Warnborough College Distance Education

How Our Courses Work

Many potential students find it hard to understand how a distance learning education course can be anything more than reading and answering questions. Some are, and if that is your experience with distance education in the past; that is unfortunate. In reality, distance education has a great deal of flexibility and today can be more practical and relevant to real life classroom education.

There are a few things to consider:

1. New technologies (internet, video, digital photography, cheaper & mobile telecommunications etc) make it possible to overcome many of the isolation and communication problems that used to exist with distance education.

2. People today are better networked than ever, and more exposed to visual images than ever (e.g. In the past, if someone was studying an animal they had never before seen, the option to see an image of that animal would be virtually nil, unless supplied by their teacher in the classroom). Today people are bombarded by images of virtually everything they could imagine through cable/satellite TV, Youtube, web sites, magazines¦ etc.

3. Be aware that no course will ever teach you everything! Whatever you study, your course should lay a foundation and framework for you to build on. It should open up opportunities for further learning - to further develop your practical skills, problem solving skills, knowledge, networking, communications abilities etc, within your field of study. Some courses focus heavily on the information, some on assessment more than learning, others focus heavier on the problem solving ,others perhaps on the practical, etc.

4. No course can have its emphasis on everything, because to emphasise one thing is to de emphasise something else.

5. Our courses are experiential learning (i.e. A concept in education that focuses on learning through experience). Over more than 2 decades, these courses have been developed using feed back and suggestions from both staff and students to create a variety of different ways to building all sorts of learning experiences into the courses. Some are integral and compulsory experiences within a course, others are optional facilities (such as student interaction through the student room directory), which some students use, while others do not use.

6. We get our students to do all sorts of hands on and observational tasks throughout courses.

Examples may be:

To visit a farm and observe things (for students who have a problem with a real farm, they might take a virtual tour on a website or using a video.

To study the anatomical structure of a bone or piece of meat obtained from a butchers shop.

To collect pieces off a plant and from those pieces. Create and propagate cuttings.

To undertake a well structures PBL (Problem Based Learning) project (NB. PBL is a highly structured tried and proven learning system base on dealing with hypothetical problems. This system is widely used world wide in medical schools and increasingly in other disciplines).

To undertake a role play

To interview someone from industry

To video or photography things performed or created by the student

There are of course many other things that could also be added to this list.