Comparison of Two Models of Distance Education for Lifelong Learning in China

Abstract

Distance education has an important role in advancing lifelong learning. In China, there are two types of providers for distance education, open universities (OUs) and Institutes of Distance Education affiliated to regular universities (IDEs). IDEs are increasing because of technology development. This study compared OUs and IDEs in China from three aspects, including development goals, decision making on enrollment, and learning experience. Through corpus analysis and interviews, this study found that although the policy orientation of OUs and IDEs is different, their actual functions are the same. This is a phenomenon of institutional isomorphism, and government plays an important role in this convergence.

1. Introduction

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all, which enjoins countries to expand access to quality education [1]. Lifelong learning is rooted in the integration of learning and living and comprises learning activities for people of all ages in all life-wide contexts, which needs to meet various learning needs and demands [2]. Thus, lifelong learning opportunities must be flexible and readily available in terms of time and place and consider the needs of learners from different contexts [3]. Digital technologies represent a sustainable and effective way to increase the availability of lifelong learning to people anytime and everywhere, which can be used to create and deliver content tailored to each individuals’ needs [4]. Distance education is education using information and communication technologies that can provide individuals with different levels and readiness in accordance with various goals and purposes [5]. The distinctive feature of distance education is that the learner and the teacher are separated in time or space [6]. Distance education has featured largely in professional continuing education and other forms of lifelong learning. Distance education has an important role in society’s lifelong learning expectation. In China, distance education has made a great contribution towards advancing the process of popularization of higher education by providing learning opportunities for people who failed the Gaokao (College entrance exam in China) and therefore did not benefit from higher education [7]. According to the Ministry of Education’s report for the year 2020, there are 2.779 million students enrolled in distance education institutions, and 8.465 million students are learning at distance education institutions. Moreover, in 2020, China had more than 890 million people in the working-age population, i.e., those aged 18 to 59. Among these populations, approximately 620 million people have not received higher education. Providing distance education opportunities for this group is significantly important for China to advance the SDG4 [8].

Distance education has undergone three main stages of development. The division of these three stages is related to the development of information technology [9]. The first stage is correspondence study based on printing technology and postal communications. This is the beginning of distance education for mankind [10]. The second stage is open education based on mass media and audio–visual technology. In the second stage, many open universities were built around the world, and the founding of the Open University is considered to be the major milestone in the historical development of distance education [11]. The third stage is online education based on computers and the Internet. In this stage, the institutions that provide distance education are gradually diversifying. Virtual universities have emerged in addition to the Open University. At the same time, many traditional universities have begun to offer distance education courses and programs to address the diverse educational needs of students and stay up-to-date with advancing technology [12]. Today, online education launched by traditional universities, such as MOOCs, SPOC, and EdX, has had an important impact on education.

The various providers of distance education can be classified into two models, which are referred to as single-mode and dual-mode institutions [13]. Single-mode institutions only offer conventional distance education, for example, the Open University UK (OUUK) and the Open University of China (OUC). Dual-mode institutions are those that offer both traditional on-campus and distance education, which is the result of traditional universities having to embrace modern information technology. Open Universities (OUs) and Institutes of Distance Education affiliated to regular universities (IDEs) have coexisted around the world for a long time. In international distance education academia, an important theoretical and practical issue is the comparison between these two types of institutions. In the 1980s, Greville Rumble proposed the famous question in the field of distance education [14]. For OUs and IDEs, which one has competitive advantages? Since then, the superiority and inferiority of these two models have been discussed by many researchers [15]. Initially, researchers thought that compared with dual-mode universities, single-mode universities such as OUs have competitive advantages. For example, single-model universities can achieve economies of scale and reduce costs. Distance education students face widespread discrimination at dual-mode universities. To avoid this kind of discrimination, it is best to establish specialized distance education institutions, i.e., OUs [14,16]. Some researchers pointed out that traditional universities once ignored, refused, and even slandered distance education, but later gradually began to embrace it [17]. In recent years, with the rapid development of information and communication technologies, the number of campus-based tertiary institutions which enter distance learning is increasing. They usually target the part-time adult learner market, which was formerly the preserve of single-mode distance learning providers [18]. Bates noted a rapid growth in online distance learning in higher education, with an accompanying dramatic decrease in open and distance teaching universities’ enrollments in Canada and the UK in 2018 [19]. In the United States, research shows that eight Ivy League universities all provide distance education, including Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University [20].

