Why Distance Learning?

In this episode of Why Distance Learning, Seth talks with Dr. Mark Deschaine - Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Mississippi and editor of the Journal of Contemporary Research in Education - about what online teacher preparation actually requires, and why this moment of institutional disruption represents a structural opening for distance learning. Deschaine draws on three decades of work at the intersection of online learning policy, special education research, and K-12 practitioner experience.

Together, Seth, Allyson and Mark explore why teacher preparation programs still treat online instruction as a digital extension of face-to-face teaching rather than its own discipline, and what the NSQOL standards actually get right (and why state adoption is uneven). They trace the structural roots of "à la carte education" — the pandemic-era shift in which parents bypassed school-provided content and found it wasn't that hard — and Mark argues it wasn't an anomaly but a preview. He walks through the three gojies — pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy — as a framework for understanding how learner agency changes across contexts, and makes the case that a heutagogical twelve-year-old with internet access could test out of their grade if the system would let them. The conversation builds toward a central claim: what traditional schooling sells isn't content, it's credential and trust — and right now, both are actively eroding through school choice legislation, educational savings accounts, and the dismantling of federal categorical funding. That erosion, Mark says, is where online learning's real opportunity lives. He closes with a preview of decentralized learning, soul-bound tokens as credentialing infrastructure, and the fourth "gogy" he's currently developing — agentagogy — a framework for learning with agentic AI he'll be presenting at AACTE.

Key topics:
  • Online teacher preparation as a distinct discipline (not technology added to traditional training)
  • NSQOL standards: what they are, why states adopt them, and where they fall short
  • À la carte education: the post-pandemic structural shift in family-school authority
  • Pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy — the three frameworks for learner agency
  • Credential and trust erosion in traditional schooling
  • Decentralized learning and soul-bound tokens as credentialing alternatives
  • Diffusion of Innovations: why the DLAC community matters
Links & Resources:
Guest Bio: Mark E. Deschaine, PhD
Mark Deschaine is a Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Mississippi, where he prepares MA, EdS, EdD, and PhD candidates for school and district leadership roles and serves as editor of the Journal of Contemporary Research in Education. His research focuses on online learning policy, special education in virtual school settings, and differentiated instruction — grounded in a practitioner career spanning building-level principal, special education teacher, and paraprofessional. He is a Research Fellow at Michigan Virtual and a Leadership Team Member for the National Standards for Quality Online Learning.

About the Hosts:
Seth Fleischauer is the founder and president of Banyan Global Learning and a host of Why Distance Learning. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual exchange programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators. Find Banyan at banyangloballearning.com.

Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring are co-hosts of Why Distance Learning and part of the team at CILC, the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, which connects students to real experts through live virtual field trips and experiences. Find CILC at cilc.org.

Why Distance Learning is available at whydistancelearning.transistor.fm.

Creators and Guests

Host
Allyson Mitchell
SF
Host
Seth Fleischauer
TM
Host
Tami Moehring

What is Why Distance Learning??

Why Distance Learning? is a podcast about the decisions, design choices, and assumptions that determine whether live virtual learning becomes shallow and transactional—or meaningful, relational, and effective at scale.

The show is designed for education leaders, instructional designers, and system-level practitioners responsible for adopting, scaling, and sustaining virtual, hybrid, and online learning models. Each episode examines the structural conditions under which distance learning actually works—and the predictable reasons it fails when it doesn’t.

Through conversations with researchers, experienced practitioners, and field-shaping leaders, Why Distance Learning? translates research, field evidence, and lived experience into decision-relevant insight. Episodes surface real tradeoffs, near-failures, and hard-won lessons, equipping listeners with clear framing and language they can use to explain, defend, or redesign distance learning models in real organizational contexts.

Hosted by Seth Fleischauer of Banyan Global Learning, and Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, the podcast challenges outdated narratives about distance learning and explores what becomes possible when live virtual education is designed intentionally, human-centered, and grounded in evidence.

