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Providing a Shorter Path Using Distance Education to Enhance Access Joan Esterline LaFuze Indiana University East It was the first day of a two semester class in anatomy and physiology. We had finished the tour around the room, with a quick introduction and description of personal goals. During the break, several students stopped with questions or comments, but one woman waited patiently until all others had left the room and then said, “I just wanted you to know that I am eligible for student services, but I don’t want to be treated any differently from the others. The only reason that I am telling you is because if I work hard enough I can make a C in this class. I just don’t want you to think that my C is not because I am not trying.” Upon reflection, I decided to develop “voiceover” PowerPoint slides as a way of meeting the needs of not only this student, but also other students who may have difficulty learning the material at the quick pace set in my classes. To create a “voiceover” PowerPoint slide, I simply recorded myself as a I explained complicated concepts on each of my PowerPoint slides and briefly discussed how we would use the material covered in the PowerPoint slides in class to develop a deeper understanding of the material. After I distributed my “voiceover” PowerPoint slides to the class, this student stopped again during break. “Oh, thank you. It is exactly how I learn. I hear your voice, see the picture or words and have time to write it on paper.” In the same way that putting reading glasses on a student who is visually impaired can help them to see clearly, using the newer technologies may provide an opportunity for students to learn in meaningful ways. Over the almost two decades that I have used “distance education” technologies to “close the distance” between the classroom and the student learner, I have marveled over the power that technology may sometimes provide in opening doors that would be closed and locked to students who only now have access to the college education of their dreams. I have had a number of students move during the semester from traditional classrooms to online sections of courses that I teach in order to make it possible to follow deployed spouses or partners; to take care of children, spouses, partners or parents who are critically ill; or to take advantage of job or career opportunities that require relocation or shift change considerations. Of course, my personal account overlaps greatly with the experiences of others. In this chapter, you will find Quick Hits from faculty who use technology to assist students in finding pathways to achieve their educational goals. As a whole, these submissions reflect several of the potential advantages of distance education as outlined in Steenhausen’s (2010) executive summary of “The Master Plan at 50: Using Distance Education to Increase College Access and Efficiency.” Specifically, the submissions in this chapter: ■ ■ Make undergraduate and graduate coursework more accessible to students who otherwise might not be able to enroll due to restrictive personal or professional obligations. ■ ■ Provide opportunities for students attending one campus to find and get credit for courses at other campuses (thereby potentially speeding their graduation). Providing Access 2 www.quickhitstech.com ■ ■ Allow campuses to increase instruction and enrollment without a commensurate need for additional physical infrastructure (such as classrooms and parking structures). ■ ■ Make possible statewide collaborations, including “virtual” academic departments that are taught by faculty from more than one campus. Many of our students are restricted in completing course work in a traditional classroom setting by both personal and professional obligations. In the submission by Beth Goering (Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis), a way of helping students ‘internationalize’ their education is described – without the students going abroad. Similarly, Laura Guertin (Penn State Brandywine) describes utilizing existing gigapixel panoramas for virtual fieldtrips in her courses. In their submission, Grace Pinhal-Enfield, David DeFouw, and Nagaswami Vasan (New Jersey Medical School) describe the use of virtual microscopy in teaching histology. With virtual microscopy, “rather than being limited to a set of glass slide boxes created by one institution, our students have access to a broad repertoire of virtual slide images in an optimized, faculty-selected virtual slide box. Furthermore, in contrast to variable box-to-box slide quality seen with glass slide boxes, virtual slide boxes are uniform and all students have access to the same virtual images.” Additional...

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