The development of single-mode and dual-mode institutions is increasingly showing a homogenization characteristic. In the last three decades, many of the innovative characteristics pioneered by open universities have been adopted by campus universities. The emergence of digital technologies blurred the boundaries between distance and campus universities [21,22,23,24]. As neo-institutional theory points out, organizations usually imitate one another, which is called mimetic isomorphism [25,26]. Institutional isomorphism leads to an identity crisis for some single-mode OUs, eroding the unique status of open universities in many national jurisdictions. The sustainable development of open universities is experiencing a critical risk. Though open universities, as specialized distance education institutions are an important component of the higher education ecosystem and contribute to the diversification of higher education institutions, very few governments protect the unique status of open universities as sole providers of distance education [27]. However, open universities’ unique status is protected by the Chinese government. China has a very large distance education system [28]. In China, the Radio and TV Universities Network that was established in 1979 was the sole distance education provider in China for twenty years. From 1999 onwards, 68 online colleges in campus-based universities were authorized by the Chinese Ministry of Education to offer online/distance degrees and professional diplomas. In 2014, the Chinese Central Government abolished the regulation that new online/distance education programs must be authorized by the government and enabled any Chinese university to offer online/distance degrees and diplomas. However, online distance education enrollment in regular universities completely stopped in 2022, which is a big change in China’s higher distance education policy that will end the coexistence of the two models [29]. Since institutional isomorphism is a common phenomenon in global higher education, countries are trying to establish a standardized and universal university. The imitation of higher education in different universities and countries has led to the isomorphism of universities [30]. Then, why does Chinese distance education policy go in the opposite direction to the global distance education policy? Do OUs have advantages to provide better distance education than IDEs in China? Research on the comparison of the two models in China is limited. The comparison of these two models in China can contribute to understanding the policy of ending distance education enrollment in regular universities in 2022 in China and its impact on ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all.

According to the theory of institutional isomorphism, organizations prefer to adopt the same development goals and strategies and provide the same services to consumers. Thus, in order to answer this question and fill the research gap, this study compared the two models of distance education for lifelong learning in China from three aspects, including the development goals of the two models, learners’ decision making on enrollment of the two models, and learning experience of the two models. We assume that institutional isomorphism exists between the two types of institutions providing distance education in China. Then, this research proposes three hypotheses:

H1. 

There is no significant difference between the development goals of the two models.

H2. 

There is no significant difference between learners’ decision making on enrollment of the two models.

H3. 

There is no significant difference between learners‘ learning experience of the two models.

2. Materials and Methods

This study is based on corpus and semi-structured interviews. Corpus analysis will extract highly repeated words, word clusters, etc., from texts and use them as examples to identify the ideas implicit in the discourse [31]. Moreover, with the help of corpora, we can also discover new ideas beyond the scope of existing research results, thereby helping to find new perspectives and new entry points for research [32]. Corpus analysis is considered able to break the boundaries between quantitative and qualitative research [33]. Corpus analysis in this study aims to test H1, which is “there is no significant difference between the development goals of the two models”. Analysis of the content of the mission statements of open universities and other distance education institutions is helpful for understanding the purpose of these institutions [34]. In China, development goals are often shown in the introductory texts on the official websites of these institutions. Therefore, this study builds corpora by retrieving introductory texts from the official homepages of OUs and IDEs. We collected data from September 2022 to June 2023. After excluding institutions that have no self-introduction or invalid network links, a total of 44 OUs above the provincial level and 59 IDEs remained as the research objects of this article. The OU corpus has 45,000 words, and the IDE corpus has 59,000 words.

