Distance Education: student and teacher's role

In distance education, students are more involved in their process of learning using the new technologies than years before. However, teachers should reinforce student's motivation and proper interaction with technologies. Learners only will reach their goals if they use the media tools properly.
Teachers should plan more carefully than in traditional classes. Teachers need to know not only how to use the technologies, but also how to teach their students to become a successful learners. Also, it is very important that teachers should improve their facilitating role through permanent training.
Researchers in distance education courses has shown that a sucessful course is when students and teachers work as a team.

Distance Education in Central America

The digital simulation in the Education

Simulation
When I was in Japan in 2003 (doing a study about the distance education and the use of the multimedia) I had the opportunity to see the use of simulations in NIME (National Institute of Multimedia Education). NIME is a Japanese organization of research and multimedia development. Nime's objective is to help the higher education in Universities and Colleges with the research of multimedia applications, the development of multimedia in the collaborative systems, and the production of digital material for leaning and teaching. (http://www.nime.ac.jp/en/)
What is a simulation?: It is an abstraction or simplification of any situation or process from the real life. In the simulation the participants play a role that involves interaction with another people or with elements from the simulation environment.
Advantages
To develop skills similar to a real environment
To develop activities without risks
To simplify the situations

The simulations are good for:
The training in the physical skills. Also, those complex skills that could be expensive in the real life.
To teach in the social interaction and the human relations where it is very important the empathy and the reaction with other people.
For the education, etc.
There are many kind of simulation.
Now, it is very common among all the world the use of simulations in education and medicine.

In the picture, Dr. Akahori from Toin University NIME when we visited this institution to observe the digital simulations. That was a simulation for an art class.

Rosemary Raygada Watanabe

Rubric and evaluations

Rubric is a useful tool for evaluating several levels of quality in student's perfomance, project, product, etc. The rubric is composed by a set criteria for evaluation and fix levels of fulfillment.
Example of rubric could find in the following link:

http://sites.google.com/site/rosemaryraygada/ikarus

The variables to evaluate e-learning courses

In order to compare and evaluate the e-learning courses it is important to have in mind the following points:
1. The contents related to the objectives and the audience needs
2. The benefits and the application of the learning
4. The pedadogical method in the plan
5. The Institutional experience and academic prestigiuos that hold the course

More details
Source: http://www.elearningamericalatina.com/consultorio/ce18.php

Quality of Teaching-Learning at distance

Important facts to look in a good quality of teaching/learning at distance

We must not forget that it is learner-centered, so it is important to encourage active participation, active learning and knowledge construction.
Another important factor is that distance education should be based on higher level thinking, skills , analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. All of this will allow the group collaboration, cooperative learning, multiple levels of interaction and a reciprocal teaching.
Finally, the distance education must focuse on real-world, problem solving, foster meaning-making, discourse,and moves from knowledge transmission to learner-controlled systems

Professor Rosemary Raygada Watanabe
http://www.uned.es/catedraunesco-ead/publicued/pbc01/secundaria.htm

Tutor Issues

The Role of the tutor/moderator is a very important area to work in distance education. It is neccessary to describe and point out the following:
Availability: A tutor area with dates and times identified when this person is accessible online to the students.
Intervention: The aim here would be to get people into a routine of communication which they get immediate feedback and satisfaction from, also to motivate people at any stage of the course.
Support: It is very important to give students support in feedbacks, and make sure that they still feel part of something, and don't stack up piles of work which then feels overwhelming later.

Professor Rosemary Raygada Watanabe
http://sites.google.com/site/rosemaryraygada

(Picture: University of Distance Education in Costa Rica)

Educational Technology

Definitions of Educational Technology

1. Educational Technology is the development, application and evaluation of systems, techniques and aids to improve the process of human learning. (Council for Educational Technology for the United Kingdom (CET).
2. Educational technology is the application of scientific knowledge about learning and the conditions of learning to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of teaching and training. In the absence of scientifically implements techniques of empirical testing to improve learning situations. (Natural centre for programmes learning, UK).
3. Educational technology is a systematic way of designing, implementing and evaluating the total process of learning and teaching in terms of specific objectives based on research in human learning and communication and employing a combination of human and non human resources to bring about more effective instruction. (Commission on Instructional technology, USA).

Reference: "A Handbook of technology educational".

Professor Rosemary Raygada Watanabe

http://sites.google.com/site/rosemaryraygada/techno

What is the role of the new technologies in the peruvian schools?

