Distance Education

1. Identify and briefly discuss 5 advantages of distance education.
1) Flexibility: Students can take and do assignments and their learning at their own pace instead of having time restrictions in a physical classroom.
2) Variety of Classes Offered: online classes can be more varied than physical classrooms because it is virtual.
3) Low Costs: Transportation costs for the parents is lowered because they don't have to take their child to and from school. Material costs for the school districts is lowered because there are less physical materials...assignments are turned in digitally instead of on paper.
4) Avoiding Bad Weather School Cancellations: School doesn't have to stop just because the bus can't come! Unless of course, your electricity goes out, and in that case you probably deserve the day off anyway.
5) Can Hold a Job and Go to School at the Same Time: High school students have the opportunity to arrange their school and work schedules to provide a balanced lifestyle.

2. Identify and briefly discuss 5 disadvantages of distance education.
1) No physical spaces like Libraries, Gyms or Playgrounds: Students learn in one exact place the whole time..in front of their computer. Occasional and infrequent field trips cannot compare with PE every other day in the Gymnasium.
2) No Face to Face Interaction with the other Students: Especially for younger students in the primary grades, learning new faces, hearing new voices is mentally stimulating. Lack of these might potentially harm the learning of young students.
3) No Interaction with the Teacher: Students sometimes need to have the intimading presence of a teacher to get them going on assignments, this role could probably be filled by involved parents but the likelihood of that always occuring when needed is significantly lower for online schooling.
4) Behavior Issues aren't focused on, only Ignored: The students who use online schooling because of behavior issues aren't being helped..their problems aren't being dealt with...just worked around by using online schooling.
5) Decline of Physical Writing Skills: The legitimacy of students writing might go down if they never actually write anything, only type answers onto the computer to submit. People will always need to write legitimately.

3. How you would determine the readiness of students to participate in distance education?
You would have to determine their ability to work and complete assignments on their own, stimulate their own thinking, use technology expertly and have the work ethic to be a good online student. To do this, stuents would probably need to take some sort of diagnostic assignment/unit lesson which they complete online in the same sort of way they would do their online learning. Then, the online school administrators would determine if the students were capable of excelling in the online schooling environment. Paremt involvement would be CRUCIAL for determining if their child would be capable of doing well using online classes.

4. What would you need to do to be ready to teach in an online environment?
As a teacher, I would need to have taken specialty courses in how to teach in the online school environment. I would need to have a super fast, very smart computer also. And programs like skype downloaded and be proficient with such programs. I would also need to have massive amounts of time to dedicate to answering student e-mails/questions/ grade assignments.