# Why Distance Learning — Dr. Mark Deschaine, Part 1
# Clean Transcript (cuts applied)
# *Timestamps after first cut are approximate*
# *Note: Obvious stutters and false starts have been lightly cleaned for readability.*

---

**[INTRO — recorded separately]**

[00:00:00] Seth: Hello, and welcome to Why Distance Learning, the podcast for education leaders and practitioners who are making real decisions about how virtual learning gets designed, adopted, and sustained. I'm Seth Fleischauer, founder and president of Banyan Global Learning, and my cohosts are Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration. Every episode we try to surface at least one assumption worth questioning.

My guest today is Dr. Mark Deschaine, Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Mississippi and editor of the Journal of Contemporary Research in Education.

This is Part 1 of our conversation with Mark — he'll be back.

The assumption on the table today: that improving online learning is primarily a design and preparation problem — get the instructional design right, train teachers properly, follow the standards, and quality follows. Mark largely agrees, but ends up somewhere more unsettling: the structures that have given traditional schooling its authority — credentials, state mandates, accreditation — are actively eroding, and online learning isn't just filling a gap in those structures. It may be part of what's replacing them.

This episode is brought to you by CILC, the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, connecting students to real experts through live virtual field trips and experiences — visit cilc.org to learn more. And by Banyan Global Learning, which brings K-12 classrooms face to face with global peers and expert facilitators through live, thematic international exchange programs — find them at banyangloballearning.com.

---

[00:00.887] Seth: Mark, welcome to the programme.

[00:02.722] Mark Deschaine: Thank you.

[00:04.439] Seth: So this first question — honestly, I could ask one question and we might be talking for 40 minutes — your research argues that online teaching is a distinct environment requiring its own teacher preparation. When the pandemic started and everybody was doing emergency learning, everyone who'd been in the industry for a long time was raising their hand to say this very thing. A general question for you: what does preparation designed specifically for online environments actually look like, versus what most programs are doing?

[00:54.232] Mark Deschaine: Well, when we start using terms like "most" and "all" and "have to," I kind of bristle, because there is so much diversity in learning and teaching opportunities, especially in the online learning environment. The nomenclature we use, how we define things, how we measure things — things that are important in one area may not be important in another because you might have extra funding or finances. Here in Mississippi, we have the Delta, which is traditionally very impoverished with very few resources, which is different from down near the Capitol in Jackson where they have a lot more capabilities.

But ultimately, when you start looking at traditional educational programs — and when I mean traditional, I'm talking about traditional public schools — we have to make that distinction between public schools with the lockstep curriculum, charter schools with a little more flexibility, parochial schools, online schools, home schools, the like. We can no longer talk about "a place called school." If you haven't read that book, John Goodlad did a study years ago asking what does traditional school look like.

Traditional school, in my mind, starts with the states. States have the constitutional responsibility to set program standards and requirements. Several states have done a very good job of articulating what that looks like for online programs and schools. But then you have to wrestle with how does that fit into an accountability structure? How does that fit into teaching preparation programs? What about professional learning? How do accreditation programs — AQIP or CAPE — deal with pre-service teacher development in online schools? And they very seldom touch it.

So then you have to look at what supports are out there that really make sense. The NSQOL standards are a wonderful good start. They have standards for course development, course design, online teaching, online programs, and now a new set for online leadership. When you look at what the profession is doing, sometimes there are outside groups that have to step in and say there's a need here that states can't fill on their own.

The reason it's difficult to talk about "online learning schools" is that depending on where you are, you may not have a virtual school that's been accepted by the state. The challenge from a research perspective is how do we get portability with our findings? Quantitative measures are very difficult in online learning. We need to be much more qualitative. We need to let practitioners in the field tell their story — give us an opportunity to learn from their lived experiences and let them tell the folks in charge what's working and what isn't. Part of my job preparing graduate students — especially doctoral students in our EdD program — is to make them a mouthpiece for the programs they're passionate about so that people in positions of authority listen.

