix Two.
- Resource-based learning involves communication of curriculum between students and educators through use of resources (instructionally designed and otherwise) that harness different media as necessary. Resource-based learning strategies too can be integrated into any educational programme, using any mix of contact and distance education strategies. Resource-based learning need not imply any temporal and/or spatial separation between educators and students, although many resource-based learning strategies can be used to overcome such separation.
Efforts to integrate use of instructionally designed resources into courses and programmes have been influenced by various motives. It is worth noting that these objectives have often incorporated efforts to overcome temporal and spatial separation, but not always. When they have incorporated this aim, the result has generally been an integration of distance education and resource-based learning strategies. The key motives/objectives, might usefully be described as follows:
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