Week 11 reflection

Week Eleven (Chapter Nine & Ten)
3. What is distance education? What types of support are critical to the success of distance education? Why?
Distance education is defined as the delivery of instruction to students who are separated from their teacher by time and/ or location. There are many ways of using distance education, and many different technologies in which a teacher can utilize in order to make distance education successful. One way that distance education can be used is if a student wants to take courses from a college located in a different state. What the student would do is sign up for an online class in which the teacher would prepare a syllabus and lesson plan, along with assessments, grading information, and resources. The possibilities are very great when it comes to distance education. No longer do the teacher and the student have to be in the same location in order to make a class setting work.
Distance education has come from something as simple as mailing text materials and using a telephone with a speakerphone on it all the way to videoconferencing and e-mailing. Communication and learning through distance education has also been done using such technologies as voice mail, fax machine, broadcast video, video cassette, radio broadcast, audiocassette, net meeting, and print materials.
Several types of support are critical to the success of distance education and they all have reasons why they are so critical. These types of support include those used for both synchronous and asynchronous courses. Synchronous courses, such as when all students and the teacher are using the same technology at the same time to interact, use supports such as a speakerphone because of its ease of use and simplicity, and the conference call, because it allows for many participants to engage in the message being given. Also, in a conference call, each member of the class can be involved from any location of their choosing. Finally, a phone bridge is a great type of support for synchronous distance education because students can call a toll free number and instantly be connected with the teacher and classmates for the lesson. This is a good support because any student can leave the lesson without disrupting others simply by hanging up and, again, learning can take place from the comforts of the students’ homes on their own telephones, and long distance rates do not apply. These are just a few supports used for synchronous distance learning. Types of support that are critical to asynchronous distance education include voice mail, because students can leave responses to assessments on the teacher’s voice mailbox as opposed to tracking down the teacher to give the response. Another support is a fax machine, where information is simply sent directly to the teacher via a fax machine. This is a good support because text or graphics can be sent both ways (teacher to student and vice verse) instantaneously. E-mail is currently the most widely used support for asynchronous distance learning, because of its ease of use and ability to include attachments, such as projects and papers, to name a few things.