Royal Holloway, University of London

[Divinus Arma]

Just a little clarification for those who are completely inexpereinced with modern distance education. I have attended both formats, traditional and distance. I have also attended two types of distance education courses: Asynchronous, and combination asynchronous/synchronous.

The combination asynch/synch ditance ed courses are spectacular. They now use voice over communication via an internet connection. The professors verbally communicate to students, and the students verbally respond. In addition, the lecture is supported by an online "blackboard", where the professor can draw, post powerpoints, bring up word documents, and even access students' computers using desktop sharing software. The professor also has a number of other tools, such as instant surveys and simultaneous text chat.

The online lectures now even support live streaming video, though it is still a little sketchy because not everyone has a 300kb per sec connection.

All of this is relatively new. Until recently, most online lectures have been through a chat, similar to what we have here at the org.


Online libraries have grown tremendously over the past few years as well. My university has a monstrous online library with access to periodicals, journals, online books, and other studies. The university pays subscription fees to countless journal article databases so that students have access to the latest scholarly articles. Will you find some older articles? Not always. Many older books have not been updated into the system, but digitizing books has increased the university's capacity to offer volumes of data at a fraction of the cost of a traditional library. Furthermore, there exists no dilemma in multiple students seeking the same information. With an online database, several students can all access the same material at the same time with no problem.