The main goal of the interviews in this study was to test H2 and H3, which are “there are no significant difference between the two models on learners ‘decision making on enrollment and learning experience”. Previous studies indicate that factors which influence whether students choose an OU or IDE include time cost, economic cost, social reputation, and advertisement [35,36,37,38]. Distance education in China usually includes two parts of online leaning independently and campus-based leaning on weekends. Therefore, learners’ learning experience in this study includes online and offline learning experiences. Based on previous studies and the characteristic of distance education in China, we developed the interview protocol and completed a pilot study made up of 5 interviews to improve the protocol. With the help of teachers from institutions such as the School of Online Education at Beijing Foreign Studies University and the Aopeng Learning Center, we interviewed 7 staff and 45 learners in total. All interviewees voluntarily participated in this study and signed informed consent forms. The details of the interviewees can be found in Appendix A and Appendix B. The interviews with staff focused on the following questions: What are the differences in the goals of OUs and IDEs? What are the characteristics of market share? What are the characteristics of learners’ choices for enrollment? How do learners’ learning experiences differ? Do you have any suggestions for the development of distance education? The interviews with learners focused on these questions: What are the reasons for choosing to study at an OU or IDE? What are your learning experiences at the OU or IDE? Do you have any suggestions for the development of distance education?

3. Results

3.1. Results of Corpus Analysis

3.1.1. Statistics of Highly Repeated Words

The statistics of the top 40 highly repeated words in the introductory texts of OUs and IDEs are shown in

Table 1. The top 40 highly repeated words.

Ranking	OU-Word	Frequency	IDE-Word	Frequency
1	education	535	education	670
2	open	264	college	364
3	learning	212	continue	242
4	running school	201	development	242
5	university	182	Internet	238
6	development	162	learning	223
7	construction	160	training	201
8	college	124	running school	193
9	community	114	service	188
10	service	112	construction	171
11	major	112	management	170
12	country	107	society	167
13	society	104	distance education	161
14	system	99	students	156
15	modern	81	whole country	150
16	teaching	80	major	141
17	continue	78	modern	137
18	management	73	teaching	129
19	center	72	adults	114
20	training	69	special	113
21	Internet	66	Ministry of education	112
22	distance education	64	country	107
23	diploma education	63	center	106
24	system	63	technology	105
25	non-diploma education	62	higher education	95
26	lifelong learning	61	university	94
27	fostering	60	non-diploma education	91
28	lifelong	59	fostering	89
29	platform	58	build	86
30	whole country	55	distance	85
31	technology	50	curriculum	83
32	campus	49	resource	82
33	resource	48	college	82
34	teacher	48	quality	77
35	guidance	47	exam	77
36	distance	47	diploma education	76
37	special	44	China	74
38	province level	44	advantages	71
39	TV university	44	system	68
40	learning	43	teacher	67

OU-Word refers to the word from OU corpus. IDE-word refers to the word from IDE corpus.

. After the 40th highly repeated word, the same ranking corresponding to multiple words will no longer be significant. Therefore, Table 1 just shows the top 40 highly repeated words.

We also identified the common places and differences in the highly repeated words (see

Table 2. The common places and differences in highly repeated words.

Words Appeared in Both	Words Only Appeared in OU	Words Only Appeared in IDE
education, learning, development, university, construction, college, service, major, country, modern, management, training, Internet, distance education, resource	open, community, lifelong learning, platform	students, adults, higher education, curriculum, quality, exam

Words appeared in both refers to the words which appeared in both introductory texts of the two models of distance institutions. Words only appeared in OU refers to the words which only appeared in the introductory texts of the OUs. Words only appeared in IDE refers to the words which only appeared in the introductory texts of IDEs.

). The Spearman correlation coefficient of the words which appeared in both introductory texts of the two modes of distance education institutions is 0.7395 (p = 0.0000). It can be seen that they are significantly related. The correlation between highly repeated words which appeared in both introductory texts of the two modes indicates significant consistency in the self-introductory texts of OUs and IDEs. Most of the highly repeated words are related to students, learning, and teaching. Both OUs and IDEs take teaching as their main function. The words “open” and “community” are highly repeated words in the OU corpus, but they did not appear in the top 40 highly repeated words of the IDE corpus. This reflects the difference in the educational philosophy of the two models of distance education. The word “student” is a highly repeated word that only appeared in the IDE corpus. Searching for the context of the word “student” shows that IDEs generally put forward the educational slogan of “student-centered education”. For example, The School of Distance Education of Beijing Institute of Technology proposes a school-running philosophy for all students’ learning and development.

