Distance Learning in 21st Century Education

Colleges and universities around the country are scrambling to keep pace with the innovations in technology to engage a generation of students that come to campus with laptops, camera cell phones, and the knowledge and skills on how to use Google. Some professors make available course websites while others use podcast lectures, but these are often considered experimental. Many of these tools and techniques aim to revolutionize the learning process, however, many faculty and students worry that these advances are just distracting from the material and from time tested methods of teaching. Since no one understands the full impacts of these teaching tools or about their long range effectiveness, for now, colleges and universities are engaged in a beta test to determine how technologies will co-exist with or replace the traditional approaches. The challenge of each innovation is that it must be carefully measured against the successes of the traditional approaches.