Fifth Generation Work - Virtual Organization

Distance Education

Introduction

There are a number of approaches to education and I will use the basic time and space grid to briefly discuss them and provide a few examples.  There is considerable documentation on distance education from a wide variety of sources found elsewhere.

The table below covers some of the more common approaches to education

The same time and place education is synchronous education and the typical example is a school or corporate classroom.

The same time and different place education is distance education conducted in real time.  An example would be a situation wherein an instructor is lecturing to a group of students in a distance classroom but at the same time.

The different time and place education is distance education conducted at varying times and locations.  An example would be an online university or school with instructors and students living in various locations world-wide.  Lectures as well as other materials may be posted by the instructor to a classroom Website.  Assignments may be submitted by students to the classroom Website.  Interactions between faculty and students and between students can take place via electronic mail or telephone.

Educational Time and Space Grid

Technologies Supporting Distance Education

Some technologies that support education are listed in the table below.  Some examples of products include Dell, HP, and Apple laptops: Microsoft Office application software; NetMeeting, LiveMeeting, WebEx, and InterWise conferencing software; Groove Virtual Office; Moodle, WebCT, BlackBoard, and MSN and Yahoo! Groups..  Note: these are just examples of products the author has had some experience with -- there are many more -- this is not to be considered an endorsement of any specific product.

Three specific examples of distance education this author has recently experienced are:

• Different time and place -- as a student, I accessed lectures, readings, and assignments from the school Website.  I used physical materials as well including textbooks.  Assignments were completed, emailed to the instructor for grading, and returned.  Questions were communicated via electronic mail as well.
• Different time and place -- as an instructor, I used Groove Virtual Office folders to store lectures and other materials and students used folders to submit assignments.  Questions were submitted using Groove mail.  Groove also supported student teams as well.
• Different time and place -- the virtual classroom was essentially a set of newsgroups accessed via Outlook Express.  The newsgroup(s) were used to store lectures and other materials including assignments.  Virtually all correspondence took place using these newsgroup(s).

Each of these situations worked well enough to learn the material.  Certainly some things were lost (or not gained) that may have been picked up through face-to-face interaction, but given the possible options, this worked well enough to be successful for me.  I haven't had any educational experiences using video conferencing technologies at this point in time.

Educational Time and Space Grid

Reasons for Distance Education

Reasons for distance education center around the differences in time and space for instructors and students as well as markets.

• Students and / or instructors  may not be physically collocated.
• It may not be practical to travel to meet face-to-face (some city traffic is so bad, for example, that online or distance education may be more desirable).
• Instructors and / or students may work different shifts
• Some students travel extensively and are not able to attend a school at one physical location
• Some students may desire classes or degrees unavailable at a local school
• There is a larger market / choice of available schools

Date last revised:

June 05, 2006

David Gould, Ed.D.

daveg@seanet.com