[07:24.949] Seth: I think what you're describing is a common dynamic within social sciences where it's very difficult to establish a control. These phenomena are incredibly difficult to isolate. That's even more true in education. Any given classroom is a product of its own classroom culture, school culture, city culture, state culture, country culture — distinct from the classroom next door, let alone the classroom on the other side of the world. That's the portability problem you're talking about. At the same time, you identify the national standards for quality online learning as something you have trust in. How do you square those two things — the difficulty of making research widely applicable, and belief in these sets of standards? What gives you the confidence?

[07:46.027] Mark Deschaine: Let's look at the idea of high-leverage practices in toto. Going back to No Child Left Behind, there was a strong push toward empiricism — materials and methodologies need to be found efficacious. That's where the What Works Clearinghouse came from. IDEA said everything needs to be empirically sound. But the problem is, when you talk about empiricism, a lot of times people want to use the bell curve and standardization. And not every behavior we're attempting to deal with in education has enough of an N for you to get a level of reliability from a coefficient.

There's a lot of differentiation with place-based learning — rural, urban, suburban; north, south; and if you're in a very rural area, you may have a technology desert as well as a food desert. We have to look at a number of different variables to figure out how we move the needle for everybody.

Standards are a nice goalpost — a way to set not just the floor, but to say this is what the profession thinks is important. But then you have different standards groups. CAPE and AQIP both move educator prep programs through accreditation, but they look entirely different.

A lot of states — Idaho, Hawaii, Vermont, South Carolina, Wyoming, Pennsylvania — have not taken it upon themselves to recreate the wheel. They say: let's go to the NSQOL standards. So where does my confidence come from? It's not that this is definitely best — it's always going to get better. It's a nice starting point. But the policymakers who drive what we're supposed to be doing have confidence in these standards. That's not to say I just abdicate my professional value judgments. There's a reason I put my time in with that group — I want to have input into what happens in this field. And a lot of times my voice has to be around students with disabilities.

[11:52.529] Seth: You're in the room where it happens. That's cool.

[12:02.446] Allyson: It's exciting to hear about the rooms where things are happening, and also the idea of standards as a goalpost — because the way you get there is going to be a little different no matter who you are. When you look at the "digital pivot of 2020," you wrote about parents bypassing school-provided content in favor of their own online resources, and you suggested it wasn't an anomaly — it was a preview of something structural. What does that shift mean for those who write curricula? Are the NSQOL standards what you'd point them toward? Can you unpack that research?

[13:32.887] Mark Deschaine: That paper — "À la Carte Education" — came out of academia.edu. They reached out and said they wanted to try a different perspective on publishing called Academia Papers, with a focus on how the pandemic was impacting things. My first thought was: we have given people a taste of something different. Now that parents have experienced this flexibility, how are traditional schools going to respond when they come asking for the same level of flexibility you forced them into?

The crux of it was: from a professional administrative policy perspective, you're not going to be able to say no when they come with a very similar request. What we're seeing now is statewide school of choice, the Tim Tebow Act in many states where homeschool students can participate in local school athletics. This dismantling of traditional schooling started a long time ago. My crystal ball told me years ago that in the not-too-distant future, the only people who will have face-to-face mentoring and education opportunities will be the rich — because technology is moving so quickly that content is easily accessible.

You've got YouTube videos, and there are studies showing how many YouTube hours teachers integrate into their curriculum. Khan Academy — when Khan came up with that idea, he was putting together math tutorials for his niece and nephew. Look how that exploded. You've got Teachers Pay Teachers, Outschool, all sorts of Montessori materials online. I don't care what kind of educational opportunity you're looking for, there is content out there. And now with AI — how difficult is it to say, "My kid is four years old, I want to teach them to read, give me some resources"?

The thing I think we need to get back to is some old-school stuff. Are you familiar with John Dewey? There's one I want you to pick up: The Sources of a Science of Education, written in 1929. It's on Project Gutenberg. Dewey really said education is a unique animal — a confabulation of science, psychology, and sociology — and because of that it's very difficult to pin down empirically. He wrestled with empiricism himself, warning that seeking external prestige through precise mathematical validation risks turning science into a rule-of-thumb empiricism.

