One of the classes I'm taking this semester is Distance Education. One of the reasons I'm taking this class is because I believe that there are incredible opportunities for educating people at a distance, and providing self-help tools. This past semester I worked on a website for an "independent research" class. The site is http://studyyourscriptures.com and I was thinking about this website as a form of "distance education." No, it's not a course that one could take (though the idea occurred to me to create a free online "how to improve your scripture study" web class occurred to me during class), but it's more of a piecemeal approach to educational resources at a distance. While I was creating the site I found several websites that had tips or ideas or provided free resources--my point is that all of this was (to me) "distance education" albeit not of a formal sort. My belief at the start of this course is that this kind of education (on-demand, not part of a formal course) is very important and I hope to learn more about how to create it, and make it more effective.
I briefly reviewed two articles giving a flavor for the research being done in distance ed research. I was intrigued by one journal called Open Learning. I googled and was led here. I was disappointed to see how closed this "open learning" journal was. In fairness, I'm not sure this is the same open learning journal.
In this blog, titles that begin with "Distance Ed" will relate to this class. If you're not interested in Distance Ed, feel free to skip them (not that you need my permission!).
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3 comments:
John, what course is this and when does it meet?
The course is 692 R at it meets Tuesdays from 4:15-6:45. It's a small class only 5 of us, and if you could join in that would great!
I think you're right on the money there, John, about non-formal "distance education." Each one of us probably learns something new on the internet each day. I think that this type of informal non-course free content comprises the vast majority of things that people learn on the Internet each day.
Interestingly, any formal distance education course that provides essentially only learner-content interaction is really not much different than reading about a topic on Wikipedia. This underscores the importance of making our DE courses socially interactive, both for learner-learner interaction and learner-teacher interaction. Otherwise, people may as well just go find everything they need out on the web, for free.
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