At the time, the panelist huffed and blustered about "instructional design integrity" and "enhanced learning experiences for geographically scattered learners" and "learner control of the means of instruction." He went on at length about the woeful inequity of making distance learning courses more accountable than traditional forms.

But then, as is so often the case, the panelist got to thinking about the issue. What is it about distance education, he wondered, that makes it the object of such regulatory concern? While computer-based instruction is relative new, surely there is a long tradition of distance learning as a concept—and there, he thought, might lie the answer.

The problem, fundamentally, is that while distance education does indeed have a long tradition – beginning in 1840 when Sir Isaac Pitman (1813-1897) in Bath, England thought it might be a good idea to offer shorthand training by mail to rural secretarial students who translated sections of the Bible and mailed their work back for grading--it is not entirely a positive one. In fact, much of the historical tradition of distance education is, in the words of one scholar, one of "villainy, incompetence, and foolishness."

Before going on our little trip back in time, let’s start with a definition of what we’re talking about. According to ARELLO, "distance learning is education and training that takes place when the learner is at a remote location."

Or, we might take a somewhat less succinct approach:

(No limitation is intended by the use of the word "technological," which refers here to any instructional medium that can be used to provide education to learners in a flexible manner.) Let’s briefly consider the four fundamental elements of this definition:

All this is good stuff, so what’s the problem? The problem is complicated and multifaceted but, I think, partly it’s historical and cultural: rooted in assumptions and stereotypes of what we really mean when we say "distance education." Today we are, in effect, the victims of the sins of the fathers, paying for the excesses of the past. Today’s distance education is not your father’s matchbook cover diploma mill, but it carries that association in the popular mind nonetheless. In the next section, we will wallow a bit in distance education’s sordid past, and maybe learn something from it.

Distance education began, as has already been mentioned, around the middle of the 19^th century with Sir Isaac Pitman. In the 1870s, Illinois Wesleyan University offered the first home-study college classes in the United States, and in 1883 a "Correspondence University" was established in Ithaca, New York. In the 1880s and 1890s William Rainey Harper developed correspondence programs at Chautauqua, New York and at the University of Chicago, of which he was the founding president.

Outside the academic world, the home-study courses in mine safety begun by Thomas J. Foster in Pennsylvania in 1885 became the International Correspondence Schools (ITC). The program was begun to help mine foremen pass the written certification exam that the legislature had required in response to frequent mine injuries and accidents. ITC, therefore, was the first educational response to regulatory licensing requirements; it helped working adults prepare for a state-required exam that would decide whether or not they kept their jobs. That rings familiar in the real estate industry today.

Distance education has always been inextricably linked to current communication technologies. In the 19^th century, distance education was limited to print materials distributed through the mail. Certainly print-based distance education is still strongly with us today, as is the postal service. In the 1950s, radio (and later television) provided a means to give a broader segment of the population access to education, including exposure to actual instructor lectures.

In the 1960s, the "Open University" movement began, adding tutors, regional study centers and greater reliance on audio/visual materials and mass media such as PBS. In the early 1970s, audioconferencing, and satellite-based teleconferencing began to appear, although they were prohibitively expensive. Finally, beginning in the 1980s and continuing through today, the advent of personal computers, networking, floppy disks, videotape, CD-ROM, all our favorites.

"Distance learning is hardly new. The term has come to replace correspondence school and the notion of correspondence classes advertised on matchbook covers is all but gone." But is it? Mary Gotschall, in Money magazine, writes:

There’s that association again—distance learning and matchbook covers —and it’s not a pretty one. Indeed, as one scholar has observed, "The image of the proprietary correspondence schools has never fully recovered from the stereotypes inspired by its more reckless, irresponsible and criminal practitioners.

If there is a correlation between distance education providers and the stereotypical matchbook cover diploma mill, it might be helpful (or at least amusing) to consider for a moment what that stereotype might be.

"Plenty of vacancies or plenty of tenants who wished to remain anonymous" writes Raymond Chandler as he describes an office building in The Big Sleep,

Correspondence school detective courses were popular targets, and in fact that they existed in real life to gull the innocent, often offering inducements such as badges, equipment and diplomas for those who completed their handful of easy lessons by mail.

The stereotype has come up again and again in popular culture, from Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (in London, the longest continuously running play on the planet) to more recent works by mystery writers Ross Thomas and Loren Estleman. An entire murder mystery, Free Draw, is set in a correspondence school filled with instructors who are not only unscrupulous and incompetent but murder suspects as well. (It should be noted that the author, Shelley Singer, had once worked for both a correspondence school and a pyramid sales scheme.) One of Horace Rumpole’s unscrupulous defendants received his theology degree from a Canadian correspondence school and went on to found a chain of illicit massage parlors.

