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Is Distance Education Right for You
Distance education is seen both as a way to offer more equitable distribution of educational resources to special populations of students, and as a way to make instruction more cost-effective by sharing teachers and instructional materials. Distance education is a newer term for correspondence courses, which arose from the need to provide schooling to students in remote, sparsely populated areas that could not support a school. Distance education is the current hot topic for educators in all fields, including second and foreign language, and it was the focus of the CALL-IS academic session and other panels this year at the international TESOL convention. Distance education is often used to enhance the quality of traditional primary and secondary schooling and to deliver instruction to students in remote rural areas.
Teaching
As the National Science Foundation (NSF) provided access for universities to the Internet, educators gained a powerful means for teaching and learning, which was radically different with previous electronic media. As we look today, educators can define and design effective and robust teaching and learning systems that would be responsive to the needs of student communities close and afar. In addition, institutions with 10+ years experience used satellite and videotape delivery more often, paid for faculty release time for DE teaching, and paid for a DE teaching assistant. According to these respondents, institutions compensate faculty more to develop distance learning courses than to teach them, in spite of anecdotes from faculty that teaching a DE course requires a lot more time and energy than traditional face-to-face courses.
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Elementary Home Schooling – Can This Be the Way to Go?
There’s an interesting movement taking place across America these days. While all over the world tensions are heating up over wars and saber rattling, while the collective economies worldwide are in shambles and while most of the rest of the world, it would seem, are on their Internet blogs, a small, but growing number of parents are beginning to home school their children.
A survey released in December of 2008 done by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics reported that in the Spring of 2007, over 1.5 million children were being home schooled. And that was up over 400,000 kids from just four years earlier. And almost double the figure from 1999. What’s going on?
The top three reasons parents gave for home schooling were:
1. They had concern about the school environment.
2. They wanted to provide more religious or moral instruction.
3. They had dissatisfaction with the academic instruction available. Read the rest of this entry »
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