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.