Distance Education |
Todays Self-Instructed Learning |
| Educational Technology, Distance Learning, and Distance Education appear to be synonomus. They bring together an enormous range of technical, practical and pedagogical expertise in the area of educational technology. As school district, teachers and parents,technology coordinators, educational publishers, and site administrators, become more concerned with the relationship between teaching and technology in grades K-16 we find ourselves at the tip of the self-instructional iceberg striving to keep abreast of its rapid advancement. Since the 1920's, education philosophies were furthered by such people as Frederic Burk and Mary Ward who instituted the plan which clearly defined the objectives of self or individualized instruction at the San Francisco State Normal School. Carleton Washburne and Helen Parkhurt took their philosophy one step further and included mastery learning with their self-instructional materials. There work allowed the students to work at their own pace and do so with a minimal amount of teacher direction. Their work influenced B.F. Skinner and his work in the 1950's (Skinner Box). Before Skinner was influenced by Burk and Ward, Ralph Tyler of Ohio State University started working on Eight Year Study which lead ultimately to the creation of formative evaluation. Tylers work on behavioral objective assessments and the re-designing of curriculum is what is going on today. Today, we as education are re-designing our course curriculum to suit on-line courses so that students can further their education through self-instructed courses which use a minimal amount of teacher direction. Text books are indeed used along with workbooks and other hands-on materials as they were in the days of Burk and Ward. Their minimal teacher assistance was within a classroom whereas today it is conducted on line through the use of sites such as Blackboard.com where instruction and students alike can post information and assignment, chat with other student and gain their assistance as well as that of the professor, and as necessary complete examinations on-line. Yes, Self-instructed learning has evolved and will continue to do so. Burk and Ward were innovative educators that had the ability to see that we as students all learn at a different pace and that for many of us can accomplish more outside the confines of a normal classroom environment. Instead of operating within the normal confines of a classroom, Distance Educators work with an interconnected dimensions of multi-media applications using learning styles which including cognitive, information processing, 4MAT, and experiencial learning. |