Legitimation of distance education: a social history of the Open Learning Institute of British Columbia 1978-1988
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As Canadian higher education expanded from the 1950s, new institutions sought institutional legitimacy, meaning credibility and prestige in relation to educational peers and the state. Three dimensions to institutional legitimacy were identified: hierarchies of institutions, curricula and pedagogies; horizontal status within institutional sectors and fields of knowledge; and external legitimacy in relation to the state. New distance education institutions have found institutional legitimacy unusually problematic because of widespread skepticism about an educational form in which teacher and learner are separated in time and/or space. Distance educators typically balance industrial organizational forms using modern communications technologies, with attention to individual learners and accessibility. The study examined how a new, publicly-funded, distance education institution acquires legitimacy. The British Columbia government established the Open Learning Institute in 1978, over extensive opposition, with an unusual mandate to teach programs from degree level to adult basic education at a distance. OLI never fitted easily into either university or college sector. Ambiguity persisted over its roles as credential-provider and service agency, but OLI quickly proved its popularity with students. Its leaders adopted existing norms and standards, especially those of the universities, while insisting on college characteristics of openness and accessibility. Government Restraint policies in the 1980s materially affected OLI’s curriculum and pedagogies, and contributed to continuing debates over OLI’s role as provincial coordinator of distance education.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".