How to Succeed in Distance Learning
Without exception, effective distance education programs begin with careful planning and a focused understanding of course requirements and student needs. There is no mystery to the way effective distance education programs develop. They don't happen spontaneously; they evolve through the hard work and dedicated efforts of many individuals and organizations. In fact, successful distance education programs rely on the consistent and integrated efforts of students, teachers, facilitators, support staff, and administrators.

A recent study of California college students taking a statistics class found that some actually learn better online than they do face to face. When the performance of a group of classroom students was compared to that of a group of online learners, the distance-learning students scored significantly better on their statistics exams.

What is Distance Learning?

Distance Education is a field of expertise exploring situations in which the learner and the teacher are separated in time, space or both. Desmond Keegan, (1956) defined as key characteristics of this field:

• The separation of the teacher from the learner(s)
• The use of technical media
• The influence of an educational organization
Other authors (Gayol, 1999) have added as key atributes:
•The emphasis on the design of educational materials
• The central role conferred to learners in the educational process
The lack of immediacy between instructor and student has a profound impact in the educational transactions, in the design of materials and in the organization of the teaching/learning process (Moore and Kearsley, 2005).

Garrison (1993) states that the "raison d’ être” of distance education is the concern for access, anytime, anywhere (in Keegan, Ed., 1993). In fact, among the earliest documented programs are those organized in Berlin by Charles Toussaint and Gustav Lagenscheidt to teach languages by correspondence in Berlin, Germany, in 1856; in Cambridge, Great Britain, James Stuart and Robert Moulton extended the benefits of knowledge through university extension; in the United States, in 1873, Anna Ticknor created the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, and bishop Joseph H. Vincent and later on William Rainer Harper, worked for at Chautauqua's Summer Institutes combining religious and secular education (Watkins and Wright, 1991)

As Marshall McLuhan stated in his most famous sentence: "the medium is the message", research in distance education consistently proves that the attributes of the medium alter the teaching/learning process. For this reason, distance educators have paid a lot of attention to these attributes. The technologies used to mediate in the teaching/learning situation are classified in four groups: printed, audio, video and electronic, according to the following structure:

• Printed Correspondence education. books, study guides, texts and other pinted materials.
• Audio Broadcast radio, telephone, audiocassete, audioconference
• Video Broadcast and cable TV, Satellite, Videoconference, Recorded Video (Casettes, DvDs)
• Electronic Computer mediated communication, mobile learning

These media in turn are subclassified as synchronous (real time) and asynchronous (deferred time), that means that the communication between the student and the facilitator of learning occurs live or in diferred time. Synchronous media are audioconference videoconference, and some forms of satellite combined with phone calls. Asynchronous media are recorded audio, recorded video, radio, TV and some satellite delivery.

A second subclassification refers to one-way or two-way delivery. One way delivery includes radio, TV, one way satellite and podcast). In this case, the originating site provides all the content and the receiving site is mainly passive. Two-way delivery considers audioconferencing, videoconferencing, chat, videostream. In this case, real time communication is enabled by technology and instructors take advantage of the of background knowledge of the participants to enrich the learning environment.

Finally, a third subclassification focuses on human-to-human interaction: one-to-one (such as correspondence); one-to-many (such as radio and TV; and many-to-many (such as computers). With the advance of multimedia. robotics and artificial intelligence, we may consider to expand this classification to human-machine-interaction, in which avatars and intelligent agents assume part of the responsibility of the instructor which so far it has been demonstrated essential to ensure quality of distance education (Sloan-C Foundation)

Generations of Distance Education:

FIRST GENERATION
Correspondence education, educational extension, home studies
SECOND GENERATION
Teleconferencing- telephone - radio - Audioconference - Educational TV - Satellite - Videoconferencing
THIRD GENERATION
Computer Mediated Communication - Online learning - Web Based training - Virtual education - Cyberspace education - Distributed learning - Asychronous learning - Mobile learning - Serious games - Multimedia - DVDs-Web Based Training