Fascinating stuff. 20 or so years ago, my friends Stuart and Rita Johnson (they wrote one of the first major books on individualized instruction*) were teaching at the UCLA medical school. They proposed developing a distance course -- not in the basic sciences, but in medicine. They chose a basic course in obstetrics. Some students took the usual hands on (literally) course; others did it all at a distance. At the practicum, which involved all students in actual attendance at a birth, the two groups performed comparably. The Johnsons had long believed that the first two years of medical school could be done largely at a distance . . . but also felt that much of years 3 and 4 could as well, perhaps reducing actual residential work to one year. _________________ * Developing Individualized Instructional Material: A Self-Instructional Material in Itself (Westinghouse, 1970)
Yes, why wouldn't the information be just as learnable through an electronic medium as that in a traditional classroom, except for the practicums of course? The students must be held to a rigorous standard to ensure learning.
