Clearinghouse DE Definitions

Definitions

• California Distance Learning Project: What is Distance Learning?
  The California Distance Learning Project's definition is: "Distance Learning (DL) is an instructional delivery system which connects learners with educational resources. DL provides educational access to learners not enrolled in educational institutions and can augment the learning opportunities of current students. The implementation of DL is a process which uses available resources and will evolve to incorporate emerging technologies."
  
  
• Distance Education: A Systems View: What is Distance Education?
  As defined by Michael Moore, then director of The American Center for the Study of Distance Education, Penn State: "Distance education is planned learning that normally occurs in a different place from teaching and as a result requires special techniques of course design, special instructional techniques, special methods of communication by electronic and other technology, as well as special organizational and administrative arrangements". From the text Distance Education: A Systems View, co-authored by Greg Kearsley [California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1996].
  
  
• Instructional Telecommunications Council: Distance Education
  The ITC definition is: "The process of extending learning, or delivering instructional resource-sharing opportunities, to locations away from a classroom, building or site, to another classroom, building or site by using video, audio, computer, multimedia communications, or some combination of these with other traditional delivery methods."
  
  
• Sloan-C View: Coming to Terms: ALN
  From the publication: Sloan-C View, June, 2003, vol 2, n4: "Online educators want to say exactly what is new about higher learning online today, yet a proliferation of terms complicates things. In Sloan-C listserv conversations about whether distance or distributed education is the proper name for it, some useful clarifications emerged."
  
  
• United States Distance Learning Association: Distance Education
  The USDLA definition: "The acquisition of knowledge and skills through mediated information and instruction, encompassing all technologies and other forms of learning at a distance."
  
  
• Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications: What is distance education?
  From the Distance Education: A Consumer's Guide...What distance learners need to know, published by Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications: "Distance education is instruction that occurs when the instructor and student are separated by distance or time, or both." The Guide continues with other practical information for the potential distance education student.
  
  
• Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT): Distance Education: Towards a Definition and Glossary of Terms
  This detailed publication by Lee Ayers Schlosser and Michael Simonson was sponsored by the Definitions and Terminology Committee Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). The publication is available for sale to AECT members.