Part I: Vision of Distance Education

​     In the 21st century, people live in a technology and media-rich environment. This environment is marked by various characteristics which include access to an abundance of information and frequent changes in technology tools and devices. For Distance Education to be effective in the 21st century, the distance student must exhibit a range of functional and critical thinking skills related to life-long learning, enhanced creativity, and inspired innovative information, and technology.  The distance education must deliver quality, effective tools, and implement them to raise up productivity, contributing to responsible digital citizens by encouraging 21st century learners to embrace using up-to-date technology and collaboration through learning and teaching; everything that helps the learner succeed in their career and life through distance education.

Part II: Explanation
     Regarding the many misconceptions of the effectiveness of distance education, “Most who begin studying distance education wonder about the effectiveness of this approach to the teaching and learning process,” (Simonson, Smaldino, & Albright, 2015, p. 7). Thus, some researchers show that when studying inside a virtual classroom or a traditional classroom there is no inferiority in the learning and teaching process. Additionally, Theory explains about the learners autonomy, Simonson et al (2015) addresses this “in traditional school setting, the learners are dependent of the teachers for guidance, while in distance education the teacher is active where the student is passive, in distance education there is a gap between the student and teacher forcing the leaner to accept a high degree of responsibility for the conduct of the leaner program” (Simonson, Smaldino, & Albright, 2015, p. 43). It depends on the distant learner to develop strategies to study efficiently and make sure the learning occurs.
   Additionally, the learner needs to have access to more and effective material, an abundance of information and frequent changes in technology tools and devices to spend more time studying, interacting with their classmates, teachers, and according to their learning style.
To conclude, distance education, must focus and work effectively to break some obstacles that may interfere in the process of learning and teaching at distance. Obstacles such as time commitment, from the teachers, students, faculty and everyone involved in the distance education program of the organization, difficulty to keep up with technology-enhanced classrooms, infrastructure, fear, training, lack of parental involvement and money to keep the programs update are all obstacles that need to be eliminated. Working to eliminate these obstacles will increase the advancement of the distance education program to be very effective.

References

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2015). Teaching and Learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education. (6th ed.) Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. ISBN: 9781623967987