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.

This table lists some of the major distance education technologies, along with their advantages and disadvantages.

	Advantages	Disadvantages
Printed materials	Portable, inexpensive, accessible, 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 moving images 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 non-classroom 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 with high-end systems.	Expensive. Must have access to special classroom. Interaction possible, but must be planned and encouraged. Poor video quality with some low-end systems.
Streaming Video or Presentations	Uses video or graphics and audio, maintains attention. Students can review a streaming lesson as often as they like. Can be easily updated without dubbing tapes. Not as time-consuming as video.	Tends to be lecture-style presentation. Can be boring unless content is engaging or supplemented with video segments.  Requires planning on the instructor's part and students must have current computer and a fast Internet connection.
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 adapt 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.

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