Distance education allows instructors to teach anywhere around the world - and one study says they are teaching more than their counterparts who don’t use it.
A report released last week by the U.S. Department of Education says in 1998 instructors nationwide who used the technology taught an average of five courses. Instructors teaching face-to-face taught an average of 3.6.
Several departments at MSU use distance education and some people say the technology will be used more in the future.
MSU Provost Lou Anna Simon said it is hard to know exactly how many courses professors at MSU teach because of the differences between when the courses are taught.
“With distance learning, the starting and stopping time is different than the traditional teaching,” Simon said. “It has a bit of a rolling cycle.”
Simon said some virtual courses are combinations of several other courses.
“Typically in virtual courses they become combined with other virtual courses and remain written down as two separate courses,” she said.
David Favre used the technology more than a year ago, but was not impressed.
“I thought that it was less than a satisfying experience,” the MSU-Detroit College of Law professor said. “It’s difficult to teach to a TV camera.”
MSU-DCL has one distance lab using teleconferencing features. Favre’s class had students in the same room as him and students in a different location.
Favre said a lack of body-language interaction between himself and the students and difficulty using the blackboard hindered the technology. He also said students sometimes forgot they were in class and began acting like they were watching a TV show.
Although there are devices designed to make up for a lack of interaction, such as a special camera that focuses only on documents, Favre said the problems are not totally resolved.
“They can’t see you anymore,” he said. “It becomes a talking document, instead of a talking person.”
But he said distance education is not a total loss.
“It can be done,” he said. “It’s not terrible, it’s just not preferable. I think that it’s not going to become common.”
But Jerry Rhead, MSU Global online connections director of online academic and professional programs, said online learning has worked well for most students and MSU administrators.
“It allows us to reach a much broader constituency,” Rhead said. “The online environment provides the flexibility and access, and that’s the key access of the online facility.”
Rhead said he expects the 140 online courses that MSU offers to increase. He also said students would enhance their online learning experience by meeting with their classmates a few times in person.
“It would be a blending of the face-to-face mold with a combination of a series of online learning experiences,” Rhead said.
Marc Hyndman, a business management freshman, said he thinks distance education can be beneficial with some courses, such as computing classes.
“It’s a good thing, but it has its limitations,” Hyndman said. “The teacher’s personality is one of the biggest factors in whether I learn something in class. If the teacher’s really passionate about a subject then all the students want to learn about it. It’s hard to do that over a television screen.”
Hyndman said he thinks face-to-face teaching will remain the tool of choice.
“I don’t think it will ever overtake schooling,” Hyndman said. “There’s something to be said for a teacher in front of your face and I don’t think the teacher can have that impression over a television screen.”
Staff writer Alison Barker contributed to this story.
