Distance education

“ As with all aspects of education, continuing research, evaluation, and development is necessary for the improvement of distance education provision. Distance education providers also need to have effective research as the basis for improving the quality of their performance. ”

“ Thus, for example, students working independently through a CD-ROM or online course materials are clearly engaged in a distance education practice, while use of satellite-conferencing, although it allows a degree of spatial separation, has more in common with face-to-face education because it requires students to be in a specific place at a specific time. ”

“ Many people harnessing ICT seem to think they are harnessing the benefits of good quality distance education, when often they are simply finding technological alternatives for replicating traditional, face-to-face educational models. The only complexity within this is that ICT has created one specific new form of contact, which is not easily classified as either face-to-face or distance. Online communication allows students and academics to remain separated by space and time (although some forms of communication assume people congregating at a common time) , but to sustain an ongoing dialogue. ”

“ In this respect, therefore, resource-based learning draws significantly from the lessons learned in international distance education provision throughout the 20th century. Critically, resource-based learning is not a synonym for distance education. Rather, it provides a basis for transforming the culture of teaching across all education systems to enable those systems to offer better quality education to significantly larger numbers of students in a context of dwindling funds. ”

“ Many distance education programmes we have worked with simply have no intention or capacity to exploit these economic benefits. Reasons for this are varied, but are most commonly because market demand is simply not big enough to create programmes enrolling thousands of students or because institutions or programmes have neither the financial nor human capacity to make large-scale venture capital investments in course design and development or administrative systems to support large-scale distance education implementation. ”

“ Direct student services– The term direct student services means public school choice or high-quality academic tutoring that are designed to help increase academic achievement for students.
(17) Distance education– The term distance education means the use of one or more technologies to deliver instruction to students who are separated from the instructor and to support regular and substantive interaction between the students and the instructor synchronously or nonsynchronously. ”

“ Indeed, it is notable that large-scale distance education programmes are, in general, confined to very few educational sectors, most notably nursing and teacher education. Most other programmes tend to be small-scale interventions, although it is fair to suggest there may be a change in this regard as alignment between industry/commerce and programme providers gathers momentum. ”

“ Research and experience from technology-mediated learning in higher education, most notably that derived from the provision of open distance learning, will enable institutions to design appropriate and scalable solutions for formative and summative assessment at a distance for OER learners. ”

“ The Open University is one of the world's most successful distance education universities. Through academic research, pedagogic innovation and collaborative partnership it seeks to be a world leader in the design, content and delivery of supported open and distance learning. The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials. Users can find hundreds of free study units across twelve topic areas, each with a discussion forum. ”

“ While there are sometimes good reasons for a faculty member to develop materials from scratch, such processes may often duplicate ongoing work taking place in global knowledge networks that are engaged in facilitating increasingly creative forms of collaboration and sharing of information. The history of development of materials for distance education purposes illustrates clearly that, all other things being equal, collaboration by teams of people producing materials tends to produce higher quality results than individuals working in isolation. ”

“ In education, the distance covered may be looked at as temporal. The fact that a process takes time to mature is so obvious a fact that we rarely make it explicit. We overlook the fact that in growth there is ground to be covered between an initial stage of process and the completing period; that there is something intervening. In learning, the present powers of the pupil are the initial stage; the aim of the teacher represents the remote limit. Between the two lie means—that is middle conditions:—acts to be performed; difficulties to be overcome; appliances to be used. ”

“ A truly deep and broad codification of human knowledge, rendered in hypertext, would make self-study considerably easier than it is now. There has been a small movement devoted to the notion of self-directed study online, via distance education programs or even independently of universities. ”

“ To increase their investment in education, training and skills development for all, including vocational training, and to improve their access to formal and non-formal education, including to gain entrepreneurial skills, through both formal and non-formal means, such as the use of distance teaching and the development of training approaches appropriate for small island developing States. ”

“ Programme, course and materials design and development expertise, with a particular focus on helping academic staff harness the full potential of resource-based learning and student-centred pedagogies in their rogrammes and courses. An understanding of educational approaches is important (e.g., being able to differentiate among open, distance, electronic and blended learning, and their respective merits) , as is an understanding of the context of education in the specific sector in which work is taking place. ”

“ This includes creating practical handbooks, hosting capacity building workshops, commissioning research and providing access to digital resources.
In India, the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) (www.nios.ac.in) provides opportunities to interested students by making available a variety of courses/programmes of study through open and distance learning (ODL) modes. These include:
Open Basic Education (OBE) Programmes for 14+ years age group, adolescents and adults at A, B and C levels that are equivalent to classes III, V, and VIII of the formal school system ”

