Final essay

Advantages and disadvantages from distance education

It is true that even though in a traditional classroom one can be an outstanding student, on a distance course this may represent a real challenge. For instance, it is important to know some the advantages and disadvantages involved on taking a distance course, mainly to benefit from the advantages and why not, to learn from the disadvantages and take them in a positive way to be able to overcome them, to make the most valuable experience when taking a distance course. 

First of all, one of the advantages from taking a distance course, would be that it encourages students’ autonomy, and autonomy leads to responsible, independent students, capable to build their own path over knowledge. However, although distance education enhances autonomy and it can be seen as an advantage, it can be also a disadvantage, specially if students are not prepared to face responsibility, or if we have younger students who are not used to the distance education system. In my experience, when I first took a distance course, it opened the door to a whole new world of possibilities. Of course at the beginning i struggled, specially with being autonomous. Sometimes I felt discouraged, some other times I felt pretty positive, specially when I felt like I was actually building my own knowledge. 

The second aspect to analyze would be the ability for the student to discover new strengths and weaknesses regarding learning styles. It is vital for a student to discover and learn things about himself, and without a doubt distance course offer the advantage to have the chance to discover or in some cases, rediscover oneself. Not only in the educational field but sometimes in a personal way. Since it helps us to realize, as mentioned before,  how independent, autonomous and responsible se are. And if one learn how to deal with all this information, one may lead it in a positive way and improve their life in other aspects, such as family, work or even socially. Nowadays, with technology taking over our daily lives, one have many possibilities to work or study from home, therefore it is important to know our weaknesses in order to improve and turn them into strengths, and distance education gives the change to discover and work all those aspects. In the other hand, this can be also taken as a disadvantage. Yes, it is true that technology is taking over our daily lives, it is true that many of us have at least one electronic device at home, call it smartphone, tablet, computer, etc. However, as a matter of fact, not all of us know how to use them correctly, leading to frustrated students, who do not know how to use technology correctly in order to perform their best at distance class. Here, even though they are discovering a weakness they might fell towards failure and not do a thing with what they just discovered, choosing failure instead of success.  Teachers might also have to face with students who know they need to improve their autonomy, but as they don’t feel motivated enough, they might stay in their comfort zone, instead of taking the risk to try being independent, autonomous and responsible. And since it is a distance course, the teacher might not be able to help since communication is being null and one can not help someone if they do not ask for help. Regarding this topic from being able to discover ourselves and using that information to improve ourselves. I have been able to have distance courses in which I have had the chance to improve some aspects about my learning ways. For example, this semester I realized that it is okay to ask for help and that even though we are responsible and autonomous there would be always a moment or a certain occasion in which we might need some help. So I learned to communicate and let people know what is going on with me. So I decided to communicate more with teachers and classmates, and I think it helped me a lot this semester. 

The third aspect that it is important to mention is that distance education gives the chance to study from home, allowing you to do some other duties such as work, family or any other activity. Definitely one of the major advantages from distance education is precisely that since one does not have to be in a classroom, one can schedule the time to manage all activities from class, and even take care of may other activities without having to sacrifice family time. It is absolutely amazing to have complete control of your time, being able to prioritize aspects of our life and execute all those activities at the time of our convenience. In the other hand, this can be seem as a disadvantage as well, if one is not ready to take such responsibility, or if they are not use to that kind of responsibility/autonomy, it would result as a failure. Even though distance education has been on for a while now, not a lot of people really knows how it really work. Most people think that because it is distance, it means i don’t have to worry about it. Being used to have the teacher in front of you reminding you the due dates of a project/activity and then out of the sudden switching into distance course might give a breeze of freedom to the students, but now that they do not have that figure reminding them about their responsibilities, they might forget about them and eventually flunk the subject because they failed to accomplish all activities throughout the course. Once again, in my personal experience, it happened to me on my very first distance course, on the first activity. Then I realized it was a free time to go have breakfast with my friends, it was a time that i had for completing my tasks for the course. But once i understood that, everything was way easier and I was able to complete the course successfully.  

In conclusion, distance education has many aspects that can be seen as advantages or disadvantages, depending on one’s perspective and willingness to succeed. It is important to have in mind that distance education focuses in personal skills, therefore we have to give the best of ourselves in everything we do, and that was something positive I learned from this course. I am glad to know that even though there are many disadvantages, maybe some of them i can change them, some other i can not, but it is my decision if I take them in a positive way and learn to do something to turn them positive to help my career and success. After all, no mater if it is traditional or distance education, the responsibility of success lays on us, so it is better to face all those disadvantages and find the positive things to benefit ourselves and make the most valuable experience when taking a distance course. 

