"Distance education" at the college level is well over a century old. It has served the needs of a numerically large, but proportionately small population of learners who have eschewed the campus classroom. These correspondence school enrollees, educational TV watchers, and audiocassette listeners have had only modest impact on the structure, mission, and strategy of the institutions serving them. But that is now changing, and changing very dramatically. The advent of the Internet, interactive television technology, and web-based instructional software, coupled with administrative and political perceptions of educational reformation and fiscal efficiency, may be causing nothing less than a revolution in higher education. By applying a feminist model of assessment called "unthinking technology," that is to say, exploring the potential, but unthought of socio-political aspects of this technological revolution, this paper raises significant questions about the security of the traditional academic enterprise. "The Politics of Distance Education" urges a pro-active embrace of these technologies by the academy in order to enable a legitimate "competency for grievance" so that the protection of the validity of higher education, and legitimacy of the academic profession can be ethically defended and publicly respected, rather than being viewed as mulish resistance to the inevitable.
Instructional Software: If You Build It, They May Or May Not Come
