Mister Rogers shows your kid how to button a cardigan, it's distance learning. The kind of distance learning that concerns us here is the type that connects people with other people via technology, what some experts call interactive distance learning. It does include audioconferencing, videoconferencing and docuconferencing, a relative newcomer to the distance-learning arena that allows many people to collaborate on a shared document via computers separated by a few feet or several time zones. The real story lies in a gradual shift in thinking about how distance learning ought to be done. In the past, we used videoconferencing to emulate a classic classroom situation.
Groups of people sit in rooms and listen to experts talk.
If we couldn't get everyone in the same room for whatever reason, splitting them into several groups connected by some kind of video link seemed the next best thing to being there. Getting the technology to work well took so much time and energy that nobody had the wherewithal to wonder whether replicating the experience of a live lecture was good enough. But in a lot of cases, getting the technology to work well took so much time and energy that nobody had the wherewithal to wonder whether replicating the experience of a live lecture was good enough. That question was asked only in relation to the learning that occurred when the same instruction was delivered in a single-site classroom. Now, that can be good news or disappointing news, depending on how you look at it.