Doodley, L.D. (2003)
Advanced Methods in Distance Education: Applications and practices for educators, administrators and learners. 

Porter. (2004). 

Developing an Online Curriculum. 

Evaluating a Distance Course

Evaluating a distance course can be as hard and difficult or as simple and easy as we, distance teachers, manage the course. For this, is important to take into consideration the use of appropriate tools to assess the course, to provide with the necessary feedback and to provide with accurate and meaningful information to guide our students to a whole new experience with distance courses and to help ourselves throughout the course in a smoothly and convenient way. 

First of all, it is necessary to use the appropriate tools to assess our class. Because when using the right tools we will have control of what we will assess. For example, by using rubrics to assess, this will help us to keep track of all the activities that we are assessing as well as more detailed way of each aspect that we will be considering on our assessing making the assessing easy and fair, since we are assessing all of  our students with one criteria. By using the portfolio, we will help students to value their work and also they will learn to be more organized to keep a track of all of their activities trough the course, and at the end of the course they will be able to actually see the progress they are making. Which on a distance course is a perfect chance to show students proof that they are improving on their skills and knowledge. 

Second of all, by providing the necessary feedback we will help students to improve in aspects that they might need some extra push. Feedback is a very important aspect when comes to evaluate a course, since students will be able to get information about their impureness or their weaknesses, so they can either keep up with the good work or pay more attention to certain aspects of their learning so they could change their ways on time, so at the end of the course they will be able to actually overcome their weaknesses. It is also important for distance teachers to encourage peer feedback among fellow classmates, improving with this their autonomous skills, facilitating with informal assessing because students will be interacting with each other enriching participation, meaningful interaction and enhancing team work.

Finally, providing accurate and meaningful information, such as outlines, the curriculum of the course, along with a detailed list of all the activities that the student will need to achieve through the course, is a helpful way to assess a class, since by providing information will help students to become more autonomous or at least they will be aware of all the activities and goals they need to achieve in order to pass the course. Giving with this, once again, the chance to informally assess distance students. Since being away from a classroom makes it difficult to assess informally, since we are not checking closely what the students are actually doing to get all their activities done. 

In conclusion, by using the correct assessing tools, providing and encouraging feedback and providing accurate information will help us to evaluate distance students in an easier way. It is important to keep in mind that aside from all the above mentioned, good organization is an ally to maintain the course smooth and easy when it comes to evaluation.

Goal 5.2

Conjunctions are words used to connect other words and phrases together.
Example: I wanted to go but she said no, and Tom just laughed.

-Watch the video about conjunctions, so you can have an idea of what conjunctions are and what is their function. 

- Read the story of Marvin, the tiny mouse. After reading his story identify all the conjunctions in the text. 

Marvin, the tiny mouse

There was once a tiny mouse called Marvin. He was so small that when his friends called him, he had to light a match fro them to see him. At school he was always teased for being so small, but he didn't care and reminded deaf to everything people said to him. 

However, what some of them didn't realise was that Martin was the only mouse to fall into the traps set by humans. Whenever he had to dodge the traps to get to his mouse hole, Martin darted home nimbly and never once stepped on the mechanism that activated the traps. 

And that wasn't all. Whenever a human went mouse-hunting, Marvin would hide in the cheese holes and they never caught him. He was the only one who could. 

- Finally, create an alternative ending using at least 5 conjunctions. Please send your activity to my email gabriela.perez6@uabc.edu.mx

Different Ways to Help Distance Learners

According to Ron Howard “Traditional distance-learning systems have been designed around the learning isolate, an individual learner who generally works by him- or herself and has communication links with his or her tutor through the postal and telephone systems.” (Howard, 1995, p.105) understanding for distance learners all those individuals who take a course in an autonomous way keeping in touch with his/her tutor either through postal, telephone, and nowadays different social networks and platforms. Stating this, it is important to identify some of the main difficulties that distance students face throughout a distance course. Therefore, some of those difficulties involve asking and providing help, learning to be autonomous, lack of communication and difficulty to understand instructions. In this text we are going to explain each of those main difficulties and we will propose solutions to avoid them as well. 

