Reflection

Over the past eight weeks I have learned a lot about distance education. Including that fact that it’s not new, the concepts of distance education are far greater then just eLearning. Distance education dates as far back as 1833, when it was just articles in a newspaper and corresponded based. If you look at the evolution thus far for distance education it show a clear predictor that the growth and acceptance isn’t stopping anytime soon.

Over the next 5-10 year, I think that the primary changes are going to be more of a blend of distance learning and face-to-face (f2f) learning. One of the primary take a ways that I have from this class (Distance Learning EDUC-6135), was that distance education doesn’t have to take the place of f2f classes. All to often it seems as though we think its f2f vs. distance learning. It’s not a competition of one vs. the other it about how we can make them work together to benefit the learner.

Looking out 10-20 year, I think that distance education is going to be more the norm, with new video chat and multimedia technologies being developed the distances will start to fade away. If you look at the current level of video conferencing technology and the pace of advancements, the future is going to very interesting, for an example look at agcommsvs.ca.uky.edu/videoconferencing/.

As instructional designer, it will be our jobs to create positive learning experiences for all learners that are taking distance learning based courses. One of the takeaways I had from this class was the importance of the instructional designer building a solid course for the facilitator. As an instructional designer it important to build in activities that attempt to close the gap and the perception of the distance in distance learning.

My primary mission for continuous improvement in the field of distance education is to incorporate as much multimedia in distance education courses. The concepts of Web 2.0 and social learning theory are strongly driven by multimedia learning. Ironically, multimedia learning isn’t far off what we have been doing for year, because multimedia is defines as the usage of text, graphics, audio and video.