Modern distance learning
- Also called:
- distance education, e-learning, and online learning
- Related Topics:
- education
- correspondence education
Web-based courses
By the beginning of the 21st century, more than half of all two-year and four-year degree-granting institutions of higher education in the United States offered distance education courses, primarily through the Internet. With more than 100,000 different online courses to choose from, about one-quarter of American students took at least one such course each term. Common target populations for distance learning include professionals seeking recertification, workers updating employment skills, individuals with disabilities, and active military personnel.
Although the theoretical trend beginning in the 1990s seemed to be toward a stronger reliance on video, audio, and other multimedia, in practice most successful programs have predominately utilized electronic texts and simple text-based communications. The reasons for this are partly practical—individual instructors often bear the burden of producing their own multimedia—but also reflect an evolving understanding of the central benefits of distance learning. It is now seen as a way of facilitating communication between teachers and students, as well as between students, by removing the time constraints associated with sharing information in traditional classrooms or during instructors’ office hours. Similarly, self-paced software educational systems, though still used for certain narrow types of training, have limited flexibility in responding and adapting to individual students, who typically demand some interaction with other humans in formal educational settings.
Modern distance learning courses employ Web-based course-management systems that incorporate digital reading materials, podcasts (recorded sessions for electronic listening or viewing at the student’s leisure), e-mail, threaded (linked) discussion forums, chat rooms, and test-taking functionality in virtual (computer-simulated) classrooms. Both proprietary and open-source systems are common. Although most systems are generally asynchronous, allowing students access to most features whenever they wish, synchronous technologies, involving live video, audio, and shared access to electronic documents at scheduled times, are also used. Shared social spaces in the form of blogs, wikis (Web sites that can be modified by all classroom participants), and collaboratively edited documents are also used in educational settings but to a lesser degree than similar spaces available on the Internet for socializing.
Web-based services
Alongside the growth in modern institutional distance learning has come Web-based or facilitated personal educational services, including e-tutoring, e-mentoring, and research assistance. In addition, there are many educational assistance companies that help parents choose and contact local tutors for their children while the companies handle the contracts. The use of distance learning programs and tutoring services has increased particularly among parents who homeschool their children. Many universities have some online tutoring services for remedial help with reading, writing, and basic mathematics, and some even have online mentoring programs to help doctoral candidates through the dissertation process. Finally, many Web-based personal-assistant companies offer a range of services for adults seeking continuing education or professional development.
Open universities
One of the most prominent types of educational institutions that makes use of distance learning is the open university, which is open in the sense that it admits nearly any adult. Since the mid-20th century the open university movement has gained momentum around the world, reflecting a desire for greater access to higher education by various constituencies, including nontraditional students, such as the disabled, military personnel, and prison inmates.
The origin of the movement can be traced to the University of London, which began offering degrees to external students in 1836. This paved the way for the growth of private correspondence colleges that prepared students for the University of London’s examinations and enabled them to study independently for a degree without formally enrolling in the university. In 1946 the University of South Africa, headquartered in Pretoria, began offering correspondence courses, and in 1951 it was reconstituted to provide degree courses for external students only. A proposal in Britain for a “University of the Air” gained support in the early 1960s, which led to the founding of the Open University in 1971 in the so-called new town of Milton Keynes. By the end of the 1970s the university had 25,000 students, and it has since grown to annual enrollments in the hundreds of thousands. Open universities have spread across the world and are characterized as “mega-universities” because their enrollments may exceed hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of students in countries such as India, China, and Israel.
As one of the most successful nontraditional institutions with a research component, the Open University is a major contributor to both the administrative and the pedagogical literature in the field of open universities. The university relies heavily on prepared materials and a tutor system. The printed text was originally the principal teaching medium in most Open University courses, but this changed somewhat with the advent of the Internet and computers, which enabled written assignments and materials to be distributed via the Web. For each course, the student is assigned a local tutor, who normally makes contact by telephone, mail, or e-mail to help with queries related to the academic materials. Students may also attend local face-to-face classes run by their tutor, and they may choose to form self-help groups with other students. Tutor-graded assignments and discussion sessions are the core aspects of this educational model. The tutors and interactions between individual students are meant to compensate for the lack of face-to-face lectures in the Open University. To emphasize the tutorial and individualized-learning aspects of its method, the Open University prefers to describe it as “supported open learning” rather than distance learning.