Distance Education
Discuss how your school has moved into the distance education realm, including which courses of study work best, challenges that have been met, and how these have been overcome. Also include your biggest recommendation for those exploring distance education.
We first offered Distance Education as an option. We know employers seek to hire employees who are capable of continuing to learn from on-line formats. Now, we utilize On-line courses in the second have of their program and mostly for General Education courses where hands on learning is less of an issue. Students still prefer the face to face class experience though.
We started with distance education as being an option for students to assist with scheduling flexibility. More and more, we are offering online classes to help prepare students for how more continuing education is offered online. We see that more employers want students who can function in online environments, and we feel this is one way we can help prepare them. The biggest challenge we have seen is in getting students to willingly participate. Students tend to come on campus because they want the in-person experience, so we have utilized open labs and online coordinators to assist students and help them be successful.
Many students are not confident that they can be successful in an online class at our institution. We have established open lab times for students to get help if they are having a difficult time with their distance education. In addition, there is a 24 hour assistance through their online moodle program to ask for help.
The biggest challenge our school has faced so far is our student population not believing they can be successful and/or not wanting to take online courses. We have developed open lab times for students to obtain assistance for on-line classes.
We do not yet have distance education so I will be looking forward to seeing other comments.
Our school has been in distance education for over 30 years. Over the past 10 years, distance education has morphed from correspondence to online education, so we have worked toward shifting our distance education model. Most theory courses work well via distance education. Courses that allow for a virtual lab component or practicum that can be completed online seem to work well. One of the challenges we have is that students own different types of technology, so we found it helped to use a web-based learning management platform. For students with technology-oriented, non-content questions, we provide help-desk support. My biggest recommendation would be that you need to find a way to bridge the gap between the classroom and distance education. You need to offer the flexibility of distance education while providing support from the school. One way we do this is by ensuring our curricula is engaging and our instructors are also engaging and have a strong presence in the online classroom.
