Distance Education’s Collateral Audience
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Ronald C. Roat The University of Southern Indiana women’s basketball team was building a respectable lead as my family watched from the top row at University of Indianapolis’s Nicoson Hall. That’s when I first noticed the man, a middle-aged, well-dressed fellow who walked behind us now and then to and from the refreshment stand. He regularly offered me a long, inquiring gaze as he passed. I checked to see if I had mustard on my upper lip. Finally he ventured over and said he knew me, but he wasn’t sure from where or how. Quickly, though, he beamed, jabbing a finger at my chest. "You teach mass communication," he said. "On television." He told me he had watched my "show" a couple of times on Indianapolis cable television. Once he learned something absorbing about the effects of the modern mass media. There have been others. A fellow mystery writer and Indianapolis area resident observed, at the foot of his "holiday greetings" card, that he could not escape my unconventional sense of humor. "One need merely turn on the television at an unguarded moment, and there you are." I accepted it as praise. These incidents have been common since I taught our freshman-level Introduction to Mass Communication (COMM 192) over the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System during the spring of 1997. Typical "sightings" often occurred in my favorite grocery store. People would stare at me in aisle two, glancing over their shoulders, examining their memories, struggling to place my face. If the gaze endured, I would suggest where they had seen me. "Television makes me look more handsome," I explained. What these experiences suggest is the subject of this paper. The experiences are evidence of not only how distance education instructors are claiming new educational territory, but also how these experiences can and must reshape how we prepare for our courses, teach our courses, and perceive the various spectators who now have access to those courses. These technologies – particularly live/videotape satellite transmissions and the World Wide Web – are altering how we teach because these tools are expanding the numbers and kinds of people now able to peek into our classrooms and see what we are doing. The Collateral AudienceOur distance education courses, transmitted via television and other mass media to our students, are generating a new audience – the collateral audience – in addition to the traditional classroom students that we readily identify and attempt to serve. This ancillary audience – composed of everyday voters, taxpayers, car salesmen, unwed mothers, farmers – is important to us as teachers. Education’s use of the mass media is also reshaping the public’s image of higher education. In other words, to be in distance education today is to be in a position to learn the power of the mass media and to learn how to use some of that media energy to enhance what you do. The Course and Its TechnologyIntroduction to Mass Communication is a course so common to American universities that there are easily 15 texts written specifically for it. It’s a big market. Required by such programs as journalism, public relations, advertising, education, and business administration, the course introduces students to the mass media and their history, people, technology, and effects. It is a survey course, covering as many subjects as possible in 15 weeks. Students become better users of the media after taking the course. Many begin to suspect they will play a role someday in the media. At this university, we use John Vivian’s The Media of Mass Communication. The technologies used in this Introduction to Mass Communication course are these:
Technology May Be the MessageFundamental communication theory is generally agreed upon – sender, message, and receiver. The sender is someone who "encodes" a message and sends the message through a channel to a receiver. The receiver "decodes" the message, interprets it, composes a response (feedback), and sends a message, starting the process over again. There are various kinds of "noise" in this process, or those things and processes which distort the message. The mass communication model uses the same elements, but in the "mass comm" model we multiply the receivers and insert complex, high-tech equipment into the sending process. This equipment enables us to send a message rapidly to thousands or millions of anonymous receivers who, in turn, obtain that message through their own high-tech equipment in their homes, cars, and offices. In the mass communication model, the receivers are generally anonymous, and their feedback is either difficult to define (ignoring the sender, going about their own lives, etc.) or quickly perceived (buying the product, tuning in a program, subscribing to a magazine). This paper addresses how some of that feedback may change the roles of educators. When you teach a class about this mass communication process, you bring to class every mass media example you can lay your hands on. You show and reveal by example. But when you teach a course in mass communication on the mass media – such as the IHETS satellite delivery system – that method is now part of the message. Simply put, we enhance a fundamental, high-demand course about the rapidly evolving mass media when we teach it through more than one of the mass media, which traditionally include books, magazines, newspapers, radio, and television. Though certainly there are communication scholars even today who might argue otherwise, the World Wide Web has joined these media (Morris, 1996). Old and New TechnologyAs educators, we’re familiar with using some of the mass media in our regular classrooms. We use a lot of books, which were made possible by Johannes Gutenberg, a man whose tinkering led to movable metal type around 1446. There was no mass medium of any kind prior to Gutenberg. He made it possible to produce the printed word on a mass scale cheaply and quickly. Gutenberg and his helpers could make an amazing 50-60 imprints an hour! Other print media emerged in the subsequent centuries. This century we added sound recordings, motion pictures, videotapes, and computer-mediated resources, all products of the new electronic mass media. We use these media in our classrooms, but until recently we used them only within the secure, manageable confines of those classrooms. We use the mass media either to illustrate a point or to break up the tedium of lectures. We use them with a group of students we can identify, see, and moderately control. But we rely fixedly upon our tried and proven ways, the lectures and class discussions. And no one else can see what we are doing in those classrooms. Distance education is changing all of that. People who normally do not venture into a university classroom now sit in their own family rooms and watch a course unfold on nursing administration, mass communication, physics, or biology. They gather information about the faculty teaching at various institutions. They inspect several degree programs to help determine what interests them. Ultimately, they make some judgments about how their tax dollars are spent, how a