The Future of Distance Learning

 

 

  

Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud

“In his TED talk presentation Sugata argued that present day schools were first designed in the Victorian age with the mandate to produce the skills needed to administrator the Victorian empire’s bureaucratic system. The education system for these schools was designed with one specific requirement and that was to make learning happen. According to Sugata the Victorians designed such a robust education system that even though the empire has been dismantled the education system still exists. Sugata says that the education system needed in the future is not about “making learning happen, it’s about letting it happen”.

Distance learning in the future

“One of the unique aspects of distance education over the last few years is really its growing acceptance in society as a whole” Siemens (2010). That is because as more and more people engage in online communication experiences they become more comfortable with technology and distance ceases to be important. People who traditionally communicated face-to-face are making a shift to meaningful online relationships. Family and friends are using simple social tools like SKYPE™ to communicate from a distance, making the notion of education at a distance more credible. The proliferation of social online interactions is making people more comfortable with communication technology and this factor is setting the stage for future wide scale participation in distance online education experiences.

Improving societal perceptions

The instructional designer’s sole responsibility in improving societal perceptions of distance education is to design, develop and implement relevant, rigorous and effective education experiences for the distant online environment. A critical factor is the instructional designer’s skills and competencies in course design and their ability to collaboratively support instructors by designing courses that effectively engage students.

Continuous improvement

As the quality of communication technologies improve the production of more technically perfect distance educational experiences will increase. According to Siemens distance education will then become more distributed, and begin to attract greater contributions from experts around the world leading to the increased use of multimedia, games, simulations and more video work within courses. The improvement of distant education experiences will “support a growing shift towards what some have called the triple helix model of education and that’s where we have universities, government and business, and the three of them together form a strand of interaction to provide and to equip students for this online environment” Siemens (2010).

References

Siemans, G. (2010) “The Future of Distance Education”. [Video Podcast] Retrieved from Laureate-media.

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (5th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.

SKYPE. http://www.skype.com/en/what-is-skype/.

Sugata, M. (February 2013) “Build a School in the Cloud”. TED2013. Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE), Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html.