Distance education is not here to replace the typical classroom. It is a system that was originaly created to accomodate people who due to practical reasons could not be physicaly present in the traditional classroom. Such reasons are: bad weather conditions (Norway), sparsely populated country (Australia), lack of permanent residence, physical disability, and the more recent phenomenon of adult education where the adult may have very little free time and non-standard timetable. It is very difficult to accomodate all these different people with the different needs in one system. This is why we have so many media (television, video, etc.) and types of distance education (synchronous, asynchronous).
Nowadays, computer mediated distance education is becoming more and more popular, mainly for higher education, (College and University degrees). There are very few high school courses offered on line yet. One problem is that many of those courses and programs are non-credited because the whole idea is new to a majority of people. There is a number of reasons these people give to explain why acredited distance learning degrees should not be offered. Some of those reasons are:
Another problem is the big cost of such courses both for the educator and the learner. The computer mediated courses in particular require both parties to have computers and software which may be very costly. There have been opinions that those expenses for the educational organizations will pay off because the materials will be bought once and the student/educator ratio will be increased, as an on -line course can have an unlimited number of students. This is not always true, of course, because when it comes to correcting and grading student work the number of educators must increase according to the number of students. Another constant source of expenses is the computer (hardware and software) upgrading and maintenance cost.
Last modified 10/9/97 by Tania Kiouprouli