Blog Assignment: Defining Distance Learning

Blog Assignment: Defining Distance Learning

My definition of distance learning was that it was a method of using the computer to deliver coursework.  That’s all!  Observations:  At first  I thought that it was very difficult and confusing (I remember how my enrollment advisor struggled to explain how to attach a document!), and I was afraid I was too old to be a distance learner.  I had heard stories about how people with poor organizational skills would fail, immediately, and I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the course work.

I was in high school and advanced placement classes, in the early ‘70s weren’t even a concept.  Computers we just being scaled down from the city-block sized Eniac card-readers and this was mainly due to the space program.  Some lucky students were able to take evening courses from the local community college, in the next town, so any enrichment had to come from correspondence courses.  This was even before the era of videos!  Your own classroom teacher had to proctor quizzes and tests.  I took courses from UC Berkeley and they came in huge boxes.  (An aside:  at one time, in the early part of this decade I assisted with our school district’s home-schooling program.  The district bought each home-schooled student a box of curriculum from Calvert – as was mentioned in the time-line video.  It curriculum was wonderful and “box” well-thought out from paper and crayons to art!  The concept was a hundred years old but it was still great.)

To be honest it wasn’t VCR or Beta Max that caught my attention about the possibilities of long-distance learning, but that of the facsimile machine.  I was in the Signal Corps.  We used clunky radio-teletype machines with oscilloscopes (not too different from those in 1950’s science fiction movies) and low-frequency radios to communicate throughout our military division.  In  1982 I saw a demonstration of a fax machine that could read signals that were so full of static no one could speak over them and produce an error-free printed page.  This was my first glimpse into what technology could do within the realm of communication.

My personal definition of distance learning changed quite a bit from those years, and it did this week, as well.  Especially reading the part two of the Moller, Forshay and Huett article in Tech Trends that addresses faculty issues, I learned that it seems that professors who teach classes designed by someone else have not received adequate pay, have not received enough time to become familiar with the course material, and still have to prove that they are worthy of receiving royalties for their intellectual work and tenure, too.  I expected that the institutions would be enlightened and would be accepting of all aspects of distance learning.  Apparently politics is as much of an issue in technology as in other parts of the academic world. 

My definition of distance learning is that it is a method of delivering course content to students through technological advances, both on-line, and in the classroom (I use, as classroom examples, technological devices that give students access to each other like the I-Phone and the availability of advanced applications such as Walden Library and Google Scholar).  Teaching students through rigorous courses, expectations of high-quality student response, and timely and thoughtful professorial feedback are still the object of distance and face-to-face learning. The same political, economic and social issues that students and professors face, anywhere, exist in distance learning, too.  

I feel that distance learning is tremendously responsive to technological and social advances and will continue to evolve to mirror advances in these fields.  What I firmly believe will be a strong factor in the development of distance learning is what I see in modern students, themselves.  In my opinion young people seem to be less competitive and more concerned for their fellow students.  This consideration crosses international boundaries, too, and gives students the motivation to provide service to others.  Distance learning, in my opinion, will give young people the ability to bring peace to our world.

Mind Map for Blog Assignment

References:

Moller, L., Foshay, W., & Huett, J. (2008). The evolution of distance education: Implications for instructional design on the potential of the web (Part 1: Training and development). TechTrends, 52(3), 70–75.

Moller, L., Foshay, W., & Huett, J. (2008). The evolution of distance education: Implications for instructional design on the potential of the web (Part 2: Higher education). TechTrends, 52(4), 66–70.

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.