Elements of Distance Education Diffusion (Blog post 2)

Collaborative interaction has been greatly aided in its evolution by technology including the World Wide Web and the Internet.  Because of these technologies, students are able to form online learning communities and work together on assignments from remote locations around the world.  Recently I attended my first webinars here at Walden University.  The facilitators and presenters were in their offices and up to one hundred students and prospective students shared in the information provided from individual homes, offices, or wherever we had Internet access.  Companies can now meet with their counterparts in other parts of the world using Internet technology.  None of this could have been done prior to the globalization of the World Wide Web and Internet in the late 1990s.

The availability of software such as Skype and Windows Live Meeting, as well as wikis, blogs, message boards, and a variety of online learning platforms facilitate collaborative interaction between learning communities, students and instructors, and presenters and participating audiences.  The quality of these interactions is greatly enhanced by the ability to collaborate on a global scale using the technology available today.  

The next generation of distance education (Blog post 1)

Distance education, as with any educational platform, needs to adapt to the changing needs of the students it seeks to effect.  Simonson’s equivalency theory asserts that every tool available should be used to accommodate the learning styles of diverse online student populations.  I suggest that even the strategies need to be adapted for an online learning environment versus the traditional on-ground classroom.  I can compare two different speech classes I took.  One class was in a traditional classroom setting where we met once a week and presented our speeches.  The second speech class I took was in an asynchronous online class.  The method of delivering speeches had to be adjusted to accommodate the online modality; however, the class was still effective and I did learn about public speaking from it.

In the same way that one cannot expect every student in an on-ground class to learn the same way, neither should be expected of online students.  Diversity in the learning modality needs to be considered to ensure equivalent learning of subject matter, as well as differentiated instruction to accommodate varying learning styles.

While distance education in higher education is my primary focus, I recognize that K-12 schools are entering the virtual world of education also.  Educators need to exploit the possibilities made possible by the Internet and online learning to implement instructional design that will meet the changing needs of this learning genre.  If student needs are not met by one institution or learning platform, they will go to another.  This should be the bottom line motivation for educational institutions to research and develop instructional design models that will meet the needs of the diverse online student population K-12 and postsecondary.

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