An invitation issued this week on HRD-L:

This message is for anyone who perceives barriers to teaching or learning at a distance. Even if you have never taught a course online, or even if your organization is not presently involved in distance learning, please read on!

As I identify and try to make sense of barriers to distance
education it has become clear that a "laundry-list" of obstacles to teaching and learning at a distance is only a first step. By itself, listing dozens of obstacles is not very useful for most educators and trainers.

I think there is value in identifying the most common barriers. These appear to depend upon the stage or level of experience that the individual or the organization has developed regarding distance education. Therefore, I think responses are important from persons who are currently using distance education and from those currently not using distance education. The barriers perceived by an individual may also depend upon the type of organization he/she works in, or the type of delivery system most commonly used by the distance educator.

I invite your assistance in further data gathering by completing the survey located at:
http://cgi.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/dharley/misc/barrier_survey.pl

Field testing found that most people completed the survey in
13-15 minutes. If you provide your accurate email address on the survey where indicated, I will notify you of results. Your answers should reflect your individual response, and not try to reflect your entire organization or any group of people besides yourself.

I would also appreciate your distributing this call for participation widely to colleagues or mailing lists to which you subscribe/own.

If you have worked on barriers to distance education, or you
have found articles that have been particularly useful to you
in this area, I would appreciate your jotting me a note citing those documents.

Regards,
Zane Berge
berge@umbc.edu
Moderator's Homepage:
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~mpc3moderators.html