Communication technologies have become such an important part of our world that it's difficult to escape their impact. Elementary school children learn how to design Web pages, high school students develop CD-ROMs, and college students live and die by their e-mail accounts. Learning via technology also has been recognized as one of the forces that will affect training and development practices at U.S. corporations, as employees will be required to update skills throughout their careers and will become, in effect, "life-long learners."

With the incorporation of communication technologies, such as compressed video, CD-ROMs, e-mail, and the World Wide Web, distance education is being used by an increasing number of schools, colleges, and universities. A person may be able to use communication technologies, but can that person teach effectively with these technologies?

That's where these interactive training materials will help. They're designed to assist you in the design and development of distance education materials and programs.

The sections are divided into modules. You may take as much or as little time as you need to complete each module. The training materials are completely self-paced.

In the Teaching Points sections, you will be able to select the link associated with this symbol  and launch a Quicktime Movie of an instructor discussing his or her experience with developing, teaching, and managing a distance education course. These videos range from 20 seconds to 2 minutes and require Quicktime Player 4.0 or better. (The installer is in the main directory of this CD-ROM under "Install.")

You will have opportunities to apply the concepts you're learning to courses that you're developing for distance education delivery. Look for interactive Recipes for Success throughout where you can jot down your ideas. You can print a .pdf version of the questions that are listed in each section and then write down your answers to the questions on your printed page. OR you may wish to type in your answers to the questions and have the answers e-mailed directly to you. In order to do that, you will need to access the Web version of the training materials at http://training.ifas.ufl.edu. All of the materials you see here are on the online version. The tradeoff is that the video clips in the Teaching Points sections probably will take much longer to download than having the clips on this CD-ROM. However, the CD-ROM won't allow you to type in your answers and e-mail your answers to yourself.

So let's get started!!!
Learn more about Distance Education by selecting a topic from the CD Index.