“ Another major advantage of this 'blurring' is that 'distance educators' and 'face to-face educators' can turn from meaningless debates about the relative virtues of particular methods of educational provision, to consideration of the nature of learning and the educational value of a course's structure and content. Educators often find it necessary to equate particular methods of education with good quality education, in an effort to market the programmes they are offering and give them added status over programmes using different methods of provision. ”

“ Costs of providing to teachers at accredited public institutions who teach levels K-12, personnel at public postsecondary technical institutes under the authority of the Department of Technical and Adult Education, and professors and instructors within the University System of Georgia the necessary training in the use and application of computers and advanced electronic instructional technology to implement interactive learning environments in the classroom and to access the state-wide distance learning network ”

“ In all educational levels, a reformulation of didactic approaches is proposed with the addition of new enjoyable distance learning environments and embedding technologies for new generations (Rapanta et al., 2020) . ”

“ To enhance the ongoing professional development of teachers, principals, and administrators by providing constant access to training and updated research in teaching and learning through electronic means. `` (6) To support the development and utilization of electronic networks and other innovative methods, such as distance learning, of delivering specialized or rigorous academic courses and curricula for students in areas that would not otherwise have access to such courses and curricula, particularly in geographically isolated regions. ”

“ A description of how the State educational agency will encourage the development of proven, innovative strategies to deliver intensive professional development programs that are both cost-effective and easily accessible, such as strategies that involve delivery through the use of technology, peer networks, and distance learning. ”

“ But if all available educational resources are used to establish learning centers based on the paradigms of interactivity, data processing, multimedia, virtual reality, neural networks, and genetic engineering, using powerful carriers such as digital TV or high-speed and broadband networks, we will stop managing a bankrupt enterprise and open avenues for successful alternatives.
As humanity ages, and societies have to cope with a new age structure, education will have to focus also on how to constitute one's identity past the biological optimum. ”

“ Given the bandwidth and connectivity challenges common in some developing countries, it would be expected that a high percentage of resources of relevance to higher education in such countries are shared as printable resources, rather than being designed for use in e-learning. ”

“ But I would suggest that the development of the skills required to operate in the open internet are more likely to provide employers with attributes that are useful to them than a purely ‘closed’ model of education. ”

“ OERs can be put forward as a success story for open e­ducation – ­they have had a positive impact for learners, they have developed sustainable models of operation, there is a thriving global community, the open aspect has been retained and there is a resonance with the social function of education, all wrapped up in a modern, 21st century, digital approach. ”

“ We also encourage those who sign to pursue additional strategies in open educational technology, open sharing of teaching practices and other approaches that promote the broader cause of open education. ”

“ The advantage of giving up structures inappropriate to the new requirements of education is that, finally, at least we would create environments for interaction, taking full advantage of the progress made in technologies of communication and interactive learning. There is no need to idealize the Internet and the World Wide Web at their current stage. But if the future will continue to be defined more by commerce expectations than by educational needs, no one should be surprised that their educational potential will come to fruition late. ”

“ ICT use is reducing barriers to entry of potential competitors to educational institutions, by reducing the importance of geographical distance as a barrier, by reducing the overhead and logistical requirements of running educational programmes and research agencies, and by expanding cheap access to information resources. There has been an explosion in collective sharing and generation of knowledge as a consequence of growing numbers of connected people, and the proliferation of so-called Web 2.0 technologies. ”

“ All of this is made possible by openness in several other areas: resources need to be made openly available, technology needs to be free to use, students need to be prepared to work in the open and universities need to accept these new models of operating. I would suggest that we are only just at the beginning of exploring models of teaching and learning that have this open mindset. It is notable that many of these early experimenters in open pedagogy are people associated with the open education movement. ”

“ Utilizing technology to develop or expand efforts to connect schools and teachers with parents and students to promote meaningful parental involvement, to foster increased communication about curricula, assignments, and assessments between students, parents, and teachers, and to assist parents to understand the technology being applied in their child's education, so that parents are able to reinforce at home the instruction their child receives at school. ”

“ OER’s transformative potential going forward — reinforced by the expansion of ICT and broadband infrastructure — broadens horizons for knowledge sharing and collaboration among educators, institutions and countries. If used effectively and supported by sound pedagogical practices, OER allow for the possibility to dramatically increase access to education through ICT, opening up opportunities to create and share a wider array of educational resources to accommodate a greater diversity of educator and learner needs. ”

“ But online communities have demonstrated the now indisputable power and value of lots of people working collaboratively towards a common cause. And doing this in education has the potential to re-focus educational systems, restoring the core values of building and sharing knowledge that underpin good education, and systematically encouraging us to work with and learn from one another. ”

“ Investigating the potential that the integration of new educational technologies into teaching and learning environments has for supporting, improving or enhancing those environments. Given the explosive growth in the use of ICT in education around the world, it is important to add this motive to the list of motives for engaging in resource-based learning. ”