Wicked correspondence schools have featured in the visual arts, too, from the early sound film, The Ghost Talks (1929) to Hearts of the West (1975). In the Seinfeld episode, "The Bris," Jerry questions a bumbling rabbi’s competence to perform a circumcision ritual by asking if he got his degree "from a matchbook."

In a novel about the 1919 Chicago Black Sox baseball scandal, the evil pitcher who is key to fixing the World Series is shown continuously sending off for information about correspondence courses in law, public speaking, and electrical engineering. Clearly, as Von Pittman observes, "A man who would enroll in correspondence courses is a man who would criminally defile the national pastime."

When a financial aid officer writes that

is he right? Does the use of the web as a delivery tool end the association of self-study with matchbook cover art academies? A graduate student in an Internet-based C++ course observed that "taking an Internet class is essentially the same as taking a correspondence course. The major difference is that it has the credibility of Virginia Tech rather than the cachet of a matchbook cover diploma mill."

It’s true that today a variety of high-profile well-respected educational institutions (many of them members of REEA) offer credible distance learning courses for their students. But academics still tend to scoff at traditional or electronic correspondence courses. "The very idea [still] invokes in many people the image of the inside advertisements of matchbook covers inviting readers to test out their talent at the Great Artists Correspondence School."

Even those who don’t make the matchbook connection look askance at distance education. They cite a perceived lack of interactivity and the supposed difficulty of ensuring security and assessing results. But the numbers of educators offering distance learning options, and the numbers of adults taking advantage of the opportunities are growing constantly, and we are clearly no longer dealing with an isolated student body of witless losers looking for a quick, cheap ticket to glory as a private detectives, commercial artists or computer programmers. And we are looking at Case Western Reserve, and the University of Illinois; Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley and Cambridge University are among the premier institutions offering courses and even degree programs on the Web. These are not fly-by-night schools holed up in one of Raymond Chandler’s seedier office buildings.

Dedicated educators in all fields, including real estate, are working hard to provide high-quality distance education that fully exploits the technologies available today, from snailmail to the Internet, and all the paper and disks and cables and waves in between. Reality is forcing people to disregard what a Canadian department of education report referred to as "the "matchbook cover" stereotype of distance education."

But even as today’s secure, interactive, creative technologies offer a new degree of credibility and instructional quality to distance education, the old matchbook cover menace is reemerging.

They’re not picky, really, about who gets a diploma. There’s an ordained minister currently living in Los Angeles who is the proud holder of a dozen doctoral degrees, and just happens to be a particularly bright Labrador Retriever. There are a number of professional-looking web-based "institutions that offer bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees based on "life experience." Students may (or may not) be required to write an academic paper or two – taking only a few days, they are promised, and may qualify to receive multiple simultaneous degrees. And what’s best, of course, is that the life experience claimed by the student on his or her application is never, ever questioned. The new diploma mill websites are clean and reassuringly professional-looking, and many use the URL suffix ".edu" which lends an additional air of authenticity.

Columbia State University, formerly based in Louisiana and California and possibly elsewhere (such is the wonder of the world wide web) was shut down by the FBI and the Louisiana Attorney General, who reported that

Just as "degrees from diploma mills ‘pose an ominous threat to the reputations of legitimate adult-degree programs at appropriately accredited universities,’" all providers of distance education courses and training through nontraditional media need to be alert to abuse, fraud and consumer scams. The reputation of whole industries can easily be tarnished by a few bad practitioners.

"What, will these hands ne'er be clean?" So there’s Lady Macbeth, wandering around the castle, her hands stained (in her mind, at least) by the blood of the king she’s killed. And even though she washes and washes her hands, the stain won’t fade.

To some degree, that is the challenge faced by distance education designers, instructors and providers as we move boldly into the next millenium. We know that distance education is democratizing and flexible and responsive and transformative and all those good things, but to many the stain of the matchbook cover detective schools still lingers. It is very easy to tar a whole industry with the broad brush of scandal.

Maintaining and ensuring a high quality of course design and delivery, instructional content and administrative security in our courses reassures both students and regulators of our credibility and professional quality.

The matchbook-cover days may or may not be behind us, but their reputation for lightweight education, poor-quality materials and lack of instructional integrity hangs over all of modern distance learning. In the end, adherence to some objective, recognized measure of quality keeps the bad guys out, keeps the good guys good, and helps erase that matchbook reputation. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a state’s regulatory guidelines, ARELLO’s Distance Learning Standards, a REEA seal of approval or accreditation by the Distance Education and Training Council, the point is that the past, as ever, is with us, and must be addressed. On the other hand, free handcuffs and a badge might be just the thing to attract brokers to a new CE software course…