Aldworth Observations on Intro 2 Distance Learning

Being a history person, I especially found interest in the first half of the article when it was talking about the development of distance education.

I had heard of correspondence schools, but I was unaware of instructional radio. This part was quite interesting. In some ways it doesn't seems much different than some of the online lectures we've had in this program: a one way means of communication. I agree that radio definitely promotes intellectual passivity and that it could be difficult to adjust to differing class schedules, but I can only imagine how exciting educational radio was for people when it first was introduced.

I show Sesame Street to my daughter, and I've watched many other programs on PBS, but I had no idea that it was created as a result of a study of inner city children. The study stated that underprivileged kids were being deprived of adequate means of learning, so the Public Broadcast System and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created. All of this came in response to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. I think now PBS has transcended it's original objective, but I can definitely see the multicultural focus of PBS kids shows such as Sesame Street and Sid the Science Kid.

I knew that many kids were home schooled, but I had never seen any statistics on the topic. I had no idea that today upwards of 8-10% of K-12 students are home schooled. I had one student this year who started the year with me (he had previously been home schooled), and then had some social issues and his mother pulled him out and returned him to the home school. Personally, I don't think it was the right call by the mother; social issues cannot be fixed by avoiding the actual problem.

I was really surprised to see that over six million people are currently getting at least part of their high education from a distance. I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised given the program I am currently involved with, but it still seems to be a high number.