Distance Education (Week 11)

The whole idea of distance technology is to provide educational services to students off site that is comparable to the education given to students on site.  Many private as well as public institutions offer distance learning including almost all universities.  The types of distance education varies and can include correspondence through regular mail, internet correspondence, courses over the television or radio, courses downloaded from a CD as well as courses offered over a mobile device.  However in recent years, distance education has come to blend the many forms.  The benefits of distance learning include the ability to learn at your own pace.  It also allows for adults to continue their education in situations where they are unable to attend classes regularly.  The draw backs of distance education include; the students enrolled in the course have to be very motivated in order to get the benefits out of the programs.  Since there are no ways of forcing people to watch materials or participate, students have to motivate themselves or they can fall very behind in the course. 

I don't see distance learning really helping me personally in any way but I could see how it could help other people wanting to get into the film industry.  Many of the programs that do things like editing, compositing or music composition are extremely elaborate and very technical programs.  I could definitely see benefits the makers of the programs to provide online courses that help get users started using their products.  There are many websites that already exist that post forums where users help each other out but I think a company issued distance learning program would still help out a person just adopting a new technology or program emensely.

LINK: http://www.mediacollege.com/video/editing/

I found a very interesting website that provides tutorials on some of the popular video editing programs as well as other technological tutorials.  The website mediacollege.com seems to give out the basic tutorials for free but requires a payment to see more advanced examples.  The way the website works is that it allows you to select the specific program you want to use, then it gives you a list of topics that you might be interested in learning and then explains how each is done.  I think this form of distance learning is unique in that it doesn't make content once students are enrolled, it makes the content before it has students and then waits for interest to grow.  I have seen that there are tutorials on the internet but haven't really thought of them as distance education until now.  I think that this is the most practical form of distance education for people in the film industry.