Distance Education: Issues and Concerns

Learn to assess and assure the quality of university-level distance education classes!

Now that many colleges and universities have embarked on significant distance education curricula, an overview of the state of the art is necessary. This valuable collection looks at distance education through a varied set of critical lenses to examine how distance education classrooms can affect students' attitudes and behaviors, the use of―and attitudes toward―group projects in online courses, the effects that the use of technology has on the relationship between student and teacher, and a great deal more!

Distance Education: Issues and Concerns:

• provides concrete recommendations for enhancing the distance education experience
• shows the relationship between learning styles, enrollment, and retention in Internet-based courses, and makes recommendations to help ensure student success
• highlights the importance of conducting small-scale usability studies for instructional Web sites
• examines the advantages of using handheld computers and mobile phones in teacher education
• emphasizes the importance of good teaching, no matter what kind of technology is in use
• provides an overview of the drawbacks and benefits of distance education and a plan for quality control
• examines the steps taken by one graduate program to ensure continuing improvement of its online courses
• offers a number of ways to develop a comprehensive quality control system that addresses development, delivery, and evaluation
• presents a basic cost-income model for electronically delivered instruction
• provides a social constructionist framework for online learning
• looks at the challenges that laboratory experience courses present in a distance education context, and shows how remote lab use could work in several engineering disciplines
• describes a successful hybrid online graduate class designed to help administrators increase their technical competencies
• and more!

D Lamont Johnson, Cleborne D Maddux, Jacque Ewing-Taylor