Peripatetic electronic teachers in higher education

Abstract

Most people would agree that the role of teachers in higher education will be changed by the advent of modern information and communication technology (ICT). At the very least open and distant learning (ODL) will become an established feature of educational provision rather than a specialist aspect. This is already evident in the increasing use of ODL in combination with conventional forms of course delivery by universities. More radically it is claimed that there will be a fundamental change in the nature of educational institutions, leading to the notion of virtual university, e.g. the Western Governors University (http://www.wgu.ed). These claims have in common the notion of utilizing the distributed nature of ICT to provide partnerships between teachers and learners that are not defined by either spatial or temporal constraints.