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Network-based Courses

The interactive technology that has been most exploited for distance learning is that of using remote computer based networks. Here the students will be all over the country, or the world, and the people responding to the networks will be mostly the people in the home institution, although in some cases students may also be involved in this activity. An example of this is the giving of various graduate level programs at Nova University, in Florida, including a Ph.D. program for several years in educational technology. Some of these programs no longer exist, while others are still active at the time this is being written.

Courses of this kind often proceed as if they were in a traditional classroom environment. One receives information from the computer about what should be done, and based on this the student sends material back to the computer, to be responded to or perhaps even to be used for grading purposes. Information needed by students may be on computers all over the world, accessed with programs such as gopher or mosaic.

People in the distance learning institute provide response. The number of people providing feedback is a function, perhaps even a linear function, of the number of students involved. It also depends on how interactive the course is to be. So as the student population increases, more people are needed to support the students, and perhaps more computer facilities will be needed. If grading is being done by many people, there may be problems with different people grading in different ways. Since interactivity comes with increased cost for people, this method presents an unfortunate conflict for the institution offering the courses; quality vs money.

Usually these programs involve some pre-training about use of the computer system. For example in the Nova program, the system was Unix, and there was a summer institute for bringing people together, getting them to know each other, and to get familiar with the operating system. Either a telephone network can be used to reach the computer, or there might be 800 numbers or some other similar arrangement. The ISIM courses, already discussed, furnish examples of network-based courses.

Since people are involved in the distance learning institution in reading and replying to the material that comes over the network, courses of this kind are often fixed pace. But if the institution is willing to absorb the costs, variable pacing is possible.