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Handbook of Distance Education

By: Michael Grahame Moore; William G. Anderson | Book details

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47
Modeling the Costs and Economics
of Distance Education
Greville Rumble
Independent Consultant
greville.rumble@btinternet.com
The costs of educational technology are of increasing interest to academics, government, international agencies, and development agencies. The relatively new discipline of the economics of education, initiated in the United Kingdom by Vaizey (1958) and in the United States by Schultz (1961), focused on attempts to quantify the economic benefits of, and the efficiency of public expenditure on, education. In parallel, the application of technology to education came to be seen as a way of lowering the costs of education (Jamison, Suppes, & Wells, 1974, p. 57). The use of technology would, it was argued, change the production function, offering what Wagner (1982, p. ix) later described as “a mass production alternative to the traditional craft approach. The scene was therefore set for academic economists to take an interest the in possible impact of technology on educational costs.
COSTING DISTANCE EDUCATION
Broadly one can identify four generations of distance education systems:
correspondence systems (referred to below as Class I systems),
educational broadcasting systems (Class II systems),
multimedia distance education systems (Class III systems), and
online distance education systems (Class IV systems).

These distinctions are not, of course, as clear-cut in practice as typologies of distance education make them appear. Nevertheless, they offer a useful framework within which to consider the costs of distance education in its various “ideal” forms.

It was the development of capital-intensive, big-budget Class II and III systems that forced governments and aid agencies to ask how much these systems would cost, at the same time

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