Professor Rosemary Raygada Watanabe

The work is focused in the role of the new technologies, like the internet, in the education at the peruvian rural public schools .
We made a descriptive analysis of the projects in the country to observe the goals of holding the social and cultural development in those rural places.
Peru had been working since 1996 in the following projects: EDURED, Globe Perú, World Links , Learning Space and Global Teach (in implementation). Also, the Huascarán project that was created in October 2001. It has more than 101 schools in rural places in Peru, from the jungle, the coast and the mountain. (all of them belonged to a distance secondary education project that was implemented in the country in 1998 )/
The idea to connect throught the internet all the public schools from the less equitative sector is to solve in part the digital divide. However, in the research we founded that the Ministry of Education is still dealing with the technical problems, the training among others.
Key words: Internet, web page, distance education, internet projects
More information

http://sites.google.com/site/rosemaryraygada/techno
More information in spanish
http://www.uned.es/catedraunesco-ead/publicued/pbc11/articulo.htm

Cases of comparison: Two virtual learning environment(FL3 and Angel).

By Professor Rosemary Raygada Watanabe
This document analized two virtual learning enviroment FL3 and Angel. We focus in the comparison of characteristics, potentials and deficits, regarding teaching, learning and working.
The group belonged to the members of the Seminar Teaching and Studying in Virtual Learning Environments launched by Ikarus and the Saarland University of Germany.
The participants in this study were: Ante Demirian, Heiki Laschet, Marianne Hetty, May Phillip Purakattu, Rosemary Raygada Watanabe and Tanja Pullwit.
We analized the pedadogical concepts and the learning theories, Instructional features of FL3 and Angel, possibilities for administration, adaptation and collaboration and the system architecture.
In the tutorial in both platforms, the computer acts as a teacher. All the interaction is between the learner and the computer. Computer based instruction allows students some control over the rate of sequence of their learning (individualization). High speed personalized responses to learner actions yield a high rate of reinforcement. However, there is a lack of interaction. Learners tend to work on their own at a computer, and there are maybe little or if any face-to-face interaction with teachers or other learners.
The strategies we suggest are:
1. Content must balance fundamental skills with higher -order thinking and match curriculums standards.
2. Content must be stimulating and draw students into learning,
3. Content should offer interdisciplinary, multi-sensory paths to learning and help students to find not just one answer to a problem, but range of solutions.
4. Students should not be simple users of content. They should be creators of content and builders of knowledge.

More information
http://sites.google.com/site/rosemaryraygada/ikarus
http://sites.google.com/site/rosemaryraygada

The effects of Instructional video in Distance Learning in Distance Secondary in Peru

By Professor Rosemary Raygada Watanabe

In August of 1999, Professor Akahori was dispatched to Peru to assist in making an instructional video for a distance learning program. JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) was the sponsoring organization; at the same time, the Ministry of Education in Peru had just begun INTE (Instituto Nacional de Teleducacion). Preparations were made to develop materials and a curriculum and to train tutors to teach in distance learning classrooms of secondary schools. This idea, to use video materials for distance education in secondary schools, came from Telesecundaria, which is a distance-learning system which originated in Mexico.
The program was begun all over Peru in April of 2000. The Toin University group visited a training facility outside Lima to meet the prospective tutors. We administered a survey to the tutors which asked them about their careers, their specialties, and the problems of education in their schools.
The next year, 2001, the Toin Group visited two schools in Piura District, in Limon and La Islilla. First, we administered a test which measured student achievement; after giving the first test, we waited the students watching TV and re-administered the test again; the main area to be measured was their achievement after studying using videos and distance learning. We also measured their gvisual literacyh since they had little exposure to TV, we needed to train them in how to understand recorded visual materials. For example, in watching a program on language gCommunicationh they had to grasp the fact that it was not being presented in real time; that it was recording and could be replayed freely; we had to teach them how to make connection in time between events presented that were not chronologically presented. Most important, was to make them aware of the goal or educational aim of each program. In the same year, we interviewed the parents and the students separately.
In 2002, we visited nine schools in the District of Junin. Our object was to give the achievements test we had previously given at only two schools. We felt that giving the text at nine schools would yield better and more accurate data than the text given at only the two schools in Piura State. The test consisted of information on communication, science and mathematics. We also tested visual literacy. We found that video instructional materials have a clear benefit in learning.
We thank for the cooperation to the Ministry of Education of Peru. We are also indebted to the tutors who visited the schools and to the parents and pupils of the schools.

