Advantages of TeleEducation

The positive points in favor of TeleEducation are numerous. Research shows that it has many potential benefits over the traditional education methods besides the advantages it has already proven to have. TeleEducation offers benefits to the students, the instructors, the universities that adopt it, as well as the environment! Considering the positive sides to TeleEducation is essential as to uncover the future possibilities of its researchers and practitioners.

Perhaps the benefits to the students are the most obvious. Students benefit from TeleEducation by having an increased flexibilty with respect to the time and duration of their access to the material. Also, TeleEducation gives the students the option to choose from a much wider variety of courses to meet their expectations since they can choose from courses offered online by all the universities worldwide. This serves the flexibility in terms of which courses to take and when to take them and hence they are able to meet their curricular requirements efficiently and comfortably. In this way, this helps to reduce shedule conflicts. Also, students are able to move their studying time around flexibly in order to meet their emergencies, or to practice sports, to socialize, or simply to study when they are in the best mood for it.

Another advantage of TeleEducation is related to students who are relatively old in age. Those who are doing undergraduate or postgraduate studies and have to take a job during a particular time of the day or take care of somebody or study for something else. TeleEducation serves all those groups owing to the flexibility it offers.

A special advantage is seen regarding students with challenges. Attending classes may be not a very easy thing to do with a physical disability if the campus is not well suited for this -and quite many are not. This might result in denial of their access to some main facilities, however, in TeleEducation this obstacle obviously does not exist. Also, students with learning disabilities benefit better from distant education courses. This is because those courses could be adjusted to suit and overcome the particular type of learning problem of each student.

Other groups to whom TeleEducation is very beneficial are populations living in rural areas or regions that don't have proper schooling facilities. This category includes children in outbacks and the different sorts of isolated areas. TeleEducation gives those people a chance to earn university degrees online without having to move to the city and pay all the expenses accompanying that in addition to the learning expenses themselves.

Instructors' benefit from TeleEducation is huge as well. Asynchronous courses do not require instructors to empty a certain regular time slot for class. Also, office hours are not a solid block of time that is booked and blocked, and may not usually be used very efficiently. Instead, office hours can be any time of the day when the instructor receives questions or inquiries by e-mail or any other sort of electronic communication. Instead of the student going to the office when the instructor has to rush to a meeting or or a class, by TeleEducation the message waits there for the instructor to read it or send the students at any time of the day. Also, instructors are allowed to catch up with conferences which in many cases clash with class time and this serves their personal careers. They may also use the time to conduct their own research. This has been the vision of the universities that are developing increasing numbers of web-based or web-supported courses.
Another way instructors can benefit from TeleEducation is shown by the awards that have been granted to some professors already to acknowledge their professional and user-friendly course designs.

The benefits to the universities that adopt TeleEducation are numerous as well. The idea that a university can accept a much higher number of students to join it every year shows how beneficial it is. Universities can do so because they are not limited by space or time or materials. Moreover, this allows them to allocate more resources in adding more facilities, developing the available services and hence raising the quality of the overall process. Universities can exchange courses and internal resources and so each university can attain a wider clientele base and each university appears to be offering a mazzively inceased number of courses at an uncompromised quality.

Considering the environment and how it is affected by the process shows how TeleEducation really serves it. Especially in highly urbanized cities where the problems of parking areas, traffic and transportation are drastic and escalating over the days, TeleEducation can be seen as a solution to at least part of the problem. Moreover, it saves fuel and hence reduces air pollution. It even saves paper and ink!



References:

Edge, Daniel W. & Loegering, John P. "Distance Education: Expanding Learning Opportunities" Wildlife Society Bulletin. Vol.28 No.3 Autumn 2000. pp.:522-533. JSTOR, AUCLibrary.

Laurence Wolff, "The African Virtual University: The Challenge of Higher Education Development in Sub-Saharan Africa". Techknowlogia Knowledge Enterprise, April-June 2002. http://www.techknowlogia.org/

Ruth, Stephen. "Virtual Learning; Between Imagination and Challenges" Techknowlogia Knowlegde Enterprise, April-June 2002. http://www.techknowlogia.org/

Introduction

TeleEducation is a type of education system in which the students and instructors are separated spatially, temporally, or both. TeleEducation has evolved through several phases before reaching the state it is at today, which is continuously changing as well.

This type of learning has been used since very old times because it proved to be more suitable for particular situations than traditional learning. The idea began with systems like those that have been used to teach children in Australian Outback, the British Open University, and other similar organizations which were based on the idea of correspondence courses. In correspondence courses the learning materials were sent by post on regular basis and they made use of radio and television communication. Until the 1980s the major medium for distant education material was in print form.

The 1990s are regarded as the time when leaps of growth of TeleEducation took place owing to the considerable technological advancement that happened during that period. Today, an increasing, very large number of universities are developing courses that are either web-based or web-supported. Those are being implemented for school, university undergraduate and post-graduate education in the various disciplines. A marked explosion of virtual universities is seen in third wolrd countries.

Examples of virtual or open universities include Africa Virtual University, Open University of Tanzania, China Central Radio and TV University, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), Sukhothai Thammanthirat Open University (Thailand), Universidad Nacional Abierta (Venezuela), University of South Africa, and many others. 

TeleEducation is a type of learning that invloves the use of technology for student-instructor communication; be this technology a telephone, broadcast video, internet chat, video conferencing, net meeting, or other.

Media used for TeleEducation are diverse in order to suit different needs and have changed with time according to the technology available. Currently, different institutes use printed matter, videotapes, projected graphical material, World Wide Web, CD-ROM, DVD, satellite as educational media. Each of these media has its characteristics that make it particularly beneficial in delivering a certain type of information and to a certain type of learner. The evolution of the media used for the process has to coincide with the evolution of the process itself which displays a trend towards becoming more interactive.

TeleEducation can be either synchronous or asynchronous. In both cases, individuals involved in the process can be in different geographical areas, however, the difference is that synchronous systems require them to meet at the same time while asynchronous systems do not. Asynchronous systems are the relatively simpler and they are the ones where the educational institute publishes the material online in HTML format so students read on the screen instead of textbooks. Synchronous systems are those for which real-time interactive virtual classrooms have to be held. At the time that the asynchronous systems seem more advantageous due to the increased flexibility they offer; the live interaction and attention-catching in synchronous systems seem to give them an edge.



The debate about whether TeleEducation has an overall positive or negative effect on society has been going for long since the pros and cons for TeleEducation as an educational system are numerous.

References

Savukinas, Robert & Jackson, Gregg. "Open Universities: A Revolution in Lifelong Learning" Techknowlogia, September/October 2000. Knowledge Enterprise, Inc. http://www.techknowlogia.org/

Edge, Daniel W. & Loegering, John P. "Distance Education: Expanding Learning Opportunities" Wildlife Society Bulletin. Vol.28 No.3 Autumn 2000. pp.:522-533. JSTOR, AUCLibrary.

Lizardi, Anthony. "Planning for Technologies; ICTs and Non-Formal Education: Technology for a Brighter Future?" Techknowlogia, July-September 2002. Knowledge Enterprise, Inc. http://www.techknowlogia.org/