3.1.2. Statistics of Word Clusters

Since the highly repeated word with the highest frequency in both corpora is “education”, we analyzed the word cluster based on the word “education” (see

Table 3. The word cluster based on the word “education”.

Ranking	OU	Frequency	IDE	Frequency
1	open education	95	continue education	221
2	continue education	76	Internet education	130
3	community education	67	adults’ education	68
4	lifelong learning	61	lifelong learning	38
5	learning society	43	learning society	28
6	vocational education	29	vocational education	19
7	adults’ education	18	teacher education	19
8	Internet education	17	international education	17
9	elderly education	16	primary education	8
10	disability education	9	open education	5

OU refers to the word cluster from OU corpus. IDE refers to the word cluster from IDE corpus.

). The word cluster formed by OUs’ use of “education” is much richer. This reflects the flexibility of OUs in running schools. The educational and teaching activities carried out by OUs are more extensive, including not only academic education but also extensive development of vocational education, community education, lifelong learning, adult education, elderly education, disability education, etc. Especially in community education, IDEs are not involved.

3.2. Results of Interviews

3.2.1. Learners’ Decision Making on Enrollment

The interviews with staff and students showed that many factors influence whether students choose an OU or IDE. These specifically include time cost, economic cost, social reputation, and advertisement.

Learners participating in distance education often face conflicts between work and study. Therefore, time convenience becomes an important factor in their decision making on enrollment. The convenience of examination time is also considered to be an important factor in the popularity of OUs. Examinations on admissions and studies are considered to be time-consuming; after all, it takes more time to prepare for exams. Whether there is an entrance exam often becomes an important consideration for students when making their choice. Often, the difficulty of the exams is low, or there are even no exams. This is an important reason why many students choose to study at OUs.

“OUs usually organize a one-day exam in the company. The leaders of the company often support this exam. However, IDEs usually organize online exams and the online exam often lasts a long time, so employees have to ask for leave from their leaders.”

(js03)

“The absence of entrance exams at the undergraduate level of open universities often becomes the primary consideration for students.”

(js02)

“The exam at my OU is very simple. However, the exams at IDEs are very difficult. I prefer to recommend OUs.”

(Xs03)

Economic cost refers to tuition fees. This is an important consideration for learners when choosing distance education institutions. Tuition fees at OUs are relatively cheap.

“The cost is definitely an important reason for students to choose, and the tuition fees of open universities are relatively cheaper.”

(js01)

“The tuition of IDEs in Hefei is about 6000 yuan per year. However, in Anhui OU, the tuition is about 4000 yuan per year. Moreover, OUs has preferential policies, such as participating in the ‘One Village, One University Student’ plan, etc., and there are discounts and exemptions when you actually register at Anhui OU. The actual tuition fee may be less than 4000 yuan per year.”

(js03)

With the same economic cost, learners will choose to enroll in an institution with a more valuable degree and better social reputation. In the enrollment market, the biggest advantage of IDEs over OUs is social reputation.

“The academic qualifications from the OUs are definitely not as valuable as IDEs. There will be pheasant universities in the market, which are too difficult to identify. Regular universities will be better (than the OU) in this regard.”

(Xs01)

“For the enrollment market, The biggest advantage of IDEs compared to OUs is their brand: Open universities are known as adult education at first glance and adult education doesn’t recognized by the public which is the disadvantage of open universities. Those who choose open universities do not care about the school brand, as long as they successfully obtain their graduation certificate. For those who choose IDEs, they pay much attention to the reputation of the university they graduate from, which will facilitate future promotion and career choices, and have higher aspirations.”

