Distance Education/Online Learning

                                     DISTANCE LEARNING AND ONLINE EDUCATION

I have always sought ways to pick up information about distance education and programs that would give me an opportunity to study abroad. With online learning as a tool we can handle the problems more easily first because the interaction between the instructor and the learner  becomes more available, faster and meaningful than it was  in the times when learners had to go to the post office, send the letter to the instructor,and wait for months to get his response. Peer interaction becomes more feasible as it can be done through skype, messaging and other ways. Students, as for me, don't need to have advanced proficiency level of  technological skills to be able to take an online course.
As we know from Hill's article(2012), there are different types of online courses meeting some particular needs Ad Hoc Courses, Fully online courses, Hybrate courses. And through this same article I found out that the logical extension of this approach is called "flipped class". Before this I could never imagine that I was studying in the flipped class at AUA which uses class time for practice and actual application moving the content delivery to be available to students via technology.
Now let me introduce my viewpoint from the teacher's perspective:  Let me remind my peers and instructor that I had intended to write a paper where I would be an online trainer and train intermidiate level learners. . Before getting to know the challenges I though it was really a great idea. With so many PLEs and VLEs at hand, Open Educational Resources at hand I would become a great trainer. I even chose the open resource to find a useful course where I could be enrolled as a teacher and my students can take courses without having to pay any money for them http://odijoo.com/. And what happened? Why did I switch on a new topic? First it was because I was short of time. On the one had I had to develop materials and do a course proposal. On the other hand I needed to be a professional in the field of technology to be able to cope with the problems. As  from the maxims introduced in White, Murphy, Shelley & Baumann's article (2003) the image of a distance education teacher should be like this: a teacher with high IT skills. In addition to this a teacher  is a trainer,who is honest, supportive and approachable to the students.Other important issues are self-management and pedagogical expertise, professional skills and responsibilities.

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