1.1 Utilizing distance education in your professional development  (Page 5/6)

We also surveyed the students about technology problems. Students attending class in the studio werenot required to use telephones or to ask questions, and they did not need to utilize the television technology to view or hear theprofessor. If any studio students had been adverse to technology, it would not have affected their class. For off-campus students,however, bad weather could cause major problems with both the telephones and television technology.

When asked about problems with the audio and/or video, 59.7% of the 2004 off-site students said that thesystem worked all the time, 38.1% said that it sometimes did not work but was not a problem, and 1.4% said that it did not work alot of the time and was a problem for them. While these figures were a slight improvement over 2002, it should be remembered thatone of the sites changed from Ball State to South Carolina. Still, it was reassuring to know that nearly 98% felt that they did nothave a real problem with the television technology.

Students at the remote sites could call in for attendance or questions/answers on a phone system by pushing abutton on a special phone at their site. This phone system worked all the time for 66.9% of the students in 2004, did not worksometimes but was not a problem for 27.3%, and did not work a lot of the time and was a problem for 2.9% of the students. As notedearlier, students were given a regular phone number to call into the television studio director’s office and report problems with their special phones or problems with the television system. Thedirector then notified us during the class and noted whether this was an isolated case or whether there were other sites that werehaving problems. Although 46.8% of the students did call into the studio to report technical problems, previously mentioned findingsindicate that their outages were not considered a problem for most of them.

Off-campus students were asked if they ever had to order tapes/videostreaming of the presentations because oftechnical problems. The responses (2004) indicated that 10.1% ordered one tape or videostreaming, 2.9% ordered more than onetape/videostreaming, and 86.3% did not have to order any recordings of the classes. Again, it appears that technical problems, thoughpresent at times, were not a major problem for the vast majority of the students, and there were provisions made for those who did haveproblems.

Previous researchers have sometimes stated that females had more problems with technology than males, and wewanted to see if females tended to take the on-campus class or the off-campus class or whether there was any difference in theirchoices. We also wanted to know what percentage of the students were classroom teachers and how many students taking theseadministrative courses were already school administrators. Finally, since recruitment of students is important to a department’s survival, we wanted to know if we had students in our classes whowere actually in programs at other universities and took our courses for convenience. Questions were asked to gather studentinformation about gender and position. The results of that inquiry are summarized in Table 5.