Distance Education Essay

Introduction
Distance education refers to technology-based instruction in which students are at a location physically separated from their instructor during the entire course of study (Lei & Gupta). Distance education began in Europe with correspondence schools (Hull, 2009). The primary purpose of these correspondence schools was to teach shorthand (Hull, 2009). The United States adopted the idea around 1980, and it was primary used for broadening vocational training for mining, and state college agriculture extension programs (Hull, 2009). In 1926, the Distance Education and Training Counsel (DETC) was created and was the source of many well-known individuals’ education. Among these were Walter Chrysler, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Nelson Mandela (Hull, 2009).
In the early stages of current distance education, communication pertaining to class work was delivered to a video, audio recording or a CD-ROM (Hull, 2009). The internet expanded the development and use of distance education (Hull, 2009). Online discussions have developed into an important aspect of online education (Meyer, 2010). Online discussions, blogs, and bulletin boards make it easier for teachers and students to share and debate about topics and chastise other students’ posts (Meyer, 2010). Discussions posts allow teachers and other students to analyze other student’s writing as well as their personal and professional lives based on what they post online (Meyer, 2010). Online communication allows students to post as frequently as they would like (Meyer, 2010). Blog communications has expanded in use (Meyer, 2010). In May 2007, there were 83.1 million blogs and by January 2009, the number of blogs had grown to 133 million (Meyer, 2010).

Quality of Lear...

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...ve data along the ten-year period when a new technological advance would have been made to evaluate whether there was a correlation between a given technological advance and enrollment in distance education courses at that time. A correlational design will be used because a correlation will be drawn between online education and institutional growth at both Missouri Western State University and Northwest Missouri State University. Although this study will correlational, it is not causal. As with many other studies, there could be issues with the third-variable problem and the directionality problem. Simply stated, there could be another variable that causes an increase in enrollment of distance education courses other than technological advances. It is also a possibility that a boom in enrollment would influence technological advances rather than the opposite.