Distance Learning and the Next Generation

We have only begun to understand e-learning and how it impacts learners, teachers, and society. With many existing courses, developers were not familiar with the differences between classroom and online learning. Many instructors were told to create the courses, so they took their made for the classroom curriculum and posted it on the Internet. As we have come to learn, this does not work. In fact, this is exactly what happened where I work. I am full-time at Tiffin University. In this capacity, I am required to continually develop my online courses. When I first looked at the course (I just began this position last month) I found that they were quickly thrown together with not thought about how students learn, how e-learning is different, and what type of resources are out there to make the course more learner-centered.


As I begin to understand the make-up of the online Associates Degree program that I teach in, I find that the faculty were not completely on board with this whole idea. "If distance education is to become "main-stream" with continued productivity, we need to begin to clearly address e-learning issues such as course development, salary, workload, intellectual property rights, and promotion and tenure)" Moller, Foshay, and Huett, 2008, p. 69). In our case, this still has not occurred. In fact, there are arguments about intellectual property rights that linger on, so faculty have chosen not to post their information on the TU portal but instead email the information so that TU cannot say that it is theirs. Faculty believe that if they leave the university, they should be able to take their developed course information with them, however, TU does not.

The development of courses needs to continue. Even John Dewey told us

 “Since the curriculum is always getting loaded down with purely inherited traditional matter and with subjects which represent mainly the energy of some influential person or group of persons in behalf of something dear to them, it requires constant inspection, criticism, and revision to make sure it is accomplishing its purpose” (Dewey, 2009, 86). 

So it is important that we stay on top of e-learning and continually update the information and add new technological features to the course.

Dewey, J. (2009). Democracy and education: Complete and unabridged. USA: Feather Trail Press.

Moller, L., Foshay, W., & Huett, J. (2008, May/June). The evolution of distance education: Implications for instructional design on the potential of the Web (Part 1: Training and Development). TechTrends, 52(3), 70–75. Use the Academic Search Premier database, and search using the article's title.

Moller, L., Foshay, W., & Huett, J. (2008, July/August). The evolution of distance education: Implications for instructional design on the potential of the Web (Part 2: Higher Education). TechTrends, 52(4), 66–70. Use the Academic Search Premier database, and search using the article's title.

Huett, J., Moller, L., Foshay, W. & Coleman, C. (2008, September/October). The evolution of distance education: Implications for instructional design on the potential of the Web (Part 3: K12). TechTrends, 52(5), 63–67.Use the Academic Search Premier database, and search using the article's title.