Distance Learning and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Distance learning and the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) are both ancient, yet both are new. Distance learning is now associated with online learning using digital technologies, but it goes back to learning by rudimentary means of correspondence between someone with something to teach and those with a desire or need to learn. Oral stories and traditions preserved and passed on the teaching of individuals and cultures. With the development of writing, epistles, letters, scrolls, then books became the favored medium. In the late modern age, correspondence courses used overland mail delivery for those exchanges, but that was replaced with audio (telephone, audio tapes) and video (television, video tapes) means. The common thread for all those centuries of such distance learning is that the process tended to see learning as transmission of information and knowledge from a knower to relatively passive receivers (students).