The Web and distance learning: what is appropriate and what is not

Abstract

The World Wide Web is increasingly being used to provide opportunities for distance learning. This report explores the motivations for developing Web-based distance learning and examines a range of issues including ethics, pedagogy, planning, advantages, disadvantages, and appropriate and inappropriate uses. The analysis takes a learner-centric view, classing as appropriate those uses of the Web that further the traditional educational values of quality, outreach, and flexibility. Examples of inappropriate uses are also given.

High School Students Learning University Level Computer Science on the Web – a Case Study of the DASK-Model

“…Much time and effort has to be invested in maintaining the material, and particularly in giving individual feedback for assignments to all students on a weekly basis. These experiences are in line with the findings of an ITiCSE97 working group (Lawhead et al, 1997): "There may be a perception that creation of Web-based courses will be an easy, one-time effort: ... In fact, constant maintenance, updating, and delivery costs in time and resources will be required" (p. 37).…”

“…Web-based education (e-learning) has been used to improve accessibility of courses at higher levels of education for a relatively long time (Lawhead et al, 1997;Vetter & Severance, 1997). Today, we are experiencing an increasing introduction of web-based courses at lower educational levels, e.g.…”

An analysis tool for the assessment of student participation and implementation dynamics in online discussion forums

“…[8] noted that personal interaction between students and teachers is lessened (or even eliminated) with online courses, but the teacher is still the primary source of knowledge and are facilitators of the learning process. [9] advocates taking a "humanistic" approach that would "encourage students to feed their own curiosity".…”

The impact of campus-wide portable computing on computer science education

“…As stated previously, faculty will have higher expectations of their students in this new environment. It is important that the students are fully apprised of this additional responsibility before they enroll [10]. To complement the extra responsibility, students will now have constant access to a great deal of additional information.…”