James J. Stukel (1997), president of the University of Illinois, has credited the technology revolution of the 21st Century with extending access to education beyond the limits of time and place. Even the most skeptical among us has to admit that distributed learning, long considered by many to be a "poor excuse for the real thing," (McIsaac, 1998) is assuming an increasingly respected place within the education arena. Distributed learning and its associated Web applications will continue to evolve more rapidly and dynamically than most of us can even imagine, and much of the credit for this expansion is due to the ever-increasing capabilities of technology.
Historically, the purpose of distance education has been to provide greater access to education rather than to enhance educational outcomes (Gay, 1997). However, to ignore the potential of Web-supported/Web-based instruction to improve educational outcomes would be to miss a significant opportunity to foster improved performance and achievement of online learners. As Dodge (1996) says, it was not until the Web that truly ground-breaking changes in teaching, training, and self-directed learning began to occur. Nonetheless, an aura of suspicion regarding how well distributed education courses can approximate their on-site counterparts lingers. Even the most strident detractors of distributed learning must concede that what may have begun as a questionable and sometimes experimental exercise has quickly become a readily accepted practice. That equivalent learning outcomes can be achieved for both scenarios through the application of appropriate instructional strategies and technology is the argument put forth in this paper.
The paper is based on a project on which the Naval War College and private industry collaborated to produce an online, Web-supported version of a correspondence course based on a residence course given at the Naval War College. It will focus on the measures taken to ensure the integrity of both the content and the learning experience and is grounded in Simonson, Schlosser, and Hanson's (1999) Theory of Equivalency. Equivalency Theory aligns the learning experiences of online learners with those of on-site learners and maintains that the learning that takes place under either scenario should yield the same learning outcomes. The responsibility for creating equivalent learning environments for online learners lies with the instructional designer and is in no way the responsibility of the student.
Simonson et al. (1999) predict that distance learning will become mainstream in the U.S. if those involved in the educational process perceive the value derived from on-site and online learning to be the same. The application of technology-driven interactive telecommunications can minimize any differences in learning outcomes between on-site and online learning scenarios. This paper provides background information to illustrate how that can be accomplished.