Redefining services to distance learners: what’s in a name?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditionally, the term ‘distance learner’ specified the distinct category of students who studied at a distance from the university or college at which they were registered. Enrolled on designated distance learning courses, and identified as distance learners on the student records system, they were entitled to specialist services such as postal loans. Today, however, the student learning experience is changing. Remote access to information and communication across geographical boundaries enables institutions of higher education to offer flexible modes of study by means of online and independent learning. Thus they are able to include in their increasing and diverse student population many non-traditional learners of different backgrounds and personal circumstances, including part-timers, mature entrants, international students and learners ‘studying at a distance’. For a variety of reasons, whether family obligations, work commitments, time constraints or geographical location, many of our learners may rarely be present on campus. They may have little or no in-person contact with staff and may never attend formal classes, or visit the library, making the concept of the traditional ‘campus-based student’ less relevant to higher education institutions. As the proportion of students not physically present on campuses increases, the balance between ‘off-’ and ‘on-campus’ students also changes. Consequently, it becomes necessary to redefine what we mean by the term ‘distance learner’, so that library services, and the manner in which we provide them, offer the same benefits to all learners. These services must meet – and exceed –the information needs of all our learners, whether they are on- or off-campus.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.015 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.046 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
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".