Is flexibility always a good thing for distance learning?

by Alan Nelson

Working with a wide variety of professional bodies to create online distance learning materials for their qualifications, has highlighted something that now seems obvious but hadn’t struck me before: flexibility of provision, which sounds like a good thing, can sometimes be the enemy of service quality.

When we first met Chris Bestley, who runs a range of qualifications for The Institute of Sales Promotion, I was surprised at how inflexible he was about enrolling students in their Diploma in Promotional Marketing. The course starts once a year, in March. Students study for five months and then in July they all complete a multiple choice test and submit written answers to a standard set of questions.

Perhaps, like me, you are thinking “Surely one of the benefits of online provision is that you can allow people to start whenever they want and take different amounts of time to complete a course.”

When challenged, however, Chris puts up a pretty good defence. He is confident of his approach and I have to say that I can now see his point. Chris argues that the critical part of distance learning is not so much getting people to enrol as persuading them not to drop out. He says that it is only by keeping them all working though the course together that he can provide good support.

A couple of weeks after they start, Chris posts a new quiz into the learning centre of the course and sends all students an e-mail telling them that they should have completed the first module. He does this every fortnight throughout the duration of the course. It’s a neat way of nagging people in a friendly way and with the tools in Imago it can be done at the touch of a button. Of course if every student had enrolled at a different time, it would be an endless job to send everyone the right e-mail at the right time. So the structure of the course helps students.

Would this always be true? I don’t know. I suspect that the increased enrolments that you might be able to generate on some courses by offering more flexibility might be more important than the structured support you can offer with the more rigid approach. I think it should cause e-learning professionals to stop and think, though. We are so ready to launch into a speech extolling the virtues of flexibility that sometimes we lose sight of the need to give people structure.