WK1Assignment Blog Post (hopefully)

I always felt that distance learning was a combination of attending classrooms or activities that influenced the educational experience that one may be learning about within an online setting. Or vice versa where one attends school in a physical setting but has to participate within an online community. In my past experience before attending Walden University, I always found the term “distance learning” to be awkward. For someone like me, I don’t have a car so no matter where I went to school, I always felt like I had to travel some bit of distance to receive my education.
Once I began graduate school at Cal State Northridge, I learned that some courses required us to use educational modules such as Moodle. I then gained a better understanding of how these types of programs and sites could impact those that may not have the opportunity to go to school within a physical setting because of various reasons. “Resources should be subjected to instructional design procedures that organize them into learning experiences that promote learning including resources that can be observed, felt, heard, or completed.” (Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. 2012)
My new definition of distance learning would incorporate the use of educational material or coursework placed in an online medium which allows participants to access and gain insight from the material at hand. It allows instructors and trainers to include personal experiences and insights to the learning experience. Distance learning’s new definition would also include face-to-face interaction where students are required to interact with or create projects within an online setting which would enhance their understanding of particular subjects. “Integrate knowledge management, community, and tutorial techniques within the context of the entire curriculum to support a certification or degree program.” (Moller, Foshay, & Huett 2008, p.70)
      My future for distance learning is one that will be much more embraced by people in the future than they are right now. I believe that students within “traditional” classrooms will have a requirement of working within an online community or structure along with their traditional course work. This will still allow them to have that face to face interaction that many people will still feel that they need. Distance learning will grow to allow better use of the multimedia that is out there currently. With the fast changes that have occurred with media mediums, I am sure that in the future students will be further advanced with these formats and have an easier ability to incorporate into the educational process. Media formats such as Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. will allow students to retrieve resources from around the world and include these mediums within their projects or coursework which can create a better, interactive and intriguing type of projects that would allow for a stronger learning environment.
With distance learning, I believe that students around the world that may want to have educational experiences with other students from other nations will have access to schools that are strictly online and have that opportunity to join that community. Even if they are not within the same facility or country, the use of discussion forums, video and audio conferencing and other means of live interaction can help students develop the interaction needed to gain some insight on the culture of where their peers come from. I also believe that if we allow the students to express their ideas of how the layouts of the modules should look, we would see many different formats of how the navigation of the instructional websites could change and affect the learning experience of some of the students. Some students may find that the modules are too simplistic while others may feel that it is too overwhelming to work through. In gaining their feedback of how they would change the format, we could possibly see an increase of students in the world of distance learning. By creating more “App’s” that are mobile and accessible via their mobile mediums, I believe that people would see that even if they are not able to manage their own schedules to work around a school course load, they can indeed maneuver their school course load around their work schedule.

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

Moller, L., Foshay, W., & Huett, J. (2008). The evolution of distance education: Implications for instructional design on the potential of the web (Part 2: Higher education). TechTrends, 52(4), 66-70.