Shihkuan Hsu

Assistant Professor
Department of Curriculum & Instruction
University of Southwestern Louisiana
Lafayette, LA
s.hsu@usl.edu

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CONNECTING AT A DISTANCE: THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON TEACHING AND LEARNING EXPERIENCES IN DISTANCE EDUCATION
College of Education
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ph. D., October 1997

 

More than ever before, technology has merged with the process of education.  In distance education, technology has gained tremendous popularity in recent years by providing cheaper transmission, high resolution texts and graphics, and instant communication.  Many believe that teaching with technology promises high-quality education with wide access and low costs.  Distance education students, however, experience an unfamiliar physical setting, and the behaviors of the teacher and the students are different.  This new culture and environment breaks, removes, or changes the familiar classroom teaching and learning activities and challenges ordinary classroom practices that are embedded in the face-to-face environment.  This research examined the context for interaction of three teachers and their students as they experienced teaching and learning in such a setting.  My purpose is to reveal the dynamics of the contextual components.  Specifically, based on observations and narratives collected, I show (1) how the technical and social environments shape and reshape each other, (2) what underlying assumptions and conventions of teaching and learning the teacher and students in a classroom operate on, (3) how the goals of teachers and learners are facilitated or limited.  The stories that emerge tell of numerous problems which teachers and students face, but after coping with the problems the narrative suggests great potential.

Committee: Bertram Bruce (Adviser), Morris Sammons, Margery Osborne, Klaus Witz