Cooperative learning at a commuter school and its implications for distance education

A variety of social, economic and technological factors are converging to create increased demand for distance education. Consequently, enormous challenges are facing today's educational institutions, to reduce costs, improve access, and cater to a changing population more interested in lifelong learning using distance education. This societal change promises to have a profound impact on the traditional university system. Schools have responded by spawning a variety of methods and technologies for delivering distance education. This is in turn transforming how knowledge is delivered to students. Not only does the instructor need to learn how to use the new technologies, the nature and style of delivery of the course content itself has to be adapted to the new medium of delivery. It has become axiomatic that teamwork and cooperative learning are essential ingredients in engineering and engineering technology education. Cooperative learning becomes a challenge in a commuter school where the students are widely dispersed throughout the community and many of whom have significant out-of-school commitments including work and families. The paper describes strategies that were followed to promote cooperative learning at an urban commuter school where these challenges are a given. The author's experiences in adapting cooperative learning techniques to Web-enhanced classes, as well as live 2-way interactive television classes, with reflections on lessons learnt, are also given.