(js02)

Based on the interviews, advertisement was also shown to influence learners’ decision making on enrollment. Learners know little about the institutions of distance education, and they will be affected by the propaganda and guidance of admission staff. The effect of advertising investment on enrollment is also significant.

“In Anhui, there is an IDE which was chosen by most learners before 2019. After 2019, Anhui OU invested heavily in advertising. Now learners prefer to choose Anhui OU.”

(js01)

3.2.2. Learning Experience

The learning experience of distance education includes online learning experience and offline learning experience. All the learners who participated in this study are generally satisfied with their online learning experience at OUs and IDEs. The interviews show that there is no difference between the two models in terms of the aspects of educational resources, course design, and technical facilities. Compared to learners’ online learning experience, they prefer to talk more about their offline learning experience, and they think that offline learning is more valuable. Offline learning offers them the opportunity to enter their dream university campus and experience university life for real. Meanwhile, instructors are the key factor that influence learners’ online and offline learning experience.

“The online learning platform is quite convenient and very easy to use. Offline classes are more interesting than online learning, as offline learning allow discussions with classmates or group interactions.”

(Xs02)

“There are many learning materials on the platform and the slides are very good for self study.”

(Xs23)

“The technology is quite good. But the facial recognition technology in online exams is too bad. Anyway, I am very happy for having this learning opportunity.”

(Xs28)

“I cherish the opportunity to attend lectures on campus. You can learn online at any time. However, the motivation of learning offline is much stronger. After all, you haven’t had the opportunity to study for a long time after graduation. It is rare to sit in the classroom and study again. Moreover, you can interact with the teacher face to face and the questions could be solved in time.”

(Xs25)

“I feel that the instructors are quite responsible. They distributed many learning materials in the WeChat group and they are very patient to answer our questions.”

(Xs15)

“The teachers are all from prestigious universities, and it is very exciting to listen classes fromf well- known professors.”

(Xs32)

4. Discussion

As providers of distance education, the sustainable development of OUs and IDEs is important to expand higher education in developing countries [39] and ensure inclusive and equitable quality lifelong learning opportunities for all. This study found that OUs and IDEs have similar actual functions based on corpus analysis and interviews, which is a phenomenon of institutional isomorphism. A large number of studies have found that almost all organizations such as governments, enterprises, and educational institutions will experience institutional isomorphism due to legitimacy pressure [40]. The “legitimacy” question about an OU lies in whether it is a “university”, and the “legitimacy” question about an IDE lies in whether its distance education is “professional”. Therefore, OUs try to seek clear definitions of their educational attributes in terms of policy, and IDEs try to imitate OUs at the technical level, which is a process of strengthening its “legitimacy”. OUs’ self-introduction generally emphasizes that their academic degrees are “recognized by the state” and that they are “higher education institutions”. IDEs emphasize this less. This is because an OU has been criticized as “not a university”, while an IDE, often seen as the secondary college of an ordinary university, is considered to be naturally “a university”. Therefore, an OU would claim in its promotional texts that its “university” status is no different from that of ordinary universities. Meanwhile, government plays an important role in institutional isomorphism. Departmental adjustment, university mergers, higher education institution upgrades, university integration, etc., led by government, as well as university evaluation standards and resource allocation mechanisms, are all mandatory forces that lead to institutional isomorphism.

Though the actual functions of the two modes are similar, there are some differences in their official targeted development goals and learners’ decision making on enrollment. The corpus analysis shows that differences exist between the two models in terms of their development goals. OUs mainly serve for lifelong learning and community education. They are more flexible and diversified in terms of enrollment. For IDEs, they always target the higher education-appropriate population and organize teaching on traditional university campuses, which is similar to full-time higher education. The interviews show that OUs have advantages in terms of time cost and economic cost. Learners prefer to choose OUs because time arrangements are more convenient and tuition fees can be subsidized. IDEs usually have a good reputation because of the prestigious universities they are affiliated with. This is the most important reason why learners choose IDEs. However, all the learners who participated in this study were generally satisfied with their learning experience at OUs and IDEs. The interviews indicate that there is no difference between the two models in terms of the aspects of educational resources, course design, and technical facilities. Learners’ outcomes in terms of knowledge and ability acquisition are similar. However, learners prefer to learn offline, and IDEs can provide better offline learning experiences compared to OUs. These small differences do not conceal the nature of organizational convergence between the two modes.

