Mielke (1997) defines distance education as the delivery of educational services in situations where the learner and teacher and even the institution sponsoring the instruction can all be separated by physical distance. The position of this paper is that in the next part of this decade, education via distance learning will change a great deal PROVIDED that educational institutions are able to remove several barriers involved in implementing distance education programs. These barriers include: keeping up with increases in student demands, becoming sufficiently literate in the use of new educational technologies, and costs (Johnson, Rutheiser & Hardnett, 2002). This paper first describes the possible future of distance education in the year 2010 including a description of technologies that will be used in the virtual classroom; it then discusses the barriers that must be overcome in order for the described future to become a reality in 2010.
Description of Distance Education in 2010
Peraya (2002) provides one possible vision for distance education at the end of this decade. First, he notes that distance education will increase in scope and demand due to an increasing need to train the unemployed and to re-train the employed.. However, Peraya also notes that distance education will be strongly influenced by increasing knowledge in both the social and cognitive sciences, which will make the system ever more focused on learning rather than teaching. With this shift in focus, teachers will more and more become advisors, managers, and facilitators of knowledge acquisition and will be less and less involved as instructors in the classical sense. Students will be guided by these teacher-facilitators toward what they need to learn rather than presented with the actual information itself. Further, university degrees, now limited to a finite number will, through distance education, be offered to any interested person over a certain ag...