Developing new distance education

Developing affordable and accessible global electronic distance education across national boundaries.

Distance education is one of the major uses of internet multimedia telecommunications. For distance education, priorities are: (a) voice, (b) content (i.e. text, image/photo, animation, application program/simulation model, web), and (c) video, in that order.

The current challenge, as perceived in 1998, is to combine the various modalities for distance education, notably to serve less developed countries and similarly underserved regions which are without good analog voice-grade telephone networks, and hence without Internet access. This will require demonstration of previously unexplored hybrid configurations of various electronic distance education course delivery technologies. Part of this implementation will be to educate the participants, perhaps by offering them a stage for meeting at a distance and gaining confidence in using novel means of communication – an opportunity for hands-on "collaborative experiential learning" about the technologies and their applications.