WHAT IS DISTANCE EDUCATION?
Distance education is education with the help of telecommunications, where subjects of education (students, teachers, tutors, and others) that has space or time distance between, work within one educational process, which is aimed at developing internal educational products and corresponding internal changes (additions) of education subjects themselves.
The characterizing features of such technology are high quality of training and high acquisition motivation, which is provided by Internet. That is high motivation, in which distance education differs from part-time education and here the quality difference lies.
Distance education is characterized by high professionalism, tendency to cooperation, self-assertion, and high level of communication with colleagues. One of the main characteristic features in distance education is strengthening of socially important motives as the result of using open and computer educational technologies together with modern means of communication. Those motives are as following: business, acquiring, of cooperation, self-asserting and of development, of affiliation, and communicational.
There are the following characteristics of distance education:
1. Flexibility;
2. Division into modules;
3. Economic efficiency;
4. New role of the teacher;
5. Special control of the quality of education;
6. Usage of special educational technologies and means.
The principles of distance education are the following:
1. Humanism of education;
2. Priority of pedagogic approach while designing of educational process in the system of distance education;
3. Pedagogical worthiness of using new informational technologies;
4. Choosing the content of education;
5. Providing the safety of information that is included into distance education system;
6. Existence of starting educational level;
7. Correspondence of technologies to the models of distance education;
8. Mobility of education;
9. Non-antagonistic position of distance education to the existing educational forms.
The principles education quality of distance Education are the following:
• Encouraging the contacts between students and teachers;
• Encouraging the cooperation between students;
• Using active educational means;
• Fast feedback;
• Effective using of time;
• High motivation;
• Taking into account talents of a student and means of teaching.
Distance education is also very popular among the managers
Aged between 30 and 40,
who need professional training and more knowledge mainly in business-connected subjects.
The most popular areas of Distance study in Ukraine are the following:
1) business,
2) international economics,
3) management,
4) judicial sciences
5) computer technologies.
Distance education in Ukraine is mainly design for
1. University teachers who need knowledge about distance education technologies. Only educational establishment can pay for their education.
2. Handicapped people who want to choose profession connected to informational technologies. (Such educational courses were carried in Russia.) In such a scheme we need sponsors to pay for education.
3. Part-time students who would like to pay for the knowledge of the higher quality.
4. Senior students who started to work in different firms and don’t have an opportunity to be present at all the lessons. They can pay for additional educational services.
Distance education is a kind of technology in which both traditional and innovation means and forms of education that are based on computer and telecommunication technologies are used.
In the educational system distance education fulfils all the demands of humanistic principle, according to which nobody can be deprived of the opportunity to obtain education because of poverty geographical or time distances, social isolation physiological defects, or lack of time because of own business. Taking into consideration the objectivity of the process of informatisation of society and education distance education, which encompasses the best features of other forms of education
Education becomes an instrument of interrelation not only of knowledge and technology, but also the capital, the instrument of market competition, and solving geopolitical problems. At this stage distance methods of education that are based on the modern technological achievements will play the main role. At present the mankind have rich experience in the realization of distance education systems, which use computer nets, television systems and modern telecommunication technologies.