Reflecting on 30+ Years of Distance Education Leadership: Retiring WCET Executive Director Russ Poulin

When Russ Poulin began working with WCET 30 years ago, distance education looked very different than it does now. This was prior to web browsers making the internet accessible, and the leading edtech was room-to-room video between institutions and telecourses using the television broadcast bandwidth or television satellites. Poulin even remembers one project that involved a plane with a broadcast antenna circling over the transmission area.

Poulin had been involved in establishing room-to-room video programs throughout North Dakota. Because the state’s population is distributed thinly over a large area, the local joke, Poulin says, is that “North Dakota is a mid-size city with very long streets. So there was a lot of need and a lot of interest in distance education. One of the things that got me working on it was the need for healthcare in rural areas.”

In particular, that early distance education technology was especially taken up by nursing and social work programs to extend training to the distant neighborhoods of the state, and it was also an important resource for tribal institutions.

Up until then, most distance education projects were within a single state’s system, but in the early 1990s WCET was beginning to develop multi-state initiatives, which Poulin was brought on to support. “That was a fun short-term project that was only supposed to be a couple of years,” he says. “And now, 30 years later, I’m still here.”

Until Dec. 31, that is, when Poulin retires as the WCET Executive Director. In between then and now, he has been a leader in innovative instruction and student support, federal and state policy, and building strategic alliances to support distance education.

From margin to center

Reflecting on what has changed in distance education during his career, Poulin points to the significance it plays in education overall.

“Quite often it would be off in these continuing education units, and I’m not sure some of the faculty even knew it was there,” he says. “It slowly grew over time, and then there was more use of the same digital technologies in the regular classrooms.”

The Covid-19 emergency accelerated that cultural change, and “we’ve gone from this being this little thing way off on the edge to something like 57 or 59 percent of students take at least one distance ed course in a year, and that doesn’t count hybrid courses.”

Now most on-campus faculty are incorporating asynchronous elements into their traditional courses, and many want to include online courses in their own schedule. “Distance ed is pervasive throughout the entire institution now,” he says. “We don’t always want to acknowledge that and build the infrastructure to reflect that. But the demand is there.”

Poulin says another example of how distance learning has moved from margin to center is Every Learner Everywhere itself — a nonprofit devoted, along with its 13 partner organizations, to encouraging evidence-based and equitable implementations of digital learning technology.

“I thank the funders for entrusting WCET with this important mission and serving as Every Learner’s home,” he says. “Of course, the progress can be credited to the hard work of the Every Learner partners and the dedicated staff.”

Changing use cases

Poulin says the term “distance education” itself points to how the demand for digital learning has evolved. At first it was about bridging distances like the 300-mile long streets in North Dakota.

Then it began to be valued for removing limitations on time — allowing people to access learning despite scheduling conflicts and irrespective of how remote the student was from campus.

Lately, distance education is seen more as a means to overcome institutional, cultural, or other barriers. A full-time student living on campus — with no significant barriers to distance and scheduling — might still prefer digital learning for other reasons. For example, non-native speakers or students with learning disabilities might benefit from recording or captioning features in distance courses.

Technological change — ubiquitous internet, smartphones, AI — tends to prompt new use cases. What’s evergreen, says Poulin, is that the distance ed field is on the vanguard and always adapting.

“Change has been a problem for higher education, writ large,” he explains. “We’re very much stuck in industrial models that go back to the 1900s. Whereas the people in distance ed always know something is going to change every year, and they’re ready for that. That’s a different mindset. They have an ethos of, ‘How do we get to more students?” There’s always experimentation going on that we don’t see across the entire campus.”

Movie stuff at the end

Poulin says he hopes to see a change in how distance education is represented in movies and television, where it is usually the butt of a joke. (e.g., A character’s online dental school degree in Wild Hogs. The comic villain Sue Sylvester’s online doctorate in Glee.) One recent exception he admired is The Whale, in which Brendan Fraser plays a housebound writing teacher who connects successfully with the students in his online courses.

Some readers may feel this reference to movies is an odd turn in the conversation, but WCET membership will recognize the homage. For the last 10 years, Poulin has concluded his email digests to the membership by sharing his enthusiasm for movies, often a review of what he’s seen recently. Sadly, with Poulin’s retirement, WCET will miss his upcoming takes on Wicked, Emilia Perez, A Complete Unknown, September 5, and the rest of the movies he’s looking forward to seeing soon.

Even more, the Every Learner Learner network will miss his leadership in distance education. Good luck, Russ!