Removing Barriers and Enhancing Openness: Distance Education as Social Adult Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the benefits claimed for post-secondary distance education is that it removes to learning and is, therefore, open-as suggested in the title of the British distance learning university the or British Columbia's Learning Agency. However, openness and accessibility, as they are currently understood, are not to be equated with the traditional adult education goal of providing education for participation in democratic society. Social purpose education, which leads to an enhanced participatory democracy, has been pushed to the margins of the purposes of traditional western distance education. It can be argued that, given the internal institutional constraints of delivery-centred distance education institutions and systems, distance education on its own cannot remove all barriers and become truly and Open, accessible, social purpose adult education can only be rebuilt in collaboration with other educational and community groups. In order to explore these issues this paper will begin by examining the barriers to education and then will consider ways to open up access in distance education. L'un des avantages que revendique l'education a distance au niveau post-secondaire est de supprimer les « obstacles » a l'apprentissage qui devient donc plus « ouvert », comme le traduit si bien le nom de l'universite britannique d'enseignement a distance, la « Open University », ou, en Colombie-Britannique, le « Open Learning Agency ». Il ne faut cependant pas etablir de parallele entre le concept de l'education traditionnelle des adultes, c'est-a-dire d'enseigner pour preparer les etudiants en vue de leur participation au sein d'une societe democratique. L'objectif social de l'education, soit la participation a la democratie est un objectif secondaire de l'education traditionnelle « occidentale ». On peut alleguer qu'en raison des contrainte internes des etablissements et des systemes d'education a distance qui mettent l'accent sur l'enseignement, l'education a distance ne peut a elle seule obvier a toutes les difficultes et devenir vraiment « ouverte » et « accessible ». Un systeme d'education des adultes ouvert, accessible et jouant un role social n'est possible qu'avec la collaboration d'autres groupes educatifs et communautaires. Ce document s'attarde donc sur ces questions; il commence d'abord par examiner les obstacles a l'education, puis etudie les moyens de rendre l'education a distance plus accessible.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".