What is distance education? What are its advantages and disadvantages?

First, understand the distance education.

Distance education is a form of education in which students and teachers, students and educational organizations mainly use various media to carry out systematic teaching and communication, and it is an education in which courses are transmitted to one or more students outside the campus. Modern distance education refers to the education of transmitting courses outside the campus through audio, video (live or video) and computer technology, including real-time and non-real-time education. Modern distance education is a new type of education with the development of modern information technology. With the development of computer technology, multimedia technology and communication technology, especially the rapid development of internet, the means of distance education has made a qualitative leap and become a distance education under high-tech conditions. Modern distance education is an educational method which is mainly based on modern distance education means, compatible with traditional teaching forms such as face-to-face, correspondence and self-study, and optimized combination of various media.

Modern distance education can effectively play the characteristics of distance education. It is a teaching activity opposite to face-to-face teaching, separation of teachers and students, and non-face-to-face teaching organization. It is a cross-school and cross-regional education system and teaching model. Its characteristics are: students and teachers are separated; Adopt specific transmission system and media for teaching; There are many ways to transmit information; The place and form of study are flexible and changeable. Compared with face-to-face education, the advantage of distance education is that it can break through the limitations of time and space; Provide more learning opportunities; Expand the teaching scale; Improve the quality of teaching; Reduce the teaching cost. Based on the characteristics and advantages of distance education, many people of insight have realized the significance and broad prospects of developing distance education.

Due to the different ways and means of information transmission, the development of distance education has gone through three stages, the first is correspondence education, the second is radio and television teaching, mainly radio and television and audio and video recording; The third stage is the online distance education stage through the combination of computer, multimedia and remote communication technology. With the gradual popularization of television, telephone, computer and Internet, online distance education is getting closer and closer to us. For us in big cities, it has actually come to us.

At present, the number of participants in online schools is increasing gradually, which can be divided into three types according to different learning purposes: academic degree, vocational training and online charging. At present, there are two main learning methods: group class and individualized learning. On the other hand, various online schools can be seen everywhere on the Internet. There are online schools run by regular universities, studying undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and the qualifications are recognized by the State Education Commission. There are well-known national key middle schools engaged in online education-based college entrance examination counseling online schools; There are also some online schools for vocational and technical training organized by some commercial websites, which are used for online chargers. Peking University Business Network is the teaching executive body of Peking University's management distance education, which belongs to the first category.

Second, the requirements of distance education for learners

The characteristics of distance education determine that distance learning is mainly self-study, and most of students' learning time is separated from teachers and classmates. There is no classroom and no classroom atmosphere. These characteristics will inevitably make many students who have just started distance learning encounter some difficulties or are not used to it. Therefore, distance learning first requires learners to have two abilities:

Always keep spontaneous learning motivation. Most people who participate in distance learning are adults, and their learning motives are varied, but they are nothing more than improving their academic qualifications, increasing their skills, charging on the job, expanding their career scope and so on. They generally have strong learning motivation and clear learning purpose, but whether they can maintain the resulting learning motivation in the course of several years of study is the key to their success or failure.

The spirit of active exploration. Adult students should be able to decide how much time to invest in their studies, make their own study plans, and choose and gradually adapt to a learning method. Learning to learn has become one of the four pillars of education in 2 1 century; This is also of great significance to distance learners. In the specific learning process, when faced with a question, active learners will not only accept an answer, or wait for the teacher to tell you what kind of views or positions you hold; Nor will it be limited to a chapter or section of a book or textbook to find the answer. Active learners will actively try various solutions, establish their own ideas, and decide what to do and how to do it after active exploration. Peking University Business Network encourages students to actively explore, think and try to understand what they have learned, instead of rote learning and passive acceptance.

In addition, with the formation of information society and learning society and the arrival of knowledge economy era, education is undergoing profound changes. Learning in distance education needs to change one's learning concept and understanding.

Although there is less time for face-to-face instruction and higher requirements for autonomous learning, you can improve your learning ability through this new form of learning.

In the information society, people's living and working environment is changing faster and faster, and they need to face the emerging new knowledge and technology. One-off school education is increasingly unable to meet the lifelong social needs of individuals. Only by continuous learning can we keep up with the rhythm of life and work.

Modern distance education provides equal learning opportunities for all scholars, so that receiving higher education is no longer a right enjoyed by a few people, but a basic condition for individual survival; The universality of educational resources, educational objects and educational time and space provides the possibility for mass lifelong learning.

● Receiving education is not only about learning knowledge, but more importantly, learning to learn and cultivating good study habits for further study; Master the necessary learning skills. Learning to use modern information technology for autonomous learning is very beneficial to continuously acquire knowledge and improve education level in the future.

3. What teaching information can be obtained online?

At present, the online teaching information provided by Peking University Business Network mainly includes teaching organization and management information, course information, teaching trends, counseling information, BBS (bulletin board) and other educational information.