It is well known that  being autonomous is one of the most important characteristics that a distant learner must have, however not all distance students have developed it and this is why it becomes a major issue when having to succeed on a distance course. Knowles (1990) suggested that as a person matures and ages his or his independence on an educator decreases (cited on Doodlers and Lindner, 2005, p.57) therefore, it is expected that sooner or later students will acquire that certain degree of autonomy required to succeed in distance education.  The question is, as future teachers or distance teachers, how can we motivate our students to reach that maturity needed to become autonomous? A good way to help our students and solve this problem could be motivating our students to work by themselves, showing them the wonders of being independent, creating activities to help hin/her to experiment being autonomous. Another way of helping them would be encouraging them to self assess their activities, that way they will realize how well they are performing at the subject, it will also provide them with the information to know their strong and weaknesses, and therefore it will encourage them to work their way into autonomous learning. 

The second most common difficulty that most distance learners face, is communication.  Probably, this is a difficulty that can be experienced not just on distance education but probably even in traditional education, since there are different factors that contribute to bad communication among teacher-students or student-student. Those could be that the student is shy and he is not used to ask for help or to ask to clarify instructions or even to ask for help. the lack of communication may lead to misunderstandings giving a result frustrated students who eventually will drop off the course. So one way to help this kind of students is providing as teachers a good environment of secureness so they would feel confident to ask without the fear of being judge for having doubts or ask for help. Maybe the teacher could also, create different activities to encourage team work, to get to know their classmates and develop an environment in which learners share and help each other. Richard Slatta (2007) in his article “Diversifying and Improving Student-Instructor Communication” mentions that communication is essential to succeed in any class. He also suggests that either students and teachers must show respect when communicating, remarking that all opinions are important and encouraging all students to participate in all activities through the course. It is also important to keep in mind that as distance teachers, it is difficult to keep communicated with all students. Therefore, we have to make an extra effort to keep in touch specially with those students that aren't participating or that we may think that they need some extra help to enrole in the activities. 

Lastly, Bad habits such as lack of discipline, proactivity and responsibility could be part of the major difficulties that the distance student has to upfront at some point of the course. Even when attending traditional courses, some students struggle when having to overcome some bad habits, making it even harder to deal on distance courses, because as we mentioned before, the distance learner must have some degree of autonomy in order to succeed. Said that, as teachers, we need to find ways to help our students to work on those difficulties and break the bad habits. It is not as simple as it seems because it requires the student willingness to leave behind those difficulties. However, there are some ways we can help. For example, just like we mentioned before with autonomy, we can motivate our students through self-assessment and or creating activities in which all students can help each other and contribute to improve their classmates experiences at class. It is good helping them find their strong and weaknesses. 

As a conclusion, the distance course teacher has a hard work to do, since they do need to work harder to get close to their students, they need to make things work in the course, and motivate students to enrole the course in a respectful and friendly way. It is also important to know students and to encourage them to get to know their classmates keeping their autonomy and helping others around. 

Bibliography: 

Advanced Methods in Distance Education: Applications and Practices for Educators, Administrators, and Learners

Kim E. Dooley 

James R. Lindner

Larry M. Dooley 

2005

Distance Education for Language Teachers : A UK Perspective Multilingual Matters

Ron Howard

1995

Distance Learning Basics: Skills for Being a Successful Online Student

Paul Alford 

Amy Lawson

2009

Diversifying and Improving Student-Instructor Communication

Richard w. Slatta

Jennifer Blossfeld

2007

Autonomous Distance Learning

Explaining the term autonomy by itself may be a little difficult as we often link it to “the ability to do certain task” or the “capacity to achieve a task”. However, Holec (1981) refers to the term autonomy as “taking responsibility for” or “ taking control of one’s own learning”. As we can notice, the key element in the definition is the idea that autonomy is an attribute of learners instead of a learning situation. In the other hand, writers associate autonomy with different levels in which students develop action, awareness, involvement, intervention, creation and transcendence which also involve content and process. Now, with the recent growth of distance learning, the necessity of encouraging autonomous learners has growth as well, mainly because autonomy plays a crucial role in distance education. To understand the importance of autonomous distance learning, it is important to take in consideration, the virtual environment, the teacher’s role and the main characteristics of an autonomous learner. 

When talking about virtual learning environment, we most take in acquaintance that distance education involves a high level of interaction between teacher and student, because interaction is essential for the learning process in a virtual environment in order to be successful. It is said that a good virtual learning environment allows both students and teachers to free themselves from the limitations of time, space and communication in a flexible way to take education to another level. Technology and internet had made this process  accessible and available at any place and any time, making communication and interaction a lot easier for students and teachers to get along with the educational process. Now, despite the important role of technology in distance learning, the success of all this programs is, of course, linked directly to the student and the teacher. for this is very important to know the different tools that virtual learning offers: 

- Communication: can be done by either mail, discussion board and chats, and it can be preformed one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many.

