What role do you think distance education will play in education as the Information Age unfolds and technologies improve? What advantages and disadvantages for teachers and students do you foresee?
“Whatever your views and experiences with distance education may be, it’s clear that distance education is fast becoming an accepted method for economically maximizing student access to instruction”. I totally agree with the statement in the last paragraph of Chapter 10 however, in my opinion, the prevalence of distance education may be various in each education stage such as in basic education and in higher education.
It’s kind of a common sense that younger learners attending school is not only to receive academic instructions but also foster their personality, develop views towards the world and future life, make lifelong friends and understand how a community works. I cannot image how these missions can be finished if there’s only distance education available. Besides, I don’t think it’s easy for younger learners to manage the distance learning well due to the inherent highly-demand time management and self-control ability required by distance learning. To summarize, the distance learning would more be a complementary tool to enrich the instructions in basic education stage (K-12). Or perhaps the blended learning, such as flipped classroom, may be a better choice than pure distance learning.
For higher education stage, I do agree that distance education will be an important component in future academic life. Meanwhile, some of the challenges mentioned in Chapter 10 may not be serious issues but others may have new concerns. For example, since our generation grew up with a bunch of technology products, getting in touch with new programs may not cause many troubles. Newly teachers and professors are able to manage the technology challenge well for their teacher education program has comprehensively prepared them for the new age. But for Copyright issues in distance education, I think there will be much more difficulties. Centuries ago, limited by the available media, copyright might only refer to the protection of text property. Then the notion of copyright enlarges to video and audio with the advent of TV and broadcast. What about the future information age? The development of technology will make it even harder for students to understand the copyright and fair use. Challenges are everywhere. But even in that circumstance, I still believe that distance education will be widely embedded in higher education.
For the projects done this week, we created a forum, a quiz, a Quizzizz interactive quiz and a rubric document on our topic. I enjoyed finishing the assignments especially for the forum, I found there was no forum in Weebly now and sent their company an email requesting help. Then I was able to embed an outside free forum into Weebly with their suggestions. The projects are linked below this paragraph.