From a distance: student empowerment and constructing teacher identities online

It can doubtless be argued that many pedagogically sound teaching and learning experiences have been and will be successfully constructed in the absence of online learning. Many such experiences however, depend on opportunities of teacher-student contact through lectures, tutorials and consultations. These face-to-face interactions over the length of a semester allow a personal sense of knowing to develop among the participants, and help forge a common goal and identity. Distance education students, by contrast, experience significantly less of the benefit of such interpersonal and continuous interactions. As off-campus enrolment may be related to lower academic achievement (Dickson, Fleet & Watt, 2000), the advent of technology compelled us to find ways and means of levelling the field and provide comparable learning experiences and environments to those enjoyed by their on-campus peers on principles of social justice and equity. Online learning through the WebCT platform enabled innovations and facilitations to provide the desired processes and outcomes for distance students; our perceptions and consequences of our common three-year journey are described.

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Distance Education ,

Internet ,

E-Learning ,