The missing borders: Pedagogical reflections from distance education

Advanced technology brings excitement and promise to the area of distance education, but it also generates questions in what it means to be teaching and learning in media-rich environments. This paper addresses the issue by contrasting distance education and face-to-face education. The students and teachers struggle with distance education because they do not realize that the face-to-face methods of instruction, especially the lecture format, do not match the distance education methods and media. The supporting elements of traditional classroom instruction and management are not present, which creates an environment that looks like traditional instruction but most of the teacher-student methods of communication are hindered. Using the concept of "borders, " the authors reinterpret the existing problems with previously ignored or hidden factors. Examples are drawn from a case study of distance learning courses. The concluding section of the paper offers suggestions for improving existing practice by recognizing the long-standing tradition of face-to-face education and mutual interaction of machine and people