ABSTRACT
The increased use of technology to substitute for traditional face-to-face instruction continues to impact on higher education in the United States and throughout the world. This chapter considers three comparisons of faceto-face (traditional or F2F) education pedagogy versus distance learning (DL). We define DL techniques as those learning techniques where no expectation that the learner and teacher will be physically copresent exists during the instruction. The comparison made in the chapter of DL is to F2F where the expectation is that the learner and teacher meet simultaneously in the same location. This chapter does not consider the issues of use of technology in the classroom or computer-assisted instruction (that comparison occurs in Timmerman, chap. 6, this volume). This comparison does not
involve the addition of computers or other online instructional methods, but rather the substitution or replacement of one educational practice with another. The guiding question is the ability of DL techniques to attain the same outcomes as F2F techniques of learning. Critics of moves toward an inclusion of DL into the curriculum have often voiced concern over the ability of the practice to achieve the same outcomes. This chapter does not include courses that blend a combination of F2F and DL approaches; these comparisons only consider environments solely administered in either a DL or F2F format.
