Illusionary Ethos in Distance Education

Higgs & Budd (2007) provide a political perspective on the growth and development of online higher education; everything has a purpose.  The purpose of education is to instill a set of qualities such as intellectual abilities (analytical and verbal skills), character traits (self discipline and perseverance), and moral values (commitment to truth and objectivity).  The authors assert that when we speak of ethos, we are referring to the culture of goal-oriented behavior and that is guided by the pursuit of human virtues. The authors are asking, in a sense, is it possible for DE to have an ethos?

There is an ethical problem in higher education’s use of online education because of the tension between the goals of education in capital culture and the pressure to cater to the illusionary ethos of online education.  The illusionary ethos is that online education defines progress as the efficient production of goods  - so that education and its means of production become commodities (which renders the teacher redundant).  I think this is also an important tie-in as to why instructor are stripped down and devalued in their classification of “merely” facilitators.  In short, the authors assert that online education pretends to have moral value but it only claims a moral purpose – it does not define or demonstrate it on ground of virtues.  For example, most literature comes from within the field, is prescriptive, and never challenged; such literature usually reads: online education is flexible, effective, efficient, interactive, and affordable.  The ethical implications of these claims should be explored and we should be asking how these events are happening and with what effect.

This topic is important to my own research since I am interested in the dialogic interplay between field and practitioner which has not been adequately explored. In this tension between field and practitioner, there are also overlaps between ethos and identity and this article makes that connection clearer in the purview of field ethos & field identity. For English Studies, we already understand and use terms such as identity and ethos, but I don’t think that we have even considered them in the context of distance education - what are some of the assumptions that we continue to operate using?  In what ways should these assumptions be questioned in light of our own field identity?

References
Higgs, G., & Budd, J. (2007). Toward an Authentic Ethos for Online Higher Education. Policy Futures in Education 5(4): 507-515.