Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.

What is Transactional Distance?

Distance education in Second Life

It is apparently time to review what ‘transactional distance’ means:

Wikipedia tells us:

Transactional distance theory was developed in the 1970s by Dr. Michael G. Moore, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education at the Pennsylvania State University.

InstructionalDesign.org tells us:

The theory of Transactional Distance states that as the level of interaction between teacher and learner decreases, learner autonomy must increase.

When talking about distance education we are typically talking about a teaching environment where the separation between the teacher and learner is significant enough that special teaching-learning strategies and techniques must be used.

Even though there are clearly recognizable patterns, there is also enormous variation in these strategies and
techniques and in the behaviour of teachers and learners. Within the family of distance education programmes there are many different degrees of transactional distance.

(Image: Distance education in Second Life. F Delventhal via Flickr. Distance ED on the MUVE-19. Licence: CC-By-2.0)

Leave a reply

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

css.php

Report this page

To report inappropriate content on this page, please use the form below. Upon receiving your report, we will be in touch as per the Take Down Policy of the service.

Please note that personal data collected through this form is used and stored for the purposes of processing this report and communication with you.

If you are unable to report a concern about content via this form please contact the Service Owner.

Please enter an email address you wish to be contacted on. Please describe the unacceptable content in sufficient detail to allow us to locate it, and why you consider it to be unacceptable.
By submitting this report, you accept that it is accurate and that fraudulent or nuisance complaints may result in action by the University.

  Cancel