Distance Learning - Why? What? How?
with Some Examples
Martin@lii.law.cornell.edu
I. Why?
- External factors:
- Because the competition is doing it or will
- Because students expect it (and view it as a measure of quality)
- Given the new means of distributing content (text, still images, audio,
video) and conducting interactive communication, distance learning technology
affords a way to:
- Reach new students
- Involve teachers previously unavailable
- Meet the learning styles and needs of diverse students
- Increase student-faculty inter-action
- Encourage peer-to-peer learning
- Provide program more closely matched in time and place to the situation that prompts the learner's desire to learn
- Extend the duration of the educational experience (pre and post)
II. What?
- Distribution of text (images, audio, and video)
- Flat text
- Text as a gateway to broader or deeper exploration (course materials for
Copyright and Digital Works and the Background material for this discussion)
- Discussion (teacher-student and student-student)
- Asynchronous - Web-based conferencing and its functional equivalents (Copyright and Digital Works WebBoard Conference)
- "Real Time" - Audio / Video Conferencing (Copyright and Digital Works
weekly CUSEEME "class meeting")
- Testing, evaluation, personal accountability points
- Submitting papers
- Everybody provide an example (WebBoard)
- Everybody solve a problem
III. How?
- Some of the principal determinants:
- Technology access and expertise level of the students you want to reach (monitor, don't assume)
- Parallel tracks
- Digital only
- Technology access and expertise level of the faculty
- Competing demands on time and attention of students and faculty
- Expectations of students and faculty
- Regulatory, fiscal, administrative categories
- IP rights
- Some strategies:
- Begin by adding distance components to current programs
- Focus on what you want to do and for whom rather than on a particular technology
- Draw technology support people into collaboration (here is what I want to do rather than this is what I want)
- Listen to your student
- Some novel challenges:
- Finding new pedagogy for the new environment
- Building community across institutions (or without them)
- Creating models that can be replicated and scaled