Distance Education for Teachers

Over the holidays I read the book "Trends and Issues in Distance Education: International Perspectives" (2005). One thing that stood out is that many of the examples of distance education, were for training in-service teachers. This is particularly the case for developing nations with a critical shortage of teachers, but even the UK's Open University had a significant number of teachers as students. Visser, Visser, and Buendia (2005) discuss training teachers in Mozambique and Simonson (2005) in Zimbabwe. The need for increasing the number and training of teachers in developing nations is obvious, but the UK's Open University also had a significant number of teachers as students. The role of DE, nor via the Internet, for in-service teacher training, has a long history but still tends to be neglected.

The authors in the 2005 edition of  Trends and Issues emphasized that paper based DE was still important as the spread of computers and the Internet was limited in developing nations.

One curious footnote of history is that Visser, Visser, and Buendia (p. 221, 2005) note that the Mozambique railway company in 1957 had correspondence courses for railway workers delivered by train.

Only afterwards did I discover there was a newer second edition (2012). It would be interesting to see if their views had changed in the seven years to the second edition.

Reference

Simonson, M. (2005). Trends in distance education technologies from an international vantage point. In Y. L. Visser, L. Visser, M. Simonson, & R. Amirault (Eds.),  Trends and issues in distance education : international perspectives (pp. 261-285).

Visser, Y. L., Visser, L., Simonson, M. & Amirault, R. (2005). Trends and issues in distance education : international perspectives. Information Age Pub, Greenwich, Conn

Visser, Lya, (editor.) (2012). Trends and issues in distance education : international perspectives (Second edition). Information Age Pub, Charlotte, N.C

Visser, M., Visser, J., & Buendia, M. (2005) Thank you for (not) forgetting us In Y. L. Visser, L. Visser, M. Simonson, & R. Amirault (Eds.),  Trends and issues in distance education : international perspectives (pp. 217-241). Information Age Pub, Greenwich, Conn