ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how telephones are used for teaching and examines the technology and the costs involved, and discusses its effectiveness as a learning medium. Telephone teaching has also been used at the pre-tertiary school level, though to a lesser extent. Such uses have included projects for widening the curriculum in rural American schools, for teaching sick or disabled homebound children, for helping parents in remote communities to teach their handicapped children and for in-service courses for teachers and school administrators. The research and evaluation studies of telephone teaching cover a wide range of situations and include both field and laboratory settings. To function as an interactive teaching system there is a finite number of locations that can participate. In addition to its use for teaching, administrative meetings are held by teleconference in an increasing number of distance teaching systems, particularly where an institution has a large regional network, or widely dispersed local centres.
