Learn By Doing

I didn't think it was appropriate to complete a course about distance education without any experience as an actual distance education student, so I took matters into my own hands. I found a free course offered about family finances on the Church's website http://providentliving.org/media/training/peaceheart/main.html. I haven't finished the whole thing but I tried to evaluate how effective I thought it would be based on the circumstances of some people I know. Trying to imagine how they would respond to the course was very interesting and brought up some considerations I hadn't thought of previously.

Since money matters are often sensitive and private, I saw a huge advantage to being able to go through this course independently with no other known learners involved. People who would never want to admit publicly about their money problems could easily go through this whole course and learn valuable information without anyone knowing. At first I thought the course was simply audio over a power point, but going through it showed that the designers of the course have included several pictures with audio testimonials from anonymous people about how they applied principles to overcome financial problems. To a small extent, this could replace some learner-learner interaction as far as helping people recognize that others are experiencing the same circumstances.

The course also had audio and comments from church leaders about finances, and a general voice-over as the teacher. There is no two-way learner teacher interaction in this model but there are a few interactive features in the course such as a debt calculator where you can enter in your debts and your income, a question with a box to enter your own personal thoughts about some of the topics and a button to print them out (these could either be kept to yourself or submitted to someone else as proof that you completed the course), and debt-elimination calendars etc. So while interpersonal learner-teacher interaction is lacking, the learner-content interaction was actually more interactive than I thought it would be.

There is no video in the course and the pictures seem slightly lower quality. I don't understand a ton about computers but I'm pretty sure this must have been a conscious choice to keep the course simple and accessible to people with low bandwidth or something. It didn't seem to affect the credibility or my experience with the content very much.

Overall, I think it was a great example of how, with whatever limitations implied, this form of education can be highly effective for helping individuals receive instruction they would otherwise be unable to receive.