Digital Immigrants in Distance Education

Roberto Salazar-Márquez

doi:10.19173/irrodl.v18i6.2967

Abstract

<p class="3">The constant growth of methods of education that incorporate the Internet into teaching-learning processes has opened up a wide range of opportunities for students across the world to gain entry to undergraduate or graduate degree programs. However, if the enrolling student is a digital immigrant, the chances of success may be limited by the difficulty of using the Internet to communicate. This laid the groundwork for a qualitative study aimed at determining, from an ontological, epistemological, methodological, and instrumental approach, and from a teacher’s perspective, the main technical and communication challenges faced by digital immigrants as they follow an online higher-education study program.</p>

Highlights

Many explanations exploring the consequences of the merging of education and technology have been documented, but it may be Seymour Papert (1993) who sheds light on the matter most
The world of online education would have gone totally unnoticed by the time-travellers, as it goes far beyond installing equipment in a conventional space; the concept of a classroom takes on a virtual connotation and is transferred to the context chosen by the student to develop his or her learning process
It becomes essential to establish the criteria of truth that validate the definition of “best results,” with regard to communication between people via an electronic platform, as the whole online education system revolves around this communication process

Summary

Introduction

Many explanations exploring the consequences of the merging of education and technology have been documented, but it may be Seymour Papert (1993) who sheds light on the matter most . Whereas the doctors would doubtless marvel at the sterilization procedures, anesthetic, vital sign monitors and other technological advances in a modern hospital, the same cannot be said of the teachers, who may well be unfamiliar with some objects and forms of student-teacher interaction, but would be able to take over the group without any major problems if necessary. Papert uses this hypothesis to highlight how scientific and Digital Immigrants in Distance Education Salazar-Márquez technological progress has had varying impacts on different human activities; the impact on exact sciences is considerable and visible, whereas in the humanities, changes are barely noticeable. The hypothetical time-travellers would discover that many people use Internet but not in the same way: they would find substantial differences between those who grew up with technology, and those who found themselves practically colonized by it when they were already adults

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Conclusion