APT 502

1. INTERNET-BASED DISTANCE EDUCATION
By: Raheen Brooks

2. INTERNET
The internet is increasingly being used for the delivery of
educational material and distance education. Internet-
based learning allows students to learn at their own pace,
access the information at a time that is convenient of
them, and provides education to remote students that
otherwise would not be able to travel to a classroom.

3. INTERNET STRUCTURE
 Tier 1: Backbone Networks and Internet Exchange Point- Is the essential framework that
provides a worldwide configuration of extremely high-bandwidth networks.
 Tier 2: Regional Networks- operate backbones on a smaller scale, in the United States typically
within a state or among adjacent states, connecting to one or more national or international
backbones.
 Tier 3: Internet Service Providers – is perhaps the most important component for distance
educators. The individual internet services (ISPs) are connected to regional networks and
provide dial-up, or direct, highspeed access to the internet at the local level.
 Tier 4: Organizational and Home Network – are the local area networks that interconnect
computers within an organization, such as a school, college, government agency, or company,
and provide Internet access to individuals within those entities.

4. ADVANTAGES OF ONLINE LEARNING
Students are able to participate from school, home,
office, or community locations, asynchronous course
components are available 24 hours a day, at the learner’s
convenience, and are time-zone independent.
Students are able to work at their own pace and
corporate training programs conducted via the Internet
can yield significant savings in employee time and
travel costs, and training can be conducted on a “just in
time” basis.

5. ADVANTAGES
A well organized online course will provide a
variety of learning experiences and can
accommodates any type of learning skills.
Students who become skilled at using Internet
resources, a factor that can improve
employment options upon graduation. Learning
materials are available across the entire web

6. LIMITATIONS OF ONLINE LEARNING
Online courses may emphasize the technology
rather than the content and learning opportunities,
well-designed Internet-based courses may be
labor-intensive to develop, requiring time and
personnel resources not available to many
instructors, instructors have difficulty adjusting to
the learner-centered model of instruction and do
little more than “shovel their teacher-centered,
lecture-based courses into an online format”.

7. LIMITATIONS
Copyright violations on course web pages that are not
password-protected sit in plain sight for viewing by the
rights holders and their attorneys, computer bandwidth
limitations make it difficult to present advanced
technologies, such as streamed video, multimedia, and
memory-intensive graphics, over the Web, and online
courses require students to take more responsibility for
their own learning, a task that some find hard to
accomplish

8. WEB 2.0 APPLICATIONS
Blogging: Web logging, or blogging, is a form of online
reporting and journaling that gives anyone an
opportunity to publish on the internet.
Wikis: is an online writing space designed to be created
and edited by groups of persons.
Podcasting: derived from the Apple product iPod and
the term “broadcasting”, “is the process of recording
and storing audio and/or video content on the Internet
for downloading and playback using iPods, MP3
players, computers, and other electronic gear that plays
back audio and/or video files.

9. E-LEARNING ADOPTION CYCLES
E-Learning Adopting cycles is categorized into four
distinct cycles which are:
Cycle 1- Enhancements to traditional course program
configurations are examples are emails web sources and
powerpoints
Cycle 2- Course Management Systems- reflects teacher
centered instructional paradigm
Cycle 3- Imported course objects involves student
understanding of the course materials
Cycle 4- New course configurations its purpose is to
take advantage of the power of technology.

10. SUMMARY
In conclusion technologies used for distance education
falls into two categories which are:
Telecommunication technologies that connect
instructors to distant learners and classroom
technologies that record, present and display
instructional information.
Video and computer-based systems