- Self assessment: which can be achieved by multiple choice tests that provide immediate feedback. 

- Delivery of learning resources and materials: this can involve images, videos, audios, links to another sites or resources.

- Shared groups areas: usually known as upload and share files with the purpose of communicate and share information with others. 

- Support for students: this tool could take a communication  form or it could be support material to help students. 

- Students tools: it could be individual web pages, drop boxes, electronic diaries, and calendars. 

With the evolution of distance education also come the changes in the system of teaching, mainly because “distance education revolves around a learner-centered system with teaching activity focused on facilitating learning”. Meaning that distance education is more focused in students autonomy and teachers facilitate the environment by providing explanations, references and reinforcements for the students but encouraging them to be independent rather then just transmuting information. It is important to mention that this does not mean that the teaching function is not becoming obsolete, it means that the role of the teacher is being transformed, turning the teacher into an intermediary between students and available resources. Helping students to recognize how technology can provide greater access to education by overcoming time and distance issues. In other words, the task of the teacher goes beyond merely grading students, it involves: 

-Diagnosing the student readiness to learn.

-Monitoring the student progress towards the objectives of the class. 

-Recognizing and discovering the students difficulties. 

-Stimulating and challenging students to go further and reach their goals. 

It is known that distance learning minimizes communication between teacher and student and at the same time it imposes a high degree of structure in order for learners to met their goals, and that is why students need to achieve some level of autonomy in order to be able to meet reach all the goals expected. 

To this point, it is necessary to mention the main characteristics of the autonomous student in distance education. It is said that autonomous students are centered-learning students that are viewed as independent with a high right to choose and the freedom to make decisions regarding their learning process, which empowers students to manage their time to study in an independent manner. Also, autonomous learners have the willing and have the capacity to manage and control what they need or have to learn, by knowing their own learning style and strategies, they are motivated to learn, they are usually considered as good guessers, they are also good at choosing materials, methods and tasks, organizing and caring out the chosen tasks and they pay special attention to the form and the content of the class. When students are aware of their potential and they incorporate it to their activities, that is the first step towards autonomous learning. However, sometimes being aware of their own potential is not enough to become an independent/autonomous student, because they also need to become more effective learners, and take responsibility for their own learning. They need to know when, why and how to use all those strategies they have developed in order to be able to choose the most appropriate regarding their needs. 

In conclusion, it is true that autonomous learning demands capable, responsible and independent students, but it takes more than that to reach a level of autonomy to become a successful autonomous learner. We must see it as a circle, in which effective education takes place when both, teacher and student work together, in order to achieve the goals required for the course. Also, the virtual environment plays an important role in distance education, since it is necessary to know all the tools that provides us so we can take advantage of them and use them in our benefit. As mentioned before, An autonomous learner, knows his weak and strong capacities and here is when distance education helps students to reach a different level of autonomy in order to succeed not only in education, but in life itself. 

*Autonomy in language teaching and learning

Phil Benson

Hong Kong Institute of education 

2001

*Helping students become Autonomous Learners: can technology help? 

Rubena St. Louis

Universidad Simón Bolívar 

2003

*Distance Learning: The Role of the Teacher in a Virtual Learning Environment

Ofra Nir-Gal 

2002

*Virtual learning environment

Ros O'Leary

Association for learning technology

*The American Journal of Distance Education,

Michael Beaudoin 

1990

Unit 2 Goal 2.1 Distance education and Multiple Intelligences

Being a distance student can be difficult for those students who are not aware of their learning intelligence style, because it would be hard to know how to guide themselves and focus on what and how they really need to learn. In my experience, it has been hard working in distance courses, because I like to communicate and I find it difficult to interact with my classmates and teacher in this modality. However, I have kept optimistic and just keep on trying to follow instructions carefully. Therefore, I think that it is very important to remain optimistic and try to enrole as much as possible in the course so we could maintain motivated though all the course. In the other hand, I find it easy to organize and prioritize my activities and I always stick to my time schedule to achieve all the goals I set at the beginning and throughout the whole course. 

