Using Distance Education Technologies

Determining What Technologies to Use
Just as you want to vary your teaching methods in your traditional courses by incorporating question and answers, guest panels, lectures, and brainstorming, you want to provide media variety to your students by showing videos, photographs, real objects, and printed and online materials. The same concept of media variety holds true in a distance course. Vary your delivery.

The next table lists some of the major distance education technologies, along with their advantages and disadvantages, available to you.
Advantages Disadvantages
Printed materials Portable, inexpensive, well-organized materials.  Low course completion rate. Time-delay delivering and receiving materials. 
Videotape (Many videotape programs are now being recorded on CD-ROM or DVD.) Portable, uses motion and audio, maintains attention, easy for students to review videotape's content on VCRs.  Tends to be lecture-style presentation. Can be boring unless content is engaging or supplemented with video segments.  Time-consuming to produce video segments.
Videoconferencing Live, two-way dialogue with teacher and other students. Uses motion and audio. Adequate video quality.  Expensive. Must have access to special classroom. Can be difficult for students to interact.
Web/WebCT  Can review computer materials anytime, anywhere online. Course tools in WebCT (chats, bulletin board) encourage interaction.  Access to a computer. Some technical knowledge necessary.
Online "discussion" methods: bulletin boards, chat sessions  Online "dialogue" with teacher and other students. Can be in synchronous (chats) or asynchronous (bulletin boards). Discussion can be added to. Limited "conversations."  Must be able to type well and quickly (chats).
Electronic mail  Easy to use, inexpensive, accessible worldwide.  Access to a computer. Some technical knowledge necessary.

Interactive Strategies with Distance Education Technologies
On the following pages are distance education technologies and ways some instructors implemented them as interactive strategies, as shown in these Teaching Points. This is not an exhaustive list, so feel free to move strategies from one technology you're not using to one that you are.

Printed materials
Provide a viewing or listening guide to supplement videotape presentations. The guide should assist the students in focusing on issues, prepare them for concepts to follow, and provide opportunities for further learning whether independently, in pairs, or in small groups.

Continue with Videotape and Videoconferencing.
CD Index