Distance Education: The Pitfalls and the Possibilities

As universities increasingly embrace distance education technology, it is useful to examine the challenges and opportunities of technology in the classroom. This paper draws on the author's years of experience teaching distance education and research to suggest strategies to incorporate in the engineering classroom. Methods to increase distance education student's participation, ways to avoid losing students both on-and off-campus, and tricks to minimize the additional time required to manage off-site asynchronous students are discussed. Challenges for the distance education instructor are also discussed, such as dealing with time delays in the system, maintaining academic honesty with off-site students, and avoiding the talking head phenomenon and dealing with the MTV mentality.