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1、1On-line Education and Cross CCultural Problems ()I also use the Internet to prepare students for my seminars trips to the US. I often take my seminar students to the United States to study various cultural aspects. I have taken them to places like the Navajo Nation, Chicago, New York and San Diego
2、among other areas. To prepare for these trips the students lists things they are interested in doing or seeing. Then I have had groups work separately on the Net to gather information on things like the Blues, Jazz and the Holocaust. The groups had to report to the rest of the class on their discove
3、ries. For example, last February one group of students reported on the Blues and made a list of Blues clubs they wanted to visit when we reached Chicago, another group reported on the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, and still another group reported on Broadway. In this way, the Internet was extre
4、mely valuable in preparing my students for their cultural experience in the United States making the whole experience much more valuable for them. Granted, this is not really distance eductions through the phone link. Granted, the visual was not of a high quality and the visual window was small, but
5、 our students were able to see the excitement and interest of the Angeles University students. This experiment also seems to disprove criticism that computers can not build patience in students. Of course, this was only a short test series of lectures and discussions, but the results were encouragin
6、g for distance education I believe.Although Bunkyo is not involved in an ongoing on-line education program itself, other universities report great success in the field. The Open University of the United Kingdom, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Nebraska, among others report excelle
7、nt results from their programs. At the Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, hosted by the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I was able to talk with other participants who had been successful with their own on-line distance education programs. I was very impressed with several of the present
8、ations, like the Dr. Robert Bills report about Purdue Universitys successful conversion of a traditional clinical veterinarian medical program to a web based program. Dr. Bill informs us that one of the main problems that faces such a conversion is the accreditation of the program by the American Ve
9、terinary Medical Association. Essentially the Web based course had to meet the same high standard as the campus based program. A teaching engine was designed that posed questions to the students that could only be answered by knowing the textbook material thoroughly. In one section, the students wer
10、e asked to explain the expected reaction of each of several drugs like vomiting or slowing of the heart rate and why it would happen. Evidently, this was found to be very similar to classroom situations. A harder problem to bridge was how the various physical skills need by a veterinarian like givin
11、g injections, administering medicine in a variety of ways and properly applying pressure in order to stop bleeding among other motor 2skills were to be taught and tested at a distance. The solution was to use a Clinical Mentorship where each student would find his or her own approved mentor and perf
12、orm all of the skills prescribed in the curriculum. This is of course mixing on-line with an on sight mentor, but it does offer an adequate program for accreditation and offers hope for other difficult subjects like other medical and dental courses or engineering courses. It also persuasively deflec
13、ts the criticism of on-line education as a viable alternative to campus based education. (Distance Learning Teaching, 2000, p.51)The overwhelming consensus of the distance educators is that all this new technology can be useful for educational programs. The main concern of educators seems to be that
14、 steps must be taken to insure that the technology plays a subservient role to content. This means that we educators must be clear in our objectives and design courses that meet all of the requirements and the high standards of the campus based courses. The Purdues veterinary course developed a mode
15、l where the content was decided on by the staff and the technology that was to be utilized for teaching it was tightly screened for effectiveness of delivering the desired knowledge or skill. Finally, Purdue decided to use onsite testing conducted by selected proctors, as the most secure way in whic
16、h to evaluate the students along with the mentors evaluation.Learning Styles and Cross-cultural Awareness It is in the area of course design that I see the need for caution. Once you have decided on the content of the course, one must be careful of the design of your delivery machine. We all know that students are different and each of them has his own or her own style of learning. These differences are hard enough to handle in
