| Introduction | System | Environment | Learners | Content | Resources | Teachers | Techniques | References |

A session made by Morten Flate Paulsen for the Teaching Over The Web Conference
Organized by the University System of Georgia, May 11-15 1998

3. The Learners

Discussing the learner's perspective, Mason and Kaye (1990, 25) argue that "… growth toward autonomy and self directedness in learning can be radically enhanced by CMC, …". On the other hand, Houle (1984) states that education is a cooperative rather than an operative art: it implies voluntary interaction among individuals during learning. Even solitary students guiding their own programs without the help of an instructor seek help and encouragement from others. In a social setting, those who take part in an educational activity should have some sense of collaboration in both planning and implementation:

At one extreme, this sharing is so complete that it requires a group to decide everything that it does together. At the other extreme, the sharing may be implicit in the teaching-learning situation, as when many people flock to hear a lecturer. Those who attend vote with their feet, as the saying goes, and one cannot assume from their physical passivity and silence as they sit in the auditorium that they are not cooperating fully in their instruction. (Houle 1984, 45)

Cooperation can be hard to achieve in distance education. A major problem for many students is the loneliness that results from limited access to student peers; the urge for individual freedom may intensify the problem. However, group communication technologies such as audio conferencing, video conferencing, and computer conferencing have been devised to facilitate cooperation at a distance.

Many students have full-time jobs and families to take care of and many are reluctant to participate if it means relinquishing high-quality family life and job achievements. They need flexible education: education that allows them to combine job, family, and education in a manageable way.

One may say that one person's freedom ends where another's begins, that one person's freedom to act infringes on the freedom of another. As Burge (1991) points out in relation to computer conferencing, "One person's time flexibility is another's time delay." The truth of this statement is hard to refute, but such negative consequences could be mitigated by reducing dependence on individual students and instructors. Coteaching, for instance, could reduce the response time since several teachers can access the system more often than one teacher can.