3 minutes
The development of Information and Communication Technologies âICTâ has opened up countless possibilities for educational projects in which everyone has the opportunity to access quality education regardless of the time or place in which they find themselves.
Indeed, the access options made available to people have eliminated time and distance as obstacles to teaching and learning.
What is virtual education?
Virtual education, also called "online education," refers to the development of training programs whose teaching and learning environment is cyberspace.
In other words, virtual education means that physical presence, time, and space need not coincide for dialogue or a learning experience to take place. An educational interpersonal relationship can be established without a face-to-face meeting between teacher and student.
From this perspective, virtual education is an endeavor that seeks to create learning spaces, relying on ICT to establish a new way of teaching and learning.
Virtual education is a form of distance education; it entails a new vision of the demands of the economic, social, and political environment, as well as of educational relationships and ICT. It is not simply a particular way of delivering information to distant places, but an entire educational perspective.
What is distance education?
Distance education emerged in society as a solution to the coverage and quality problems affecting large numbers of people who wanted to benefit from the educational, scientific, and technical advances achieved by certain institutions, but which were inaccessible because of their geographical location or because of the high costs of traveling frequently or moving permanently to those campuses.
How is virtual education understood as part of distance education?
To answer this question, we need to understand the three generations through which distance education has evolved:
The first generation:
It is characterized by the use of a single technology and little communication between teacher and student. Students receive a series of printed materials by mail, providing information and guidance on how to work through it. Students work on their own, send in assignments, and take exams on previously specified dates.
The second generation:
This generation introduced other technologies and greater opportunities for interaction between teacher and student. In addition to printed text, students receive audio or video cassettes and radio programs, and have the support of a tutorânot always the course instructorâwhom they can contact by mail, by telephone, or in person during the tutor's occasional visits to the educational center. In some cases, each center has a permanent tutor to support students.
The third generation:
It is characterized by the use of more sophisticated technologies and direct interaction between the course instructor and students. Through a network-connected computer, email, discussion groups, and other tools offered by these networks, teachers interact personally with students to guide learning processes and address learners' questions more quickly, at any time. This latest generation of distance education is called "virtual education" or "online education."
The key to defining online education begins with an educational approach supported by Information and Communication Technologies.
What guarantees educational quality is the coherent and harmonious integration of a model that places the educational purpose of processes above the tools themselves. Quality education can succeed with inadequate technology; but excellent technology can never make a low-quality educational process succeed.
It is important to clarify that all forms or generations of distance education are valid and relevant. Virtual education, therefore, is only one option within the range of possibilities.
Source: www.mineducacion.gov.co