ASSESSING THE VALUE OF ADULT DISTANCE EDUCATION

Formal education is widely recognized as a valuable asset for citizens and for the organizations in society that offer productive employment opportunities for citizens. As society becomes more complex, the educational qualifications demanded of individuals by employing organizations continues to increase. Enhanced educational qualifications benefit both the individual and the employing organization (Dunderstadt, 1999).

The value of a college-level education to the individual may be appreciated through a consideration of the information presented in Exhibit 1, which may be found on the following page. As the information presented in the exhibit indicate, average annual income rises dramatically as the level of individual formal educational attainment increases.

Enhanced educational qualifications, however, are equally valuable to most employing organizations in contemporary society. In no sector of society is this fact more relevant than in the nation's armed forces. The armed forces recognition of the importance of enhanced educational qualifications is long standing. Requirements for undergraduate and graduate degrees for commissioned officers and professional staff increasingly are extended to warrant officer, noncommissioned officers, and, in the contemporary period, to an increasing proportion of enlisted personnel of all grades (Ostendorf, 1999).

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ng and living in recent years and opened up heady prospects for creating worldwide links between universities, institutes of higher education and research, libraries, laboratories and hospitals, disseminating knowledge, promoting personalized teaching, education tailored to the needs of individuals and groups, the exchange of ideas and data and the implementation of collective projects. It soon became clear that among the many fields where the new technologies may be appliedùespecially the high-capacity networks known as information superhighways that can carry data, sound and imagesùhigher education, research and the promotion and dissemination of knowledge are those with the richest potential (p. 38). Media technology supports learning in distance education settings through one or a combination of the following four mechanisms, as follows: (1) process support; (2) process structure; (3) task structure; and (4) task support (Nunamaker Dennis, Valacich, Vogel, & George, 1991). An electronic communication structure provides process support. Process structure refers to techniques or rules that direct the pattern, timing, or content of learner interactions. Task support refers to the information and computational infrastructure
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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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