Maintaining Choice- Electronic University Education and Diversity (下)_计算机网络论文.docVIP

Maintaining Choice- Electronic University Education and Diversity (下)_计算机网络论文 Maintaining Choice: Electronic University Education and Diversity (下)_计算机网络论文 3.2 Distance Learning Distance learning, where students do not attend a campus to study, dates back to Pitman in the eighteenth century (Lockmiller, 1996 Pouloudi, et al., 1999). Not withstanding Pouloudi et al.’s point that distance learning should not be distant, it is literally distant in that students are geographically, and perhaps temporally, distributed and it is almost inevitably psychologically distant in that both the quality and quantity of staff-student interaction is less than when education is done synchronously, face-to-face. This is one of the primary reasons used to explain the high student dropout rate in distance education, compared with traditional education. For example, Moore and Thompson (1997) identified satisfaction with communication with the tutor as the main factor that accounted for the difference between continuing and withdrawn distance learners. Cuskelly, Danaher and Purnell (1997) found that students who had dropped out of distance courses felt isolated from their institution and from their peers and had little opportunity for direct contact with relevant others. These students claimed that they had not developed a sense of belonging to the institution and that extra forms of communication were needed both to maintain motivation and to develop collegiality with other students. The motivating influence of lecturers and other students was also shown by Taylor (1998) to be a key factor in the successful implementation of asynchronous electronic seminar discussions. Learning is a collaborative experience and, according to Norman (1998), distance learning activities need to be guided by principled models of interaction. All people are excellent, heuristic psychologists in that by both genetic predisposition and from birth they live in an intensely social world of real time interactio