Distance Education in Assessing the Thesis

independent study. It is still a broadcast-related approach to teaching and doesn't give the student an opportunity to fully participate in the learning process. Telecourses are ideal for reaching thousands or millions of students who are motivated to learn. The drawback is the lack of interaction with instructors.

The development of interactive television based on satellite and cable networks, and the development of interactive video have contributed to the development of online learning and virtual universities. In conjunction with the exponential growth of the Internet as an online learning platform, interactive television and video have become complimentary to online learning. The advantages of these forms of distance education are their ability to deliver interactive learning sessions for students, greater access to the materials used in the class via digital access, and the use of ancillary videos to better understand concepts. The drawbacks of these platforms for distance education are the costs associated with gaining Internet access in some parts of the world, unpredictable Internet access speeds, and the lack of quality control on instructors' responsiveness and completeness of answers to students. Despite these shortcomings, the more interactive and real-time the learning platform, the more potential there is for students to internalize concepts and long-term learning to occur. The role of corporate training, aimed at combining both in-class and online distance education approaches, is predominately done within a company.The general public however is increasingly relying on Open Universities that are more egalitarian in approach, and strive for practicality in terms of the courses taught. The disadvantages of corporate training are the lack of follow-up and opportunity to reinforce the key concepts, and the same holds true in open universities. The advantages of these approaches however is the opportunity for students to learn more by concentrating on the practicality of knowledge vs. being immersed in theory, which is the direction both Corporate training and Open Universities rely on.

Summary

The greater the level of flexibility in tailoring courses and contents to the needs of students, the greater the potential for long-term retention of key concepts. Called scaffolding (Najjar, 2008) this approach gives instructors the flexibility of defining specific learning scenarios to engage students and nurture a more complete learning process. Including in scaffolding techniques in virtual environments (Najjar, 2008) is a concentration on teaching problem solving, interdisciplinary learning techniques, all of which lead to creating knowledge. In essence, the use of interactive, real-time distance education methods to support scaffolding fulfills the vision of Chere Campbell Gibson and the use of distance education to better serve students.

References

Mehdi Najjar (2008). On Scaffolding Adaptive Teaching Prompts within Virtual Labs. International Journal of Distance Education Technologies, 6(2), 35-54. Retrieved September 16, 2008, from….....