Digital divide and open and distance learning supported by networks. Pedagogic functions and strategies in technological learning environments

Abstract

Traditional distance learning was born to overcome social, economic and geographical barriers due to access or communication problems, but also due to lack of time, that is to overcome differences in opportunity and quality access to knowledge and training. The last boom of open and distance learning is due to technology and it results from the convergence of two lines of development whose distance has made a bigger divide, being he first one of these lines the need of learning throughout life as a result of the mushrooming growth of scientific and technologic knowledge, technical, industrial and commercial processes, and the lack of answer in the training processes in the organizations, and the second one the increase and generalization of networks and its access which means, in a general way, the possibility to reduce this divide. Nonetheless, technological open and distance learning poses in turn new problems that become new divides or that increase the big divide. It introduces new discriminating elements, new barriers that can help e-learning to become a new divide, since it needs specific training and personal, human, cultural and economic requisites that ask for discriminating knowledge. Definitely, for us, the way to fight this divide is quality management based in the user and in the users. communities. The fight against this divide must be based in the assessment and quality management of the training activity and not in the profit or in the results, as in the classical approach, nor in the client satisfaction as in the total quality management approach. Our approach to the assessment and quality management of the training activity is based in the users. learning objectives and in the target communities. specific learning objectives. Therefore, previously we need an analysis of the favorable features for these objectives that tells us how the requisites derived from them can be translated into quality criteria and how these criteria can be translated into indicators. So, it means an integral quality management based in the student, in the learning and in the communities