If we're truly going to deal with the realities of learning and teaching — and I want a stronger emphasis on learning than teaching, because when we talk about teaching we're concerned about teacher behaviors, and when we talk about learning we're concerned about student behaviors — we have to look at what I call the three gojies. I don't want to spoil it entirely because I'm working on a fourth. You've got pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy.

Pedagogy conceptualizes how we deal with the educational needs of children — the tabula rasa, the blank slate. The sage on the stage, the omnipotent adult pouring content into the kid. Then in the 1950s, Malcolm Knowles said: why are we using instructional supports designed for children on adults? Adults come with interest, ability, experience, and prerequisite knowledge. They may want to do things differently. So he developed andragogy — adult learning theory. With the advent of the internet, heutagogy emerged: self-directed learning theory.

So if you've got a twelve-year-old heutagogical learner who has access to all this content, and if truly allowed to, they could test out of whatever grade they're in. Why don't we have more support for competency-based learning environments? Because our systems aren't built that way — we're enrollment-driven for our state foundational allowance. The à la carte piece really pairs with the heutagogical perspective: you've got kids who don't hate school, they hate the lack of agency in their learning.

[22:24.16] Seth: I feel like you're describing things I perceive within the context of my own kids. That idea of a heutagogical twelve-year-old learner driving their own learning experience through agency — I think that generally, especially in online learning but also in traditional learning, we've been pivoting more toward something that supports that type of learner, at least in the Western world. You've written a paper that distinguishes between individualization, differentiation, personalization — I have a question around that — but it feels like this is a discussion that is active in the educational community, maybe not always with these terms. Do you agree that the world looks better for a heutagogical learner nowadays than it did five years ago, before the pandemic? Definitely more than twenty years ago — before Sir Ken Robinson on YouTube, before some of these progressive educational ideas got out there. Is this a time when we're considering that a valid learning path, and that there are supports in place even at traditional schools to make it successful?

[24:24.691] Mark Deschaine: I really want to answer in a way without giving away some of the work I'm doing — I don't want anyone to steal it before I get a chance to publish it. But I can refer to something we'll have on YouTube. Are you familiar with blockchain technology?

[24:52.612] Seth: Yes.

[24:53.123] Allyson: Yes.

[24:54.933] Mark Deschaine: Are you familiar with the concept of decentralization?

[24:59.79] Seth: Yes. For our listeners, blockchain essentially decentralizes the hard drive into all of these different nodes that have the complete record of the body of knowledge you're talking about. So if one gets wiped out, every other one has it, and that creates trust in the information.

[25:23.659] Mark Deschaine: Yep. There is no single point of failure. There's built-in redundancy. Things that go on it tend to be immutable — they can't change. They're transparent; you can follow an element throughout the process.

*[CUT #4 applied — ~42 seconds removed. Timestamps approximate from here.]*

[25:40 *(approx)*] Mark Deschaine: I'm going to be working on a paper about decentralized learning, where we take things like prior learning credits, examples of heutagogical learners — a kind of personal learning portfolio. Let's say you're into gardening and you get a master gardener certificate, or you're a Boy Scout and you have a badge saying you're competent in this. There's something called a soul-bound token — S-O-U-L — where you're essentially packaging your credentials into this immutable system. This whole idea of credentialing is changing so dramatically. So much so that even the traditional structures are disintegrating rather quickly. Just before I came on today, I saw a news item saying the governor of Texas is mandating that colleges and universities put together three-year undergraduate programs.

Three-year undergraduate programs. So what stays in the curriculum? Are we going to get rid of language arts? Greek literature? There are going to be a lot of decisions about what is acceptable — not can you teach it, but should you teach it. We have the repository of most of the world's learning online. You can access whatever you want. So what is that going to do to teaching mechanisms when the learning opportunities are so pervasive and powerful?

