Week 13: Distance Education and Online Learning

In this week’s class we discussed distance education, online learning, the details of how both are accomplished, and what benefits these methods bring to students that a traditional classroom would not. Distance Education is providing a learning environment to students in different places, not in a traditional classroom setting. Educators may use mail, television, or even online communication to reach distance learners. With technological advances in today’s society, online education is becoming more prevalent and easily accessible to many who are unable to be in a traditional classroom setting, such as people with full-time jobs, people who want to take a class which is unavailable to them elsewhere, or people who are unable to travel to get to school. It provides an environment in which student may have the opportunity to study a subject which in the traditional setting they may not have had the chance.



This video demonstrates the place and time values of distance education compared to that of traditional classroom education. The classroom student had problems because he had to be in the classroom at a certain time for his class. He missed the train, and had to walk, which caused him problems. When he finally gets to class, there is no one there. The distance education student had no problems. He was able to break in the middle of his class to answer a phone call. Also, he was on the beach taking his class. This video demonstrates some of the benefits of taking distance education courses compared to taking traditional classes.

As a Public Relations major, distance education provides the tools necessary to communicate with others using a variety of techniques. In Public Relations, communication of ideas to a broad audience is sometimes vital to a campaign or a press release, as the stakeholders and publics may need to be reached immediately. An example would be the online communication used for distance education, such as podcasts, webcasting, and generating Web sites. Also, training new team members is made easy through the online learning system which commonly allows multimedia presentations to further the learners’ understanding of a concept. A good example of this in Public Relations would be learning how to complete a media kit, using examples of online multimedia software.