INTERNET-BASED DISTANCE EDUCATION

By: Raheen Brooks

INTERNET

The internet is increasingly being used for the delivery of educational material and distance education. Internet-based learning allows students to learn at their own pace, access the information at a time that is convenient of them, and provides education to remote students that otherwise would not be able to travel to a classroom.

INTERNET STRUCTURE

Tier 1: Backbone Networks and Internet Exchange Point- Is the essential framework that provides a worldwide configuration of extremely high-bandwidth networks.

Tier 2: Regional Networks- operate backbones on a smaller scale, in the United States typically within a state or among adjacent states, connecting to one or more national or international backbones.

Tier 3: Internet Service Providers – is perhaps the most important component for distance educators. The individual internet services (ISPs) are connected to regional networks and provide dial-up, or direct, highspeed access to the internet at the local level.

Tier 4: Organizational and Home Network – are the local area networks that interconnect computers within an organization, such as a school, college, government agency, or company, and provide Internet access to individuals within those entities.

ADVANTAGES OF ONLINE LEARNING Students are able to participate from school, home,

office, or community locations, asynchronous course components are available 24 hours a day, at the learner’s convenience, and are time-zone independent.

Students are able to work at their own pace and corporate training programs conducted via the Internet can yield significant savings in employee time and travel costs, and training can be conducted on a “just in time” basis.

ADVANTAGES

A well organized online course will provide a variety of learning experiences and can accommodates any type of learning skills. Students who become skilled at using Internet resources, a factor that can improve employment options upon graduation. Learning materials are available across the entire web

LIMITATIONS OF ONLINE LEARNING

Online courses may emphasize the technology rather than the content and learning opportunities, well-designed Internet-based courses may be labor-intensive to develop, requiring time and personnel resources not available to many instructors, instructors have difficulty adjusting to the learner-centered model of instruction and do little more than “shovel their teacher-centered, lecture-based courses into an online format”.

LIMITATIONS

Copyright violations on course web pages that are not password-protected sit in plain sight for viewing by the rights holders and their attorneys, computer bandwidth limitations make it difficult to present advanced technologies, such as streamed video, multimedia, and memory-intensive graphics, over the Web, and online courses require students to take more responsibility for their own learning, a task that some find hard to accomplish

WEB 2.0 APPLICATIONS

Blogging: Web logging, or blogging, is a form of online reporting and journaling that gives anyone an opportunity to publish on the internet.

Wikis: is an online writing space designed to be created and edited by groups of persons.

Podcasting: derived from the Apple product iPod and the term “broadcasting”, “is the process of recording and storing audio and/or video content on the Internet for downloading and playback using iPods, MP3 players, computers, and other electronic gear that plays back audio and/or video files.

E-LEARNING ADOPTION CYCLES

E-Learning Adopting cycles is categorized into four distinct cycles which are:

Cycle 1- Enhancements to traditional course program configurations are examples are emails web sources and powerpoints

Cycle 2- Course Management Systems- reflects teacher centered instructional paradigm

Cycle 3- Imported course objects involves student understanding of the course materials

Cycle 4- New course configurations its purpose is to take advantage of the power of technology.

SUMMARY

In conclusion technologies used for distance education falls into two categories which are:

Telecommunication technologies that connect instructors to distant learners and classroom technologies that record, present and display instructional information.

Video and computer-based systems