Distance Education Trends: Integrating New Technologies to Foster Student

Interaction and Collaboration

(Summary)

Through our research about articles in distance education we found an article

about Distance Education Trends: Integrating New Technologies to Foster Student
Interaction and Collaboration.
http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/link.asp?target=contribution& id=U15H585918372223

This research is a descriptive research that aims to identify the importance of

using emerging technology tools such as wikis, blogs, and podcasts as well as the
using of social software applications such as Writeboard™, InstaColl™, and Imeem™
to encourage the interaction between the students in distance education.
Actually these emerging technology tools and social software applications help
in promoting the interaction between the student and the instructor and between the
students themselves in both ways; synchronous and asynchronous.
They may help in creating social communities between the students and their
instructors to communicate through live meeting, chat, mail and other tools.
These technologies may provide the students with more control over the
content so this may enhance the learning process. The students may edit documents
and share their files to others.
To implement new technologies in distance education and integrate the
emerging technologies for either synchronous or asynchronous modes, you have to
consider the following principles:
• Support interaction between students and instructors, students and faculty
and between students themselves.
• Cater for differences between learners in learning styles, thinking styles,
etc.
• Provide the students with the needed feedback.
• Support the using of active learning approaches.
• Emphasize time on task.
• Communicate high expectations.
These technologies may have an impact on the theoretical frameworks in a way
that involve changes in the following:
• The way in which the distance instructors are using the learning theories
and the teaching models.
• The way in which they view the relationship between the interaction
provided by the emerging technologies and social presence.
• The way in which these emerging technologies may change the role of the
instructor.