university at the other end of the state is responding to students, or whether they want to sign up for a course from this faculty member or that faculty member. And they do. At least a half dozen times in the past year I have talked with parents of prospective students who mentioned seeing the USI Communications Department’s faculty on television. These parents arrived believing they knew me because of the familiarity of television. One mother called another faculty member one day and asked how her son was doing in class. He said he couldn’t talk to her about that, but wondered why she asked. Well, she said, she just watched his class on live television via satellite, and her son wasn’t in his seat. The man who sold a new van to me watched most of my 75-minute class very early one morning and found himself regretting he’d dropped out of college. He loved the subject and now is contemplating getting his transcripts in order and going back to school. People have often said they were impressed with various distance education classes and concluded that they were no longer skeptical about sending their children to that "new" university down in Evansville. The point should be obvious: People who don’t match our normal definition of "student" are watching us. Our new audience – a "collateral" audience because it was not the intended target – will evaluate what we do at our universities, and this communication feedback will make a difference in what we do. The traditional classroom walls are beginning to collapse, and we just aren’t in a very good position any longer to know who is outside looking in. The World Wide Web is having a similar effect. Time was short between the days of access to Gopher sites and pure text repositories and the days when users fell in love with hypertext and hyperlinks on the World Wide Web. In the last couple of years many of us on university faculties have started placing all sorts of supporting materials on our Web pages – study guides, sample quizzes, syllabi, lecture outlines, and chapter summaries. The World Wide Web has become another window upon the university – one that is available whenever a viewer wants to examine it (Berge, 1995). Universities knew almost from the beginning, however, that the Internet would engage and attract a new audience. Just as nearly anyone with a television set can watch satellite-delivered classes, anyone who is computer literate and willing to point and click through hypertext can reach a university’s Internet site. Once there, they can peruse and read at will or copy all materials available, and they can go back often with just a click or two. In fact, as noted earlier, we hope they do. That’s the point. But, again, we are not limiting access to Web pages to a select few during class periods or orientation sessions. We let users – whoever they are – into our pages anytime they want from wherever they want. It’s problematic to monitor or measure this access effectively. Yes, we can counts "hits" on Web pages, but those figures tell us precious little. Many users are just browsing – perhaps "grazing" is a better word – through one page to another, and may have only "hit" the page in question long enough to find a link to somewhere else. Changing Your ApproachesInstructors in mass communication – particularly journalism, public relations, broadcasting, and advertising – understand this question: what does all this mean to you, the prospective distance educator? Those who teach in mass communication fields grasp the basics of advertising. We know that we always have an audience (such as newspaper readers and advertising viewers), and we know that what we do and how we present our messages will alter how those messages are accepted. We also know that a mass communication message will be received by all sorts of people – intended and collateral – and we may as well do our best to shape that message so that all can understand it. It’s inconsistent with our role as communicators to do otherwise. It might be different for you. How you change your teaching in response to our new audience might depend upon how you view your role in your institution. For example, if you perceive teaching as a transitory, secondary activity, then you are likely only to freshen up your notes, don a tie, and dare to smile more as you lecture over the satellite system. The mass media will transmit precisely that image. But if you see yourself as a member of a faculty that seeks to expand its programs, recruit skillful students, and influence the anonymous population who will view your products, then you might consider developing and enhancing more of your teaching style, software products, and communication techniques. You may want to recognize, influence, and make a friend of the collateral audience. Here are a few things to consider for television delivery of classes:
ConclusionCommunication theorist Marshall McLuhan noted that the speed of modern communication technology decentralizes the system using it. Technology eliminates the middleman (McLuhan, 1989). This happens in industry, banking, and even education. The technology that brings us the expanding possibilities of distance education also dismantles the barriers, perhaps becoming one of the tangential benefits of our efforts. After all, the cast of characters in our collateral audience includes more than insomniacs, car salesmen, and mystery writers. There are legislators, university trustees, deans, executives in Japanese auto manufacturing, and corporate administrators of all kinds who perceive the need for life-long learning (Berge, 1995). All make decisions about our futures. Distance education television, of course, is an astonishing tool from the standpoint of a small, young university. It is a leveler. It emphasizes not decades of research and dusty lectures but, instead, the personality, the now, the energy of mass communication. Television indeed requires personality; it suffers without it. And television, used by educators who are aware of both the intended and collateral audiences just beyond the cameras, allows the university to project itself as an equal to those who gained their standing through conventional means. (Of course, teaching via television is not new. Those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War are old enough to remember "educational television" in the early 1960s. There was always at least one channel with an irregular schedule presenting programming that bordered on monotonous and dull. The requirements of the medium apparently were poorly understood 30 years ago.) And many of the same criticisms can be made of the World Wide Web and education’s role within it. What mass media delivery of instruction means to us as educators is more than just another method to send information to students. I’m not saying that ultimately the modern mass media will redefine higher education. Let someone else say that. But these new uses of mass media will help us define our roles in education, and it will enable some of us – perhaps you – to amplify and further your roles in the germinating information-rich digital environment. (Fulton, 1998) References
Supplemental Bibliography
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