[28:47.992 *(approx)*] Allyson: That's another question I have, especially around heutagogy. My understanding is that the primary research there is really self-directed and asynchronous. Since the digital pivot of 2020, synchronous opportunities are much more available for self-directed learners. But it feels like there isn't a really strong theoretical framework that helps synchronous learning serve that self-directed learner. Have you noticed that gap? Is it intentional?

[30:31.561 *(approx)*] Mark Deschaine: What is the draw to traditional learning? It could be rhetorical — I'll give you my answer. It is credentialing. Why do people have so much faith and trust in educational structures? Because we have a curriculum aligned to standards blessed by governmental structures. They give out licenses and certifications, they provide financial support. What traditional education sells is credential. Trust.

[31:30.308 *(approx)*] Seth: Trust.

[31:30.924 *(approx)*] Mark Deschaine: Exactly — based on trust. But right now, a lot of that trust is eroding. That's why you see parents taking alternative opportunities. And to some extent, I think the government is contributing to that erosion. Statewide school of choice. Educational savings accounts — the state giving families a grant that essentially absolves the state of its responsibility to educate your child, and you can take it wherever you want.

So when you talk about this whole trust-and-credential thing, there's an amorphous dismantling happening. And then if you want to talk about the Tenth Amendment — states constitutionally are responsible for the provision of education — what happens to programs that are highly dependent on categorical federal funding and compliance mechanisms, like special education? If special education was not mandated by federal law, and if states did not apply for those grants and monies, does special education have to exist the way it's written now? Probably not.

What's going to happen to Perkins money for career technical education? What's going to happen to English language monies? McKinney-Vento homeless monies? Are they going to be block-granted? And if so, the state has an opportunity to use those federal funds differently. What does this have to do with digital learning? Everything. I live in Oxford here — we've got the university, yet technological infrastructure is abysmal not too far from campus. Internet connectivity was never really an issue. But the point is that we are in such a flux of technological development and integration, parental choice, student capability and disability, policy dismantling and rearranging, and an emphasis moving very much toward workforce development.

No Child Left Behind had a college-and-career-ready focus. But what got the bulk of attention? It was college. High-stakes testing, high-stakes curriculum. Now with the advent of AI, with ubiquitous access to all this content — if Neuralink comes and you want to learn automobile mechanics, you just put it in. You don't need teaching and learning anymore. All of this stuff is happening simultaneously. We haven't even talked about quantum computing and how that's going to upend everything. So you generously invite me on, and I try to teach my doctoral students: do you have any clue what we're preparing you for? I don't. What is tea—

[36:01.754 *(approx)*] Seth: What do you do then? You said when we chatted beforehand that you're a professor and you are paid to profess. At some point you have to talk not just about how we got here but about where we're going, because it's a forward-facing industry. In a situation where the world is rapidly changing and anyone who speaks honestly must admit they have no idea where it's going — how do we prepare students for that uncertain future? And what is the role of online learning in all of that?

[36:43.501 *(approx)*] Mark Deschaine: If I had my way — if I get elected king — there's a line I use in my classes: we need to utilize existing systems of support within our existing systems. Where we don't have supports, we have to rob Peter to pay Paul. Not just in terms of resource allocation, but what does best practice tell us and why are we so constrained in our silos?

Most of my career I've been a special educator. That work is highly, intensely attentive to laws, rules, regulations — least restrictive environment, free and appropriate public education. You have present level of academic achievement and functional performance. You need to write good goals and objectives based on student need, with an idea of where you want them to be after a year. What materials and methodological supports are you going to put into place? What if they need a school nurse? Specialized transportation? At age fourteen, you have to address transition: how do we get them prepared so that when they leave school, hopefully with a diploma, they're able to be employed or live functionally in their environment? All of that is dictated by an individualized learning plan — an IEP.

So if we're going to rob Peter to pay Paul and utilize existing systems of support in areas where we don't have supports — how about if we take the IEP idea and make it into an individualized learning plan for everybody?

