Distance Education as a Discursive Practice

Abstract

SUMMARY Distance education has taken on a new shape with the introduction of new digital technologies that have made the process of interaction between the teacher and student a far more vibrant process. This change, and the fact that distance education often takes place with the use of text-based systems, leads to the re-thinking of the distance education ‘classroom’ as a discursive space where the voices of the teachers and students take on unique qualities. Using the construct of ‘voice’ this paper argues that the role of the teacher and the student is constantly changing as multiple voices can be heard in the discursive pedagogic space of distance education.