Topic: Getting

One of the greatest potential benefits for the future lies in putting personal computers and networking in the hands of public-school-age students … The teacher becomes a facilitator to other worlds of knowledge. In order for educators to make use of this technology, specialized communication facilities are needed for the teacher to play the role of facilitating education … In order to accomplish effective use of the technology for learning, the teacher must undertake to learn new methods of teaching. This a generalization that applies to almost any area of network application.

It is possible with this technology, not just to provide courses, but to establish a “virtual university” with all the facilities necessary to make that a reality.

The future of this technology is most closely tied to overcoming some of the current difficulties, particularly in the current situation of budget cutting and increased course loads for faculty in higher education. The first difficulty is the initial burden placed upon instructors to completely rethink the nature of their courses and adapt a facilitation role to their teaching style. It may even be necessary to provide some training for faculty on how to utilize collaborative learning approaches. There is also an initial workload in terms of creating materials in electronic form that is quite large the first time one teaches utilizing this medium. Faculty may be far slower to change and adopt this technology than students; therefore, one has to consider the incentives to do so in the particular educational institution.

If students who take most of their courses on campus are permitted to, they will choose to take a significant portion of their courses via a “distance” mode such as Virtual Classroom. This is because they experience scheduling conflicts with other courses, their jobs, or their family obligations, which mean that they either must take a “distance” course, or take longer to complete their degrees.