Distance Education: Development and Evaluation of a Supporting System

[[abstract]]The use of telecommunication technologies make it possible to carry out instructional and learning activities at great destances. With distance education, the space and time constraints associated with traditional classroom teaching are overcome. However, distance education also creates new problems. Collection of homework, posting of grades, interactions between the instructor and the students all become more difficult. Thus, a suitable classroom support system is critical to the success of teaching and learning at a distance. In this paper, we present a wed-based model of a distance education support system. The model is based on previous and existing systems reported in the literature, the problems reported, and analyses of teachers' and students' needs. The web-based system described required no special computer skills to operate. Finally, two experiments to evaluate the completeness and the user-friendliness of the system are reported. The experiment results showed that overall, the users gave high remarks to this system. The system was easy to use and it indeed was seen as fostering learning and helping teachers m anage the chores associated with distance education courses.