This is an interesting topic. I mean I felt interesting when I find that, in the middle of 1800s, correspondence courses in Europe used mail systems to offer instruction. It is out of my imagination that courses can be delivered through mail. However, it is easier for me to understand that communication through technologies, such as telephone, email, or discussion board, nowadays. In fact, communications through technology did not appear until 1980s. It is pretty new. Then it is introduced into education area for offering classes to the students who do not have time to go to school regularly or are far from school. The technologies that used to support this kind of learning is called distance education. People had to go to schools everyday and stay in classrooms before the distance education was used. If people did not have time to go to school or they had not a regular schedule, they had to give up the ideas of learning before the distance education was served. So the distance learning solved these kinds of problems. Any people, wherever they live or whenever they want to study, they will always get the chance to do it through the distance education systems.
Of course, the distance education needs technology-support. “Technology is the key to providing a format for academic communication and exchange” (Teaching and learning with technology, Judy Lever-Duffy, Jean B. McDonald, 2007). For example, students can choose different ways to communicate with teachers and their classmates, such as emails, discussion boards, facebooks, or skypes. So they have many choices for communications. Furthermore, students can choose any time to communicate with teachers or classmates. People form different countries may be in a same class and the time difference may stop them to communicate during daytime or night. The distance education can offer students choices to communicate at anytime. That is, technologies can offer students synchronized communication an unsynchronized communication. So a student can send an email for help either during the daytime or during midnight if he or she likes to study in the night.
Teachers benefit from distance education too. All the processes of teaching are delivered by a system and teachers have enough time to develop the whole course before they put it into the delivering system. And they can also make revisions after they already put them in the system but the students do not get the part yet. Students can send teachers questions to ask questions and teachers can reply them during the morning. This helps both the teacher and student to improve the efficiency of teaching and learning. Of course, teachers do not have to stay in their offices everyday, like students do not need to go to schools everyday. What they need just the access to the delivering systems, normally just need to remember the password and account number. If they like they can also make appointment with students to see each other through videos when they are discussing.
More and more technologies are emerged into this area, such as phone bridges: a sophisticated telephone conferencing system, allowed a large group of students to dial in together and connect with each other and their teachers. Students can, of course, also interact with teachers and classmates via the phone. There are also other technologies that are used very common in this area, such as personal computer and internet. Technologies are the most important to any of the distance education.
At last I also want to say, technologies help education to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of teaching and learning. There would not be the distance education with the support of technologies. However, the education also helped to improve the technologies themselves. I mean the companies may try to recreate a certain technologies according to the feedback from education area. This is the process to improve technologies. So what I want to say here that distance education need technologies and technologies benefit from the emerging into education, too.
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Throughout history, families have chosen to alternative learning their children. In the 17th and 18th centuries in the United States, some wealthier families hired private tutors to educate their children something, which relates to distance learning. Distant learning is enabling the student to be competitive with the rest of society, without witnessing some harsh views society has to offer. Whether it is due to the global economy, the information age, or other factors, the external constraints on public schools are changing. Your reflection is well thought about and illustrates what distance learning is capable of exemplify. Great write up. Happy hunting!
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