So far on H800 we have looked at a range of case studies on a whole host of subjects including 'the google generation' the use of radio in distance learning, cultural preferences for teacher-centred learning etc etc. I will write more on the debates and themes elsewhere in the blog but I want to make one observation at this point: the case studies and the debates have centred almost exclusively around distance learning in education, mainly HE and FE.
Is that bad?
Well, it's certainly not why I signed up here and I scanned the material about the course pretty thoroughly prior to signing on the dotted line. There is a lot of talk of 'learning' and very little about 'teaching' so I hoped there would be a significant chunk of the course devoted to what happens outside of academic institutions where countless organisations are doing lots of interesting things in the field of distance education.
With the notable exception of the OU, most western academic institutions 'dabble' in distance education, the focus of their activity is on the campus. i guess this is why so many of the case studies focus on the developing world where the demands and constraints are somewhat differnt.
There are lots of interesting things to discern by looking at these studies I have no doubt but it is just one side of the coin. I work for a multinational organisation that has 40,000 people in 20 or so countries all working together and as is the case with me, many of them are home-based workers. We are knowledge workers, we need to obtain information, we need to interact and collaborate and we need to learn continually. This is not uncommon in the commercial sector and surely this is worth studying just as much as english teaching in South Africa or universities in Nepal and Bhutan.