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Summer
Reading List

Coming May 10th from the TechCollab, a packet for summer reading to boost your technology intuition, including:

• an Annotated Bibliography covering topics such as:
  • Fundamentals
  • Technology and Teaching
  • Internet/Web-based Teaching
  • Distance Learning
    
    
• a CD-ROM of shareware from the Technology Service Desk
  
  
• a Web Scavenger Hunt from CST 101: Tech Tools
  

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What is Distributed Learning?
Maureen Bowman

Higher education is littered with terminology that often finds its way into our day to day conversation without introduction or definition. "Distributed learning" appears to be one of these terms, and lately it has been present in the dialog of several campus meetings.

What does it mean? How is it different from distance learning? How is it important to CSUMB? A definition for distributed learning published in Syllabus Magazine in 1995 states:

"Distributed learning is not just a new term to replace the other 'DL,' distance learning. Rather, it comes from the concept of distributed resources. Distributed learning is an instructional model that allows instructor, students, and content to be located in different, noncentralized locations so that instruction and learning occur independent of time and place. The distributed learning model can be used in combination with traditional classroom-based courses, with traditional distance learning courses, or it can be used to create wholly virtual classrooms."1

Distributed "resources" is a concept we can wrap our arms around. Shifts in focus to environments where learners have access to content, experts (the teacher and beyond), peers, and services that are independent of time and place, and which utilize a variety of approaches match the CSUMB vision. Enabling faculty to produce these learning opportunities is central to distributed learning.

In a distributed resources environment:

• Learners gain a greater degree of control of how, when, and where their learning occurs. They also increase their level of responsibility for their own learning and are no longer passive receptacles of information and knowledge.
• Faculty gain greater ability to organize and design environments that maximize learning opportunities and more freedom to experiment with effective new learning modes.
• The university gains greater ability to allocate resources for learning opportunities. "An abundance of research shows that alternatives to the traditional semester-length classroom-based lecture method produce more learning. Some of these alternatives are less expensive; many produce more learning for the same cost."2

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