An innovative program called Mauritius College of the Air (MCA) raised the standard of education significantly. It was clear that in order to make education more relevant to this country, young and old citizens on the island needed to become conversant with emerging scientific, technical, vocational and agricultural knowledge, and yet the cost of building schools and training / hiring teachers would have been prohibitive. Hence, DL was instituted.
MISSING LINK: The input presented so far in this paper suggests that scholars, instructors and authors are looking closely into several of the issues surrounding DL. But what about trust, which is a pivotal concept when assessing how much students are really getting out of their online learning experiences? How many students are engaging others in the process of completing their homework? How serious is the problem of plagiarism and how can instructors trust that students have not only completed assignments ethically but also have grown academically through the process of completing their work? Moreover, when instructors "willingly relinquish most of their classroom authority in order to entrust and empower the learners" to take control of their own learning (Smith, 2008, p. 325), is the outcome reflective of honesty and measurable scholastic advancement?
Collecting some of this data would be next to impossible, it seems, and trust goes deeper than just that between instructor and student. But R.O. Smith writes that research into trust vis-a-vis distance learning yields "contradictory results" (Smith, 326). Smith alludes to "the paradox of trust as a conundrum of a cycle that depends on itself to get started" (Smith, 328). In other words, when relating to trust between students, none of whom have met any others, the ability to trust someone depends on "perceptions...
The interactive online group "...exerts unconscious pressures on the individual members to take the risk to trust and engage..." But individual members are often "reluctant to do so because they are unsure the group is safe" (Smith, 328). Why lay out one's very personal history to a group of total strangers whose only commonality is the fact of their enrollment in the same DL class? Students who have healthy "self-other relationships" may well be willing to take risks and trust, Smith concludes, but others less sure of themselves and perhaps shy and retiring won't take that risk. And how this matter of trust (between teacher and student and between students themselves) can be quantified and qualified is a difficult matter; what is needed is empirical research using online classroom participants in well-structured questionnaires and control group settings.
Works Cited
Dhurbarrylall, Roshun. (2005). Development of Distance Education in Mauritius. The Quarterly
Review of Distance Learning, 6(3), 185-197.
McMahon, Joan D. (2007). "Ethical Issues in Web-Based Learning," Ed. Badrul H. Khan,
Flexible Learning in an Information Society, 210- 224. Hershey, PA: Information
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McGivney, Veronica. (2004). Understanding persistence in adult learning. Open Learning, 19(1),
Muirhead, Brent. (2004). Interactivity in computer-mediated college and university education:
recent review of the literature. Educational Technology & Society, 7(1), 12-20.
Nachbar, Stuart (2007). The Internet's Second Coming. The Journal, 34(4), 46-48.
Smith, Regina O. (2008). The paradox of trust in online collaborative groups. Distance Education, 29(3), 325-340.
