Concepts of Transactional Distance: Getting Closer to our Distance Learners

Before there was online learning there were paper-based correspondence courses. Correspondence courses, which provided the basis for early theorizing in distance education, have a long history in Canada and provided an alternative educational delivery model for both non-traditional students as well as learners who lived in rural and remote areas.

Before the advent of the connected computer, the majority of distance education programming was comprised of paper-based course materials sent to learners by mail. Learners completed assignments according to a schedule and sent their work to a tutor by mail. The tutor/instructor would assess the assignment and provide feedback and then mail the assignment back. If there were final exams, they would be invigilated by various means such as contracting with a local invigilator or requiring all students to come to a central location at the same time to complete the exam. Some courses were supported by audio cassette or television programming (the Knowledge Network in BC got its start supporting educational programming offered through BC’s former Open Learning Agency).

If you have never experienced a correspondence course yourself, perhaps you can imagine how alone you might feel as a learner in such a course: there are no other students to interact with, you can only contact your tutor by mail. You must account for the waiting time between asking your questions and the responses, as well as account for the delay in receiving the results and feedback on your assignments. Over the decades, the design and production of the learning materials, activities and learning design improved overall, and much improvement was informed by a growing field of research in distance education and by the notion of transactional distance.

The notion of transactional distance originated out of these experiences with correspondence courses. Transactional distance “is the gap between the understanding of a teacher (or teaching team) and that of a learner” (p. 34, Moore, 2018). One of the goals of improving learning design was to mitigate the inherent features of being at a distance, where communication is spread out across time, to improve learning. Distance education is “the methodology of structuring courses and managing dialogue between teacher and learner to bridge that gap through communications technology” (p. 34, Moore, 2018).

Flash-forward thirty years, and, even now, online courses can continue to be isolating. Students are alone when they work on course materials. They don’t have the opportunity to connect with each other and with the instructor as they would normally when classes meet in person. As social beings, we learn a lot from observing other people in addition to interacting with them, and we can be energized when others are around us. When that is not possible because of physical distance, it’s harder for students to stay engaged. What is missing is the immediate presence of others, and the notion of transactional distance informs how we measure that.

When the affordances of digitally networked online learning became available, distance educators exploited the ability to decrease the communication gap between learner and instructors with email, chat, and web conferencing tools. Doing so increased the interaction opportunities, having, for the first time, the ability to bring a group of students together in the same digital space, with the potential for student-to-student interaction in asynchronous discussion forums and shared digital workspaces such as wikis. Further, online learning provided opportunities to remediate course materials from strictly paper-based to other media forms which therefore created opportunities for student-learning interaction.

When we make a deliberate effort to increase interaction in online classes, we can help students learn and be successful. Having the ability to bring groups of students together in the same digital spaces within the timeframe of a course fosters a learning community. This notion of community, and the sense of belonging to a learning community for the duration of a course, is our next topic.