[39:22.358 *(approx)*] Seth: For everybody? Is that your decentralized learning idea?

[39:27.945 *(approx)*] Mark Deschaine: Absolutely. Now you're getting it. There's also going to be a dismantling of traditional structures. I foresee eleventh and twelfth grade levels very quickly melding into community college, because the movement is going to be away from career technical education and toward a workforce development perspective. And there's a reason why the president, when he dismantled the Department of Education, moved the general ed stuff to the Department of Labor. What does that tell you?

[40:15.546 *(approx)*] Seth: It tells you what education is for.

[40:18.281 *(approx)*] Mark Deschaine: Where the emphasis is — or at least the publicly supported aspect. This is where all of this technology and people having agency is so important. We have to step forward and talk about what are our needs, our desires, our wants, and how can these traditional structures of compliance, finance, certification, and accreditation actually serve us? What are we doing in some states with Hope Scholarships and educational funding plans?

I don't think people are understanding the direction this is moving. And online learning has such a dramatic opportunity. Look at what Florida did. Look at what Michigan did — I'm very proudly still affiliated with Michigan Virtual as a research fellow. Look at what they did with the 21F program years ago. The state said online learning is so important that every student should have access to an online learning opportunity. They created Michigan Virtual, said we are going to provide direct instructional delivery of content, and any student who wants to access it — if your local district doesn't offer it, you can take it from the statewide course catalog. What's going to happen now? I told them they need to monetize it. Why not start selling that to other states that don't have it?

What is the president doing with the American Bar Association? He's trying to say you're not the only game in town from a credentialing perspective for lawyers. I could see organizations like NSQOL taking a much larger potential role. We have national standards for online courses, national standards for online teaching, national standards for online programs, and national standards for online leadership. How about national standards for individualized learning opportunities? That doesn't exist. But if we were to move into that heutagogical, decentralized learning — who else could put it together?

[43:28.782 *(approx)*] Seth: I heard a term recently — the balkanization of American education — and I think that's kind of what you're talking about. Institutions are failing. The trust that people have in many institutions is degrading. At the same time, not completely — they still engender trust from many people. But other sources of trust are emerging. It sounds like while trust has been concentrated in a certain number of entities, those entities are being broken up and there are other sources of trust emerging in this new landscape. And that's where online learning has a ton of opportunity. Is that about right?

[44:52.407 *(approx)*] Mark Deschaine: Yeah. Online learning, if you really look at it — people wanted to go after quality in traditional learning, and online learning became a way to put pressure on face-to-face behemoths to fall into line and do better.

[45:17.434 *(approx)*] Seth: And I think about the crazy amount of flux you described and how online learning — when I go to DLAC and I'm among the community, it's amazing to me how people are such go-getters and problem solvers, because they've had to make something out of nothing over and over. They don't have the same supports that traditional schools have — they've had to invent and iterate. In times of flux, never waste a good crisis. There's always opportunity for people to create something new, and I think that's what this podcast is about.

[46:00.686 *(approx)*] Mark Deschaine: Thank you, Rahm Emanuel.

[46:26.677 *(approx)*] Mark Deschaine: One of the things I really think people are not prepared for is the rapidity of change. Traditional organizations move very slowly. There's an inertia — once something starts down the path, it's very difficult for it to stop or reconsider. Ray Francis and I came up with the idea of the Process Improvement Guidelines as a way to expand beyond the traditional Plan-Do-Study-Act. Those four elements are too small. Organizations start too quickly before they've really prepared.

What they need to do first is prepare. Is the organization ready? Are individuals ready? Do we have the resources? Is there a willingness to go in a direction? Do we have the time? Then you have to prioritize — what is most salient? We don't take good baseline data. Then you plan, then you implement, then you evaluate. And between all of those expanded elements, we put a reflective practice piece — from Schön's The Reflective Practitioner — where you identify issues, explore potential solutions, and resolve challenges. It's an IER: Identify, Explore, Resolve. By putting that between each part of the Process Improvement Guidelines, you have a lot of reflection where people can stop and say, come back and go forward.

