Abramson, T. (1999). From the desk of the Executive Editor: Learning time for busy people. Journal of Instruction Delivery Systems, 13(1), 4.

Let us examine the conditions of life and work today when graduates may have as many as seven careers before retirement. Business organizations establish learning-communities, perhaps to adapt to changing careers. Lifelong learning has become a household expression that reflects a need as well as a reality. Everyone works: The economy assumes two, wage-earner families. The skills of the workplace change with the rapidly evolving technologies so that even the same job has different requirements as time goes by. Roads and highways are increasingly congested making even short distances into long commutes. Fast foods replace leisurely meals and quality time supercedes companionship. Two truths prevail: Everyone needs to learn new skills or concepts and almost always, everyone is pressed for time. The problem is to meet the identified needs within the identified constraints.

From the very first day of kindergarten, the learner must be physically present in the classroom, the place where learning takes place or at least begins. Why must children go to school? Classroom teachers consistently arrive at the following answers: To keep them off the street, to teach them to work and play well together, to prepare them for the workplace, and last, to provide them with skills and concepts needed for successful functioning as a citizens. There are important issues worth observing here. First, the learning part usually comes last in the list. Subject matter may be mastered without going to a building with teachers and peers. Second, the answers are not specific to methodologies or delivery systems. Third, if the objectives are not met during the first 18 years of life, continuing the treatment will not make any difference.

Pedagogy, which by its root, ped, relates to children, is commonly used as an umbrella term to describe the process of learning. Pedagogy is the science of teaching to children who are required by law to attend school. A very articulate person, age seven, observed that the job of a child is to go to school. Knowles (1983) established a distinction between adult and child learners and coined the term andragogy to refer to adult learners. He observed that adults take courses because of a perceived want or need which may be internally driven as in fulfilling a lifelong dream or externally driven as a requirement to keep a job or get a promotion or change careers.

The traditional settings for adult learning include classrooms of 30 or fewer students, lecture halls with hundreds of students, and labs with one or several students per workstation. Small discussion groups mentored by a graduate student may accompany large lecture sections. Why are these methodologies traditional? One may posit reasons such as need to be physically near the college library and other such good things. However, the real reason is that this is the way adult education evolved and until recently, it was about the most economical solution and it worked fairly well. This is the model of the Age of Industry, the factory model. An alternate route for adult learner, prevalent throughout this century, has been correspondence school. However, this pathway to learning was typically looked down upon as being inferior and was often labeled "diploma mill".

During the second half of the twentieth century, the world moved from the Industrial Age to the Computer Age or the Communications Age. Changes on the factory floor came first. Computerized robots replaced people who worked on the assembly line. Next came the offices where electromagnetic machines gave way to desktop computers. Multimedia, the Internet, and low-cost systems lured homes into joining the computer age. Education is probably the last component to adapt to the new artifacts of society. Networked computing systems have made it possible for people to listen to lectures, participate in discussions, research the electronic libraries, collaborate in group projects, work in virtual laboratories, and observe live field sites.

There is little that transpires within the physical halls of academe that cannot be experienced with today's communications tools. The one outstanding basic need is touch. At this writing, science has not invented a substitute for physical interaction. How much real interaction typically takes place in an adult classroom? How many and what kinds of interaction are optimal for a given class? Can we meet this need without requiring physical attendance on a weekly basis?

A mature graduate student, currently pursuing a second career, summed up her studies as follows: I love the fieldwork and the labs. Some of the readings are enlightening also. The long days of lectures are more than I can tolerate. After the first hour, my energies are focused upon not falling asleep and offending the Professor. Do we really need these endless hours of lecture? Another student asked why he was required to make long arduous trips to campus to watch a professor speak. He suggested that the lecture could be videotaped and mailed and the hours spent in commuting could better be invested in research.

Instruction delivery systems have opened vast and varied opportunities to maximize learning time and the totality of time invested in the process of education. As the technologies mature, become easier to manage and less expensive to acquire, we can focus our energies on capturing the best of classroom experiences and translating them into technology-supported distance ones. Proliferating these efforts is the raison d'être of this journal.

Knowles, M. (1983). Andragogy: The new science of education. Invitation to Lifelong Learning. IL: Follett Publishing, 144-151.