General Issues for Distance Education across the WWW/Internet

Here are some topics which are relevant to Distance Education in general, and should be taken into consideration on evaluating it.

Cost

Is it worth it ? What are the trade offs ?

Availability

Is this technology wide available ? How long before it can be widely available, it it will ever be ?

Target Participants

class' size is limited by different constraints, such as computer power, network traffic

Pre-requisites

they will include some knowledge of Computers and Internet/WWW. To what extent the addition of new, possibly unrelated, pre-requisites might interfere with the learning process

Learning-environment

Cyber space poses some questions. For example, hyper-media might prove to be a distraction, its open nature as well as promoting accidental learning might prove to be a distraction for the undisciplined disciple

Equipment

textbooks, video-cassette recorder, sound system, video teleconferencing and TV will be substituted by html files, desktop conferencing, multi-media computer images, collaborative software tools and electronic books. A totally new environment that tries to enhance a known well-established traditional environment

Pacing

access to courseware, information and lectures on the Web allow students to establish their own pace on following a course, and you might end up having students from a same class on different stages. This will result in a limited choice of target audience, or perhaps in an addition of some pacing control mechanism

Cognitive burden

The use of new technology might impose new cognitive load on the students. On a traditional distance learning environment, reading and writing skills are all which is necessary, whereas here an extra skill is added, computer skill