Best Practices for Designing Distance Education and the U-M-T Approach

Distance education is defined by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (Schlosser & Simonson, 2006) as: Institution-based, formal education where the learning group is separated, and where interactive telecommunications systems are used to connect learners, resources and instructors. Distance education has two major components, distance teaching and distance learning. Distance teaching is the efforts of the educational institution to design, develop and deliver instructional experiences to the distant student so that learning may occur. Education and distance education is comprised of teaching and learning. This article focuses on distance teaching.