I. Wk 1 Assignment: Define Distance Education

Our understanding of distance education has naturally developed over time but also seems to have progressed exponentially with the advent of electronics and those little things called micro-chips and sub-processors.  I dare say that if you ask most people about distance education they will usually think of e-learning and online learning.  Forgotten are the days of the old correspondence courses that were offered for professional development, not for academic, degree-seeking programs.  But in time that changed and as our main text reveals, by the beginning of the 20^th century, colleges were getting in on the deal and offering first correspondence courses for certain academic courses and eventually for an entire degree program.

The first influence of technology was, of course, the use of radio and records as the medium for distance education. These forms of the phenomena lacked the important component of 2-way synchronous communication and interaction that made these courses perhaps more challenging to take and complete than the highly interactive e-learning courses of today.  The radio, as has been true in the commercial market, was eventually superseded by television and eventually closed-circuit television which provided first of all the visual element to education and human relations and also eventually allowed for the telephone to be used as a tool making the communication 2-way and synchronous.

In the 80s I participated in the Eastern Virginia Writing Project and my project was one of ten selected to be presented on local cable TV for English and writing teachers in the Williamsburg area.  A video camera was set up in my school’s library for the session and we used the regular landline telephone for asking and answering questions.  The local station videotaped the sessions and that was the equivalent of today’s archiving web-conferences, available for viewing by those not able to attend the live session.

Of course, the cathode ray tubes of television were eventually replaced with circuit boards and transistors and micro-processors.  We were entering the age of the computer with user-friendly interfaces and wired networks which eventually gave way to wireless networks like the World Wide Web.  All of this is what makes up the internet which now seems to be the only form that one thinks of concerning distance education.  The interest in social learning has led to other phenomena that seem to be part-and-parcel of distance education.  That’s the integration of social tools such as Twitter and Facebook, but also the use of social viewing through YouTube, Vimeo or Slideshare and Prezi.

What will be the next avenue taken in the advancement of distant education?  I suspect it will come through the phenomenon of open education.  Whereas distance education currently has the appearance of academic institutional-ization, open education suggests the idea that education truly can’t be bound by corporations or academic institutions but conforms with the thought that knowledge is free and should be made available to everyone.  Of course, many will want to get credit for what they learn for free, and open education will probably succeed at developing a system that acknowledges a person’s achievement in learning.