Transactional distance...it's not just miles

Within the English speaking world theories of distance education came with bell bottoms and one of the longest running TV series in history...MASH, but it wasn't until well after the 1970s  these were refined.to provide us with Moore's Transactional distance theory.

At it's core Moore (1997) theory says, "It is a concept describing the universe of teacher-learner relationships that exist when learners and instructors are separated by space and/ or by time".
This really speaks to me.

Coming from a traditional face to face teaching background and now moving to the e-learning environment I can see elemental changes in relationships and how business is done.  Overall these are in a number of areas, "namely, the structure of instructional programmes, the interaction between learners and teachers, and the nature and degree of self-directedness of the learner", (Moore 1997).

Often these are discussed as clusters of variables under sub-headings of the primary categories of Dialogue, Structure and Learner Autonomy.  In preparation for writing this post I spent way too long finding the below model which summarises Moore's theory of Transactional distance.

When Googling the theory this model poped up first under an image search and whilst it's a very reasonable representation to me it's not intuitive.  Maybe it was the tired writer's eyes but arrows heading in three differing directions took some interpreting and this was at a point when I believed I had grasped the theory.

Still, transduction of a ten page theory into one very relatively easily understood 3D model has to be applauded.**

As yet  I haven't worked out a better graphical representation of Moore's theory only my way of doing business to minimise transactional distance...Engagement.  

Be available to them, whether by forum, phone, email, video conferencing or carrier pigeon.  This isn't easy, for some students working odd hours or locations there may never be synchronous connection and dialogue but it is still possible to remove distance.  Being there for a student at the first available opportunity can mean the world.

Structure courses with supportive collaboration and as much autonomy as possible.  A learner with freedom to achieve authentic, work related goals using their own or adapted methods is more likely to learn more and be happier doing it.

Distance is a powerful entity, when allowed it has the ability to contribute to student's feelings of loneliness, confusion and despair.

When skillfully negotiated it allows students freedom to achieve great goals from afar, new skills, new careers and new possibilites abound and to me that is what it's all about.

** Transduction is the process of shifting resources from one modality to another.  In this context it has been used to discuss the shift between resources (text and image) but I believe there is a wider meaning when discussing learning technology.  Transduction is used to describe the shift in learning technology which can transform (or substitute) as described in a SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Re-defining) model.

References

Moore, M. (1997). Theory of Transactional Distance. In Keegan, D. (1997). (Ed.). Theoretical Principles of Distance Education. Routledge, pp. 22-38. Last viewed 05 May 2014, www.c3l.uni-oldenburg.de/cde/found/moore93.pdf