Distance Education

Posted Sat Dec 15, 2007 in University

I’ve never been fond of the idea of distance education the way it is normally considered — tape- or disk-recorded lectures delivered asynchronously to “students” located away from campus. The reason is that I believe much of the education process involves interaction between the educator and the student. My entire teaching philosophy revolves around my interaction with the student.

Without that interaction, the student should exercise self-education and spend time reading, studying, and working through materials of interest. I know this process well because I’ve done it for decades¹.

So, given that I need to interact with the students, I’ve been researching video-teleconferencing solutions. What I want to do is to enable the students to see and hear me, plus a virtual whiteboard where I can display notes from my personal notes. It would be good if the students could download those (PDF, perhaps) for later review. I think I have on-line resources that will enable that process.

One thing I’ll do differently than in a live classroom is to save and email PDF’s of my notes to the students. Then, I’ll require them to hand- or machine-copy them to a class notebook to be turned in. I need to see that they’ve created ownership of the material and the only way I know to accomplish that is for them to hand-copy my notes to their notebooks.

So, I think we can make a go of this experiment. It will be interesting to see that happens.

¹ Over the span of my life, I spent countless hours reading and working through things that interest me. I know enough physics, chemistry and mathematics to handle most technical material, given enough time. I know the process works.