And then on top of all of that, we place the Five Cs of digital curation that I did with Sue Sharma — as an institutional memory repository where organizations collect, categorize, critique, conceptualize, and circulate. Organizations are at different levels. There's a researcher named Jodi Spiro at the Wallace Foundation — she's got a PDF that reconceptualizes the idea of change very quickly.

Which brings us back to — are you familiar with Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations? He says you've got innovators — about 2% of any organization — who really don't care what anyone else thinks. They've got a vision and they're moving. And in the past, they had to travel to find their tribe. But with the internet, innovators can coalesce around a topic — through Reddit, through communities. Then you've got the early majority, who look at what innovators have done and start doing it themselves. Then the early majority who say, they're starting to do this, we'd better step in because we'll eventually be held accountable. Then the latter majority who begrudgingly come along. And then the laggards: go ahead, try to make me.

You know who you have at the DLAC, Seth? You've got a lot of innovators and early adopters. They've found their people. They're taking online learning and making it better, because they need to make it better for the thing they're passionate about — their kids. And I think that's where advocacy ultimately comes down to: how do you harness your passion to meet some need? And how do you get the supports to make that happen?

You supposedly brought me on here to talk about research. I've moved us wherever. But it ultimately comes down to: people who have a passion and a focus for innovation now have the tools, supports, and flexibility — in fact, the encouragement from the dismantling of the traditional — to actually make that happen. And that's only going to accelerate.

[52:32.782 *(approx)*] Allyson: That makes me think of the Zappa quote — without deviating from the norm, progress is not possible. Change can be a really positive thing if you put the right people in place and you're prepared, not just doing this in theory.

[52:42.723 *(approx)*] Mark Deschaine: Allyson, just shut up and play your guitar, would ya?

[52:50.354 *(approx)*] Allyson: I told you I had to bring the arts into it a little bit.

[53:15.354 *(approx)*] Seth: Professor Mark Deschaine — it's the name of the podcast — Why Distance Learning?

[53:22.573 *(approx)*] Mark Deschaine: Because it offers an option and an opportunity for learners that does not necessarily exist within traditional four-walls, bricks-and-mortar school. And if you are within a bricks-and-mortar school, distance learning offers an opportunity for options. It allows for acceleration and support. I'm not happy with the fact that we place kids in front of computers for credit recovery with very little adult interaction and people want to call that distance learning. But that goes back to the nomenclature — what distance learning is. Distance learning is going to do nothing but grow and accelerate.

I'll tell you this — I'm going to spoil it a little. I'm working on a presentation for AACTE with a colleague from Saginaw Valley State University up in Michigan, and we're taking the three gojies and turning them into a fourth. We're going to call it agentagogy — how are we using agentic AI within that whole theoretical structure? It has a lot to do with Maslow, agency, and all sorts of fun stuff. And if anybody wants to steal that idea, you better reference this podcast, because it's now on the record.

[55:01.554 *(approx)*] Seth: Well, now it's on the record. Professor Deschaine, thank you so much for joining us here today.

[55:07.969 *(approx)*] Mark Deschaine: Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

[55:09.166 *(approx)*] Allyson: Thank you.

---

**[OUTRO — recorded separately]**

That's a wrap on Part 1 of our conversation with Dr. Mark Deschaine.

His framing of what traditional education actually sells — not content, but credential and trust — is worth sitting with, especially as both are genuinely up for grabs right now. If states are handing out education savings accounts, parents walked away from school-provided curriculum during the pandemic and found it wasn't that hard, and a motivated learner can access most of the world's knowledge from a phone, the question for anyone building online programs isn't just whether the instruction is good — it's why learners should come to you at all.

In Part 2, Mark gets into how individualization, differentiation, personalization, and presence are actually four different things, the Five Cs of digital curation, and what he's calling agentagogy — a framework for learning with agentic AI that he's currently developing. Thanks for listening to Why Distance Learning, and we'll see you next time.