Resumen de Continuing Education at a Distance:: Evaluating Audiovisual Packages and Telephone Seminars in Behaviour Modification Courses for Practising Teachers and Allied Professionals
Donald H. Saklofske, D.C.B. Teather, D.W. McKerracher, N.J. Car
The concept of the selection of instructional resources is central to a systems, or systematic, approach to education. Faced with requests to run courses on behaviour modification for teachers and allied professionals in the health care services, both on campus and at a distance, the authors designed two courses which had as their core a common audiovisual package, but which differed in respect of the type of personal presentation by teaching staff. The on‐campus course maximised face‐to‐face teaching, while a combination of telephone seminars and minimal face‐to‐face teaching was used in the distance teaching situation.
Performance data and students’ responses to a course evaluation questionnaire allowed a comparative evaluation of different components of the two courses. The achievement level of both groups was high, but the telephone seminars were heavily criticised. The role of the telephone seminars is discussed, as are general problems of the transition from a ‘conventional’ course to one making substantial use of ‘novel’ techniques.
