What is distance education?
Distance education can be defined as the delivery of instruction to students who are separated from his or her teacher by time / or location. Many colleges have adopted this idea of moving information rather than people and have applied it to the delivery of instruction. If you are taking a distance education class, you probably would not see your teacher on a regular basis or see your teacher at all. Most communication will be through email and system like Blackboard. For example, a student is working on an assignment at night and he or she has a question about the assignment. The teacher is not in her office. The student can email the teacher from his or her home computer. Then the teacher will get the email either at her home computer or when she gets to the office in the morning. The teacher can email the answer to the student. The teacher would not get the question until the morning in this scenario, the teacher and student to be separated by both time and place. This type of instructional interaction is the core of distance education.
Technology is the key to providing a format for academic communication and exchange. Technology is the key to success with distance learning. Most students that use distance education to complete their education to complete their education have a full time job and probably a family also. Distance education was developed to deliver instruction to students in remote rural locations. Distance education used to be completed through mail correspondence courses or the teacher would have to travel to the rural area. But with the advancement in technology, the teacher can stay in the comfort of her office and communicate with the students. Technology has made the response time a lot faster.
What types of support are critical to the success of distance education? Why?
Supporting technology that are available or that need to implement the instructional design. In distance education, these technology fall into two broad categories, technologies that support synchronous and asynchronous distance education. A synchronous distance education example is when a teacher requires the students to log into a chat room at a specific time. The students that participating in the class meet at the same time but in different location. Examples of tools used for delivery of synchronous technology are the telephone, broadcast video, radio broadcast, internet chat, and videoconferencing. Asynchronous distance education is time shifted; which means that the teacher and students can participate at different time and from different locations. An example of asynchronous distance education class is one that is conducted over the internet like our class. We all work at our convenience. Examples of delivery methods of asynchronous distance education are voicemail or fax, videocassette, audiocassette, internet conferencing, email, and print materials. All of asynchronous and synchronous distance education classes are conducted in an internet classroom sites like Blackboard. If the teachers and students do not that have support needed for distance learning, there will not be any success. Teachers need to be prepared and keep up on the new technologies.
That is one negative about distance learning, isn't it, that you do not have immediate access to the instructor. However, I believe distance learning makes you plan and organize your time more diligently than normal. There is so many tools you can use with distance learning. Many teachers just do not use them or cannot use them.
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