Courses work on fail to the degree that they recognize and accommodate the range of special issues and problems posed by DL. Below is a list of such issues and problems. Not all will apply to every course or program but all should be at least considered each time a course is planned.

Issues (In no particular order)

Harvey Gover, ACRL guidelines for distance learning library services, College & Research Libraries News, v59 n9, Oct 1998

Who "owns" a course whose information is selected and arranged by a professor but produced and perhaps collected by university staff and maintained and serviced by some third group. How significant is the assumed megatrend toward "virtual university" consortia that would reduce cost and raise quality by having each course produced just once by a master teacher and offered as often as need requires?

Rubiales, David; Steely, Melvin T; Wollner, Craig E; Richardson, James T; Smith, Mark F, Academe v84 n3 May 1998

(A report by an AAUP committee on various aspects of distance learning, including faculty compensation, intellectual property and academic freedom.

Guernsey, Lisa, NYU starts for-profit unit to sell on-line classes, Chronicle of Higher Education | v45 n8 Oct 16, 1998

raised by DL use of material created and owned by third parties

Trotter, Andrew , Schools await fallout from copyright law , Education Week v18 n10 Nov 4, 1998

Gasaway, Laura N, Information Outlook v2n10 43 Oct 1998

(Critical ways in which the 1976 Copyright Act differentiates between face-to-face teaching and teaching at a distance)

the ethical and political issues raised by making learning dependent on computers whose level of ownership varies dependent on race and socio-economic status

, both in themselves as they inform the tracking and recording of user behavior and in the way that record is used, and in the way these issues are perceived by the students

Goldstein, Jinny. The Case for Learning Styles Training & Development v52 n9 Sep 1998

This is a big, ill-defined issue that is very significant in course success. In using DL, we abandon the traditional classroom whose culture has functioned as a mediating device just as the Web or television are mediating devices. (I’ll provide a separate sheet on this.)

Paul M. Bine, American Journal of Distance Education spring 1997

(Study found no gender, race, age -based differences in student anxiety about DL.)

Blumenstyk, Goldie, A feminist scholar questions how women fare in distance

education Chronicle of Higher Education v44 n10 Oct 31, 1997

Stephen Doheny-Farina , The wired neighborhood 1996. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press

Freitas, Frances Anne; Meyers, Scott A; Avtgis, Theodore A Communication Education v4 7n4 366-372 Oct 1998

(Excellent article on "teacher immediacy" the set of verbal and non-verbal behaviors of an instructor in the classroom and how this might be affected by DL. Includes a good bibliography.)

Guerrero, Laura K; Miller, Tammy A , Associations between nonverbal behaviors and initial impressions of instructor competence and course content in videotaped distance education courses Communication Education v47 n1 Jan 1998

Warning: Web Selling Isn’t Cheap Computerworld 10/12/98

www.computerworld.com/home/print.nsf/CWFlash/9810126EDA

This really involves two issues: marketing the course and determining who has the technology to become a potential student.

Regardless of the kind of course or the intended audience, most course marketing still uses traditional media, primarily print. Brochures and flyers can be sent to members of professional organizations listing courses of specific interest to them. Inserts in pay envelopes and mass mailed brochures are the most common way to inform a company’s employees of internal course offerings. Flyers for posting in college academic departments are used to notify students of DL courses in their major offered by another school and transferable to their home school. Radio ads, especially at commuter hours are commonly used to advertise professional enrichment courses. Mass mailings, based on professional lists, alumni registers, lists of students who have previously taken DL also remain popular.

The technology question has to address the fact that follows job and income. Within the corporate community, knowledge workers have computers on their desks but other workers have neither desks nor computers. In addition, most corporations have made a strategic decision to restrict access to the Web; most corporate users have access only to their own Intranet.

College students can generally be assumed to have Web access, either through a personal PC using a college-funded portal or through a computer lab. The 1998 National Survey of Information Technology in Higher Education notes that 45.1 percent of undergraduates use the Internet at least once a day, compared to 51.6 percent of their faculty. Both the student and faculty numbers are highest in research universities (over 50

percent for both groups). In contrast, less than a third (29.1 percent) of the students and two-fifths (40.1 pct.) of the faculty in community colleges have daily contact with the Internet and WWW.

K-12 students have much more limited access. While most school are now wired, the majority still lack sufficient PC’s.

The reassessment megatrend here

Home users area growing group, but the population still lacks older people (potentially a significant audience for personal enrichment courses) and the poor.

For colleges and universities, see the surveys and updates published by the Campus Computing Project @ http://www.campuscomputing.net/

For corporate use, see the journal Training, esp the October issue

See also the e-Marketer site @ www.emarketer.com/estats/welcome.html

for detailed up to date Web user demographics

The full-text archives of American Demographics magazine are available @

http://www.demographics.com/publications/ad/index.htm

GVU survey @

See current US census updates at http://www.census.gov/

The Distance Educational Training Council site @ www.detc.org

Patricia Choiecy, Who’s reading my e-mail IEEE Transactions in Professional Communication, March 1997

(a detailed study of corporate users’ perceptions of privacy and the lack of it in their use of the corporate communications network.)

Valerie Perugini Anytime, Anywhere: The Social Impact of Emerging Communications Technologies IEEE Transactions in Professional Communication March 1996