WOMEN’S DIALOG AND DISTANCE LEARNING:A University in the Arab World

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify the relationship between the Arab women’sdialog and their perceptions of distance education, their personal relevance with thedistance education paradigm, and their life affiliations within a distance educationenvironment.Aspects of Moore’s Transactional Distance Theory were investigated in this study.Transactional distance education occurs in an environment when teachers and learnersare separated. This separation deals with learners’ and teachers’ behaviors and affectsboth.This study is a descriptive study employed a mix of methods. A sample of 150 activefemale learners at the Al-Quds Open University in Paletsine-Gaza Strip Branch wassurveyed. A response rate of 80% was obtained. Furthermore, eight females from theresponses were telephone interviewed. Descriptive statistics and Pearson correlationswere calculated to identify significant relationships of life affiliations, personal relevancesatisfaction, and perception of distance education dimensions towards female students’dialog in a distance education setting. The findings indicated that life affiliations had nosignificant differences on the women’s dialog measures through distance education.However, the personal relevance and the perceptions about distance education weresignificantly related to the concept of women's dialog.