I am excited about the increased access to scaffolded learning that distance education (DE) affords diverse learners and the communities of learning that form before, during, and after the courses. I have been at the mercy of a limited curriculum for traditional classes due to limited faculty and enrollment, lack of curricular offerings, time to graduation mandates, and peer pressure for ‘blow off” courses. Distance education allowed me to pursue topics of interest to me without these pressures while creating learning communities across the nation and world. The more I learn about DE and how we learn, the more I understand my own affinity to distance and online learning from my early days in college. I am developing my teaching philosophy from the roots of how I learn which is when 1) I am given asynchronous, scaffolded, independent learning challenges to explore, 2) have access to synchronous online or in-person communication with classmates/professor, and 3) have multiple technological tools to show the application of my learning.
Access to DE courses is an area I want to explore more. When I say access, I mean open education for more equitable access to courses. Learners would have an enriched catalog of courses as well as the agency to create curricular pathways best suited for their learning. I am interested in understanding if DE and cognitive flexibility can improve transfer of diverse literacy fluency. I am disappointed to not have more answers for why so many other people are unable to learn or are flat out opposed to distance education. Through our synchronous class discussions, I have been able to translate my feelings into thoughts which are that DE is instructor driven, student desired, but administratively controlled. I am curious to see if our discussion is relevant to other research ro researchers in our field. I was surprised to find I really enjoyed reading the textbook (nerd, I know). But the attention, memory, and thinking chapters helped me understand better the ideal chunks in scaffolded learning to maximize a student’s learning. While we can’t increase a learner’s capacity, we can affect their automaticity and fluency.
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