Although I am linguistic and social, I like to work autonomously and I guess here is where my interpersonal strength shows up, which sometimes I see it as a strength because I can find my way by working alone and I do not have to be pushed around to accomplish my assignments. But, when it comes to work in teams, I find it a little bit difficult to mediate the way I work and adapt to other people’s way to work and that’s when I see it as a weakness. Even though I like being autonomous, I have felt alone and in some way lost in a distance course, specially when I have doubts and the time to clear all those questions takes a little bit longer then when attending a face-to-face course. However, I have come to develop my skills on internet researches to investigate and come up with a solution to my questions and or problems.  

I think that in order to succeed in a distance course, one must be organized, autonomous, but at the same time has to be willing to participate in distance group discussions to enrich and complement their cognitive skills. As future teachers, we need to find ways to help students to enrich this kind of communication  exchange. Students also need to prioritize their goals and of course plan their activities, They also need to communicate effectively.  

If I have to come up with two constructive solutions to contribute to help a student complete a distance course, those solutions would be: 

-To take advantage of all devices they have and of course to learn how to use the internet in an effectively way. That way, students would not get discouraged when they do not understand something, they would pursue their goal by researching and constructing their own knowledge. Here I would like to mention that when I say use the internet I don’t mean wikipedia or such paces, but online libraries, ibooks, online magazines and even other online schools that provide useful information and access to lots of interesting articles. 

- To keep motivated. And I think the best way of keeping motivated is creating a list at the beginning of the course with all the expectations from the course and goals they want to achieve, that way it would be easy to keep track of their own progress. Another way to keep motivated could be interacting with our classmates, and encouraging each other with good and positive feedback.  

Ideas of Open and Distance Education

When it comes to education, it is necessary to take into consideration our necessities and our possibilities as well. Nowadays, open and distance education offer a broad variety of different courses available for different types of people. However, it is necessary to understand what both distance and open education have to offer. it is important to review their advantages, disadvantages, and of course the accessibility they offer to our lifestyle. 

In te first place, we have the advantages of open and distance education, and some of them are: 

-Autonomy: both distance and open education provide the student the tools and environment to create autonomous students, since they decide how, when and what to learn. They decide wether to focus in one specific subject they are struggling with or they just review the ones they feel confident about.

-Time problems: In here, the student overcomes time and schedule problems, since he is able to arrange his own time to study or schedule in the way he wants to distribute his time for studying. 

-Expanding the number of students in a course: Distance education provides the chance to expand the number of students in a course, since they do not have to be gathered in a classroom at the same time. 

-It also provides the chance to work with a variety of people that might have different opinions, ideas, even ages, political views, since they are in different geographical places. 

-It also provides the tools to learn to communicate since we need to get across the spacial barrier, we need to communicate in both open and distance education in order to get our message across other people. 

In the second place, we need to think about the disadvantages of both open and distance education, here we find that some of them are: 

-The lack of face-to-face contact is another disadvantage, mainly because teachers do not have the chance to keep eye contact and in some way get to know their student's weaknesses or to know if the student is struggling with something, unless the student communicates the problem. 

-Demotivation: the fact that since there is not much social interaction some students may get discouraged on eventually drop off the course could be a major disadvantage. 

-Since both systems of education provide the student with autonomy to work on their own, there is a possibility that students may lose the sense of working in teams, or not be interested in social interaction. 

-Not everyone can be a candidate to take an open or distance course: here it is important to mention that when planing to take an open or distance course, it is important to face the fact of how capable we are to deal with the course. Since there are people who just can’t deal with all the disadvantages, or simply they are not ready for the responsibility that brings an open or distance class. 

Lastly, it is necessary to examine the accessibility that we have to take an open or distance class. Even though it is said that both modalities are accesibles specially when it comes to monetary issues, it is true that for example, in order to complete some tasks of distance education, it is necessary to have access to internet, platforms, forums, and some type of technology, that in some extreme cases, students are unable to have access to. However, nowadays, there are many other options to have access to all that kind of technology, even some schools provide access to computers and even internet in their campuses. Another aspect to contemplate is how much are we willing to cooperate with the classes and how much effort we are able to put into the course, since as we mentioned above, both modalities focus in the autonomy of the students. 

In conclusion, open and distance education, are an option when it comes to continue with education. However, it is important to scrutinize if we are eligible students to succeed the course. It is not true that only because we have the freedom to decido how or what we want learn, the course would be easy and we would not need to put any effort in achieving the goals required. All the contrary, deciding to take an open or distance course, requires dedication, time and effort justa as any other type of education.