21stcenturyed.com

I’m feeling very label conscious these days.  I sat in on a presentation recently where the Power-Point referred to Distant Education.  Now -I realize this was likely a typo and that the author really meant Distance Education.  Regardless, good online education should never be defined by distance. 

I have been the student (and admittedly the teacher) in classes where there was a huge distance between the teacher and the students, even when the teacher and students were in the same brick-and-mortar classroom.  So I wonder if those of us in online education do ourselves a disservice by continuing to refer to our work as distance education.  Does it paint a negative picture in the heads of the public?  Might it turn away potential students – and educators – because they can’t imagine learning in such a distant fashion?

No answers here – except to say that I will continue to describe what I do by what it