Institutional isomorphism challenged the sustainable development of the two modes of institutions and had negative impacts on the diversification of higher education institutions. It blurs the boundaries between the two models, gradually losing their uniqueness and inevitably leading to a crisis in organizational sustainability. With the expansion of online education colleges in the field of distance education, the unique position of open universities is threatened, and open universities are facing a sustainable survival crisis. Globally, there are few governments that protect the unique status of open universities, but in China, the sustainable development of open universities has been protected by the government.

Recently, the policy of distance education in China has made significant adjustments. According to the new policy introduced by the Ministry of Education in China, IDEs will gradually restrict enrollment and eventually terminate undergraduate distance education. The policy orientation of OUs is to serve for lifelong learning, and the OUs of China are directly affiliated with the Ministry of Education. However, IDEs are affiliated with regular universities, where general higher education is focused on and distance education occupies a marginal position. Due to policy support, OUs have increased investment in advertising, and their visibility continues to increase. In the future, OUs will have advantages in terms of recruiting students. Due to different policy orientations and administrative affiliations, OUs have broader development prospects. Therefore, it is obvious that OUs will monopolize the market of distance education in China in the coming years. These adjustments in policy are related to the entire higher education system in China. In 1999, China initiated experimental reform in distance education. The Open University of China (OUC) and more than 60 regular universities, most of which were famous universities governed directly by the Ministry of Education, were permitted to develop distance education. At the same time, these famous regular universities were encouraged to build world-class universities. Degrees for distance education were believed to degrade these famous universities and harm the building of world-class universities. So, most prestigious “985-Project” universities terminated their distance undergraduate education, including Tsinghua University, Peking Universities, Hunan University, FuDan University, Zhejiang University, University of Science and Technology of China, Southeast University, Sun Yat-sen University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Wuhan University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Central South University. However, the opinion that undergraduate distance education will harm world-class universities is not confirmed by the international experience. Top universities such as Ivy League University in the USA and Oxford University in the UK offer distance education and award academic degrees, but their academic reputations have not been negatively affected. Therefore, the purpose of this policy adjustment is to enable two different modes of educational institutions to focus on their respective tasks in their professional fields, get back to their policy-oriented roles, concentrate resources and efforts to promote lifelong learning and world-class university construction, and ensure the diversity of the higher education system. It is necessary to use policy measures to guide the development of two types of distance education institutions in different directions, as China is a developing country, and ensuring that every learner has access to high-quality education remains a huge challenge. The differentiated and specialized development of two types of higher education institutions is conducive to solving their sustainable development crisis, concentrating efforts and resources, leveraging their respective advantages, and providing high-quality education opportunities for different populations.

5. Conclusions

Developing distance education is necessary for providing more inclusive and equitable quality educational opportunities for all, which is important for achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4. The report of the 19th National Congress of the CPC proposed to successfully continue education and online education. Obviously, meeting the diverse distance education market needs of such a large population is a great challenge. Undoubtedly, in China, distance education is an important part of higher education. The vitality and health of the distance education market are highly dependent on a diverse system. Institutional isomorphism will cause the crisis of institutions’ sustainable development. Differentiated development is beneficial for the sustainable development of the entire higher education ecosystem. In the future, open universities will focus on providing high-quality lifelong learning opportunities and become the only provider of distance education in China. It is necessary to establish competition and supervision mechanisms within and outside the entire open universities system. Overall, the advantages and disadvantages of the single model and dual model of distance education, as well as whether they can coexist, are some of the controversial issues in the international distance education community. The answers to these questions are largely related to the policy background and economic and social development status of specific countries. This article has compared two models in the Chinese context and provided a reference for the international distance education community. It must be noted that whether the reform of China’s distance education is reasonable remains to be tested.