Distance Ed.?

Now that I have been studying distance education I have found that so many people have no idea what I am talking about when they ask what I'm studying in school. Others say 'I don't think you can learn as much that way'. In some of my work I have found that many people are either scared or quite unaware of the potential with distance education, or at least the tools used in distance education (technical software). They believe that an interactive program won't be used by students because they don't want to take the time to watch the simulation and interact with it. To this I say, not everyone learns the same. Not everyone wants to ask questions. Some students want to just sit in front of the computer with some sort of tutorial and figure it out. Others will have nothing to do with this and need a person standing over them. Others want a paper they can follow. So with so many people really needing different ways to interact and learn programs and aspects of the computer, why aren't all of the ways developed so the user can choose? I realize that you don't need to use all the bells and whistles to teach, but is it bad to have many access points to something? The development time really shouldn't be all that much more.

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