The UC Davis campus has a great many effective lecturers and professors who inspire their students, present complex facts clearly, and draw on their own vast experiences to bring these facts to life. We are learning new ways to make lectures even more entertaining and motivational. Interaction between students and between professor and students is virtually absent in the lecture hall, yet that interaction is what is most needed to support an active learning process. Ask twenty people how they define distance learning, and fifteen will respond that it is television-mediated instruction. The remaining five will perhaps include courses on the Internet, without distinction as to how this material is organized and presented or how student progress is evaluated.
Interaction is the missing element in most forms of learning today.
As we have seen, lectures lack interaction. Broadcast or taped video courses are not even as good as lectures in providing interaction, a sorry standard for comparison. Internet courses may in some cases provide for some interaction, but in many cases they represent merely a repackaging of existing materials in a form that can be delivered electronically, with no attention to student-driven activities and associated interaction. This is an expensive model, but the best in many ways. If time, travel, external pressures, and receptiveness are impediments to a learning exercise, it is likely to fall short of expectations.