Distance education is a planned teaching way, without students all being in the same place physically, where students and teachers keep the lesson syncronous or nonsyncronously on Internet. It is not a new teaching method or application.
Distance education has been done for over a century -learning by correspondence, open education, teleconferencing, and lastly using internet technologies. In applications, specificly designed coursebooks, television, radio, and computer programs are used.
Distance education is not an inferior teaching. And it is not a teaching method that poor countries consult.
General foundation purposes of the distance education institutions are:
- To provide learning opportunity for larger mass,
- To minimize the physical distance factor in the process of learning,
- To reduce the costs in learning and teaching process,
- To turn the education into a life-long learning,
- To activate the learners in the process of learning,
- To promote learning opportunities and alternatives,
There are many advantages of distant learning.With this system education becomes independent from time and place, so educational costs are reduced.
Distant learning provides adult people to continue their education.Besides, it gives a chance to people who cannot join into the formal education due to economic,cultural, geographical,familial reasons,or due to physical disabilities.
It enables teachers and learners to share the sources easily and fast, the specialists from different places to give courses.
In spite of all these advantages, we cannot accept the distance education as the only and perfect education system. Just as in other systems, distance education system may not be fully effective all the time because of misusing, different methods, or personal problems. Accordingly;
- The communication between teacher-learner may not be sufficient, and this can drop the motivation.
- The student control can be hard if not taken measure.
- If you don’t make a cost analysis, the course could be expensive.
- When technical support is not enough, the efficiency of the system can drop.
- Preparing a course for the first time may require harder work.