Distance Learning

Overview

The communication field has contributed a significant amount to distance education. The initial growth in practice and research in distance education can be contributed to schools of continuing or external education and social scientists studying human communication and technology. Later, researchers across disciplines became interested in the phenomenon because of the practical implications associated with online courses, programs, and institutions. In communication research, scholars became especially interested in how technology could mediate the social process of teaching and learning. Media comparison studies and the development of studies on computer-mediated communication (CMC) laid the foundation for much of the research on distance education.

Because there was already scholarship that focused on human communication and technology, CMC, and human–computer interaction, it was natural for these researchers to investigate the impact of technology on an array of social processes. Technology-mediated processes became an interest as researchers started examining how telephone communication systems impacted the way people interacted and communicated. These studies historically examined telecommunication with the development of group audio systems, video telephones, conference television systems, and computer-mediated conference systems in developing their theory of social presence, which has grown in attention by distance education research since the first decade of the 21st century. The research conducted by these scholars addressed questions focusing more on the ways technology can effectively facilitate certain activities in a course (e.g., group processes) and aligned with the group and organizational communication studies of the time. The potential for technology to mediate instruction soon became realized.

There is a close connection between research and practice in distance education. Many of those [Page 400]researching distance education early on were also practitioners. They were teaching at a distance or implementing communication technologies to explore the efficacy of adopting technologies to extend classroom spaces. In particular, many researchers were interested in determining if mediated interactions were as effective as face-to-face (F2F) interactions. As telecommunications, broadcast, and digital technologies have developed and evolved, researchers have compared them to F2F communication in many areas of communication, such as relational, group, and organizational. The study of distance education depicts the same desire for comparison studies to determine the efficacy of technologies in mediating human interaction and communication.

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