Distance Education & Content
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Often heralded as the savior of higher education, technology has emerged to the degree where the scenario of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, in which a computer takes over the space ship and its crew, is similar to distance education technology which threatens to take over conventional real-world institutions of higher learning. Distance technology is heralded by technology and education advocates as a means of eliminating time, space, and economic barriers to higher learning. Students, adult learners, the handicapped, and others can now gain access to accredited online college courses and earn four-year degrees through many institutions. Curricula is now packaged and sold as software and students either learn on their own in the comfort of their living rooms or interact with real-world classroom environments via two-way video technology. Corporate America and others have caught on to the new commercial value of information and education packaged as product “On-line instruction and distance education have swept through institutions of higher education with astounding speed. Now, commercial interests are avidly pursuing those developments…While online courses offered by traditional institutions raise a number of questions about the equivalence and quality of offerings, and about faculty responsibility for the curriculum, totally on-line institutions raise questions about the meaning and preservation of higher educ
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s confounding and critical in education debates today as they did 100 years ago when the Pennsylvania State University began offering distance learning. This is because distance learning is not a new pedagogical format, rather it is the advances in technology that have permitted a new format of education delivery “These technological advances in distance education involve such areas as Internet, Web-based instruction as well as various methods of audio and video, real-time, and delayed distance education. Distance education is the future for delivering education to various student populations” (Ponzurick, et al, 2000, 1).
Those who see distance education delivered via technology as a doomsday scenario or those who view it as a cure-all for all that ails higher education are both failing to realize that education did not change, only the delivery of it. Further, the problems that many argue are created by distance learning via technology are the same problems that plague real-world higher education. Despite this, critics of distance education immediately jump on the bandwagon of those who feel technology delivered content will diminish the standards of higher education “Can accreditors truly evaluate a university based solely
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Approximate Word count = 1343
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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