More information see:
http://sites.google.com/site/rosemaryraygada/publications/effectsvideo
http://sites.google.com/site/rosemaryraygada

E-learning in rural Latin America

By Professors Rosemary Raygada Watanabe and Kenichi Kubota
Kansai University, Osaka, Japan
Federico Villarreal University, Lima, Peru

Latin American countries have been implementing a new system of distance teaching-learning, especially for those rural students living in remote poor areas. The main features behind the distance education projects are the following: 1) Centralized management by the head offices of the Ministries of Education, 2) Although parents and communities are motivated to collaborate with the government in developing distance education, economic resources are lacking, 3) Rural teachers' working conditions are poor and unstable, 4) Many students, especially girls, need to work for their families so that they are often absent from school. The educational projects depend on the political situation. Some governments have introduced distance education without sufficient research into the success and failure of previous projects. This is especially true of those using mass media. In some cases, the technologies used in distance education are insufficient or obsolete; often teachers do not know how to use them. Thus, to improve rural distance education, attention must be focused on the role of rural teachers, policy implementation, educational technologies, and comparative evaluation studies.

More details:
http://www.uned.es/catedraunesco-ead/publicued/pbc01/secundaria.htm
http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/110000974275/

Telesecondary education in rural latinamerica.

“Distance education”, “telematic education”, “(ICT) Education” or “e-learning” are the terms of the methods that educative institutions are using to give superior or secondary education through new technologies as mass media, computer or internet, supported by print material, and where the learner is at distance from the teacher during the teaching-learning process. The purpose is to give the opportunity to all the citizens to have the information and knowledge that they want and cover all the country even remote places or with social inequities. Thus practically all the nations are launching national strategies to take advantages of this era of rapid change and technological growth where new technology contributes to reach important goals, specially in Education, which is one of the fundamental human rights and the basis of the nation’s development.

Mexico was de first country that started the program called telesecondary. Nowadays, Costa Rica, Peru, among others are doing the same. In the picture students from La Islilla, Piura, Peru learning throught the tv. In the other picture students from Cahuita in Costa Rica studuying using books, notebooks and ghe guide of a tutor.

http://www.uned.es/catedraunesco-ead/publicued/pbc01/secundaria.htm

Challenges for distance education in a modern society

For distance education it is importan to know that there are two fundamental and complexity characteristics of a modern society and together put increasing demands on the education needed for the citizens to cope with their life in the society.
Those are:
1 Quality
There are increasing demands on quality of education. This is not only a question of the number of years spent in the initial education system, or the number of graduates in relation to the population. The initial education must establish a broad and general level of competence, relevant to modern society and sufficient to form the necessary basis for continuing learning activities during the whole life­span.
2 Updating and retraining
Since modern societies require adaptability in many dimensions ,education and training must develop ways to cope with the increasing needs of updating and retraining, as well as the need of mastering completely new situations and developments. These needs will concern people regardless of previous education, age, job, and social situation.
The need for updating and retraining is reinforced by some well known demographic trends. Particularly, many occupations will require increasingly specialised training and more frequent updating and retraining than before. This also means that training will have to be close to work, both in content and in pattern of organisation. This development brings forward a need for closer links between educational institutions and industry and business, both to match market demands and to keep teachers in touch with developments outside schools and universities.

http://sites.google.com/site/rosemaryraygada/techno

Rural students in Peru using new technologies

Rural students from a poor remote village in Peru who connected with us from Huacrapuquio, Junin (Peru) with students from Kansai University in Osaka and Professor Rosemary Raygada Watanabe (Japan) using internet in 2003.


http://www.uned.es/catedraunesco-ead/publicued/pbc01/secundaria.htm

Rural Education and New Technologies: Peru

Rural Education and New Technologies: Peru
This a new feature of education in Peru where the kids from remote rural schools can open their eyes to the world and share expectations with another students around all the Nations even the language and the schedules. They are inside the Project called Huascaran. We know some schools of this project because under the responsability of the Professor Masayoshi Akahori from Toin University we have been researching the Impact of technlogies in the learning of the students in Distance Education in Peru. These schools are now inside the Huascaran Project. Since October last year, they have been communicating with similars schools in all the terrotory of Peru. However, in June 2002 we connected for three hours from different continents. In this experience participated secondary rural students from Huacrapuqio (Junin), university students from the Kansai University in Osaka, the Tutor in Peru, Juan Suazo,Kenichi Kubota Ph.D. Professor from Kansai University,Rosemary Raygada University Associated Professor from Peru, JICA's participant in researching program in Kansai University and Marco Briones,Teacher Secondary Education from the Ministry of Education of Peru, Coordinator of all the tutors in Huascaran Project.

http://www.uned.es/catedraunesco-ead/publicued/pbc01/secundaria.htm