● Teaching organization and management information includes teaching plan, professional teaching implementation plan, course teaching design plan, course introduction, matters needing attention in various teaching processes and announcements, etc. , mainly used for the overall guidance of the teaching process, teaching organization and management arrangements.

● Course information and teaching dynamic guidance information refer to targeted guidance information provided to students in time according to the requirements of teaching progress, including explanations of key and difficult points in each chapter, synchronous homework, test questions and analysis.

● BBS discussion is mainly about topic discussion, feedback on learning difficulties, and answering personality questions. At the same time, through discussion, we can understand the practical difficulties of students in learning, so as to improve school teaching.

● Other educational information also includes class activities, notices of online school activities, and dynamic introduction of students' study and life.

Distance learning is a new way of learning, and it is not terrible for beginners to encounter some difficulties. How to make a study plan that suits you? How to overcome loneliness in the learning process? How to build long-term learning confidence? How to master the skills of distance learning? How to improve learning efficiency? How to treat homework and exams? This manual will help you overcome these difficulties and establish a personalized distance learning model. 1. Four ways of distance education

(1). RTVU and Correspondence University: the educational system model based on traditional information channels. For the first time, people know that acquiring knowledge does not necessarily require a fixed classroom, but it is still centered on "teaching". Even if there is feedback from learning, it takes a long time and is inefficient.

(2). Cable TV: large bandwidth, fast transmission speed and strong adaptability to multimedia data transmission. However, it is still one-way communication with poor interactivity, which affects the communication between teachers and students and between students. Now we are studying the bidirectional transmission of cable modem based on cable TV network.

(3) Remote satellite relay: the connection between satellite communication technology and local area network is suitable for browsing organized and regularly downloaded information in local area network.

(4) Internet: Resource sharing and information exchange are realized by relying on the global Internet or local area network. This is the fastest developing, most advantageous and most promising information carrier of distance education.

2.2. Advantages and development prospects. Internet distance education

The reason why we admire Internet distance education so much is that it has developed so rapidly. The fundamental reason is that the advantages of Internet distance education outweigh the disadvantages and its development prospects are broad.

(1). Using the Internet for distance teaching, learners won't have too much learning pressure, so they can study easily and have fun. This is because there are various forms of internet distance education: game teaching, entertainment teaching, and rich audio-visual perception of artistic feelings. Let students really relax and be attractive in the study of knowledge.

(2) Breaking through the limitation of time and space, people's communication is not bound by the physical characteristics of space, and the study time is not limited by commuting, going to school and day and night.

(3) It is not the old tradition of teacher-centered, textbook-centered and classroom-centered in the 20th century 19, but a student-centered and people-oriented educational concept.

(4) The significance of Internet distance education lies in the universality and equality of education. The monitoring strength is acceptable. There is no distinction between "front row" and "back row" in "class". Teachers treat every student equally, and the audio-visual effect is equal.

(5) Not only the limitation of time and space is broken, but also the age limit of students is broken. In today's society with fierce competition for talents, many adults still need to continue their studies and constantly enrich themselves. Network distance education provides an excellent opportunity for these people. Actually, these people should be all of us. As long as conditions permit, everyone should "live and learn". "Lifelong learning" is the need of modern society and the educational concept of the 26th century.

(6) Teachers' control means and methods are more scientific. Teachers help and promote learners. The weakening of control means aims at giving full play to students' subjectivity. Teachers can control teaching in more ways. Because teachers and students are not separated, this control is more subtle and subtle.

(7). Good interactive operation. Let exchange teachers and students feel that "heaven is still our neighbor". Students can consult first-class experts, scholars or teachers in their major online at any time. Videophone is like face-to-face communication.

(8). It is helpful for students to learn. For example, the distance teaching system of a school allows students to finish their homework online and teachers to correct their homework online. Students can also read and comment on other students' articles through the website. It improves the efficiency of teachers' correcting homework and students' interest in learning. Some students said that they can learn a lot from other people's comments on his articles, and they can also learn about other people's writing experiences and feelings, so that his writing level can be improved quickly.

(9) immediacy. Such as e-mail, oicq, BBS, chat rooms and other teaching spread very quickly.

(10). Economical and practical. Schools don't need to build classrooms, but they still charge tuition fees, which reduces the cost and expenses of running schools. Although equipment and maintenance also need funds, there is still much to be done in the long run.

Distance education corresponds to face-to-face teaching (face-to-face teaching is close distance learning, and distance education is distance learning). The advantage of distance education is that there is no need to attend classes at a fixed time, that is, there is no restriction on the time and place (space) of study. Suitable for on-the-job personnel to learn. But you should have some self-study ability. Correspondence is the most traditional distance education, which is rare now. At present, distance education using online learning is very popular. There are 67 distance education institutions in China that provide learning and education. Radio and TV University is one of them.