Riding Fences

Rural Special Education Quarterly, Fall 2007 by Ludlow, Barbara

The uses of online instruction in higher education have evolved considerably since the early days of mimicking correspondence courses with the simple exchanges of messages and files via the Internet to its current efforts to re-create face-to-courses with the hypermedia and interactive capabilities of the World Wide Web. Today's online courses capitalize on the availability of collaborative tools to share and modify documents and streaming media to conduct interactive events in real time. Learning management systems provide instructors with a range of tools for creating an exciting learning environment with multimedia content, interactive learning activities, and dynamic and varied assessments. Virtual classroom programs offer new opportunities for simulating a real classroom by linking instructor and learners at their desktops anywhere in the world.

In this issue, we highlight some clever uses of online instruction within preservice and inservice personnel preparation in special education in rural communities. Elizabeth West of the University of Washington and Phyllis Jones of the University of South Florida Sarasota/Manatee outline some suggestions for deciding how and what technology to use in adopting online instruction in teacher education programs to prepare special educators in low incidence disability areas. They discuss characteristics of learners, instructors, technologies, access, content and pedagogy that must be addressed when considering whether to pursue distance education. Gaye Luna and Catherine Media of Northern Arizona University share information about an evaluation of their use of Eadvising with special education graduate students involved in distance education programs in rural areas of that state. Their findings suggest that these learners do not miss the personal contact face-to-face advising affords but advisors may need training to make the most effective use of E-advising formats. Steve Koch of California State University, Chico, describes a series of online training modules within a hybrid course about how to teach social skills to address challenging behaviors exhibited by students with special needs in rural northern California. Participants may view the pre-recorded weekly lectures and interact with the instructor in real time through text chat or view the archives at another time and interact via email or message board. Finally, my colleagues at West Virginia University, Cathy Galyon Keramidas and Eric Landers and I, describe the development, implementation, and initial outcomes of a project designed to train special educators as specialists in autism spectrum disorders in and for rural schools. We explain our use of a virtual classroom program and an online learning management system to deliver online courses and provide online supervision of practicum experience in this state and the surrounding Appalachian region.

As always, our special education colleagues at colleges and universities with rural areas are leading the way in discovering how new technologies can be used to solve the persistent rural challenges of ensuring an adequate supply of well-trained special educators to work in schools and helping working practitioners keep their skills current through meaningful professional development options. The growing availability of high speed, broadband Internet connections has significantly enhanced the possibilities of using Web-based instruction even in the most rural areas, so I predict we will see more reports of online applications in these pages in issues yet to come.

Barbara Ludlow

Executive Editor

Rural Special Education Quarterly