Distance Education in Astronomy: At-a-distance and on campus, a growing force

Summary

Introduction

Distance education has a track record in astronomy and is already making a significant contribution worldwide. It will make an even greater contribution in the future, not only at-a-distance, but through greater use of self-study materials on- campus, where it will liberate staff for more appropriate forms of face-to-face teaching, and help overcome the need to do more and more with less and less resource. Distance education offers huge promise in meeting the educational needs of a burgeoning world population, and because low costs can be achieved there is no need for people in areas of material deprivation to face mental deprivation also. The IAU and The Open University can be proactive in promoting the spread of distance education, and of self-study on campus.

What is (successful) distance education?

Distance education is NOT as shown in Figure 1, though its distinctive feature is that the student is remote from the university or college! But in place of a megaphone a mixture of media is used in which printed texts usually carry the bulk of the educational material. There can also be audiovisual and computing media (including use of the Internet and of “multimedia”), and practical work. It is important to play to the strengths of the various media – a current pitfall is that multimedia can turn out to be little more than an expensive book.