Accessible Elements: Teaching Science Online and at a Distance

The American Journal of Distance Education X • accessible elements around the country on railway trains.Looking for a simpler and less costly solution, my assignment was related to his work on the concept of the home experiment kit.This would be a package of materials and equipment that could be loaned to the student, who would use it in conducting science experiments at home.It was one of many ideas that Wedemeyer had been discussing with friends in the United Kingdom who were in the process of setting up the Open University, where it became extremely successful as sophisticated and ingenious home experiment kits were developed on an industrial scale (see Chapter 10).Forty years after those early initiatives -and in spite of the example of the Open University, which has not only shown that science can be taught at a distance, but has become a world center of high quality science -the prejudice that science can only be taught faceto-face is still widespread, especially in the United States.Indeed, innovative course and program proposals frequently fail to get off the ground because of very ill-informed assertions by classroom teachers that distance teaching of science is not possible.It should be a matter of some surprise -now that we have Dietmar Kennepohl and Lawton Shaw's book before us -to realize how long it has taken for someone to produce a book to challenge this prejudice, indeed to begin to describe the problem and to document some of the ways in which it has been tackled.Further evidence of the slowness of the educational community to deal with the challenge -and opportunity -of distance teaching in the sciences is provided by the number of articles that have appeared in the quality research journals.In more than twenty years, the American Journal of Distance Education has received only one publishable research-based article having "science" in its title; this was an article on the subject of science teaching in high schools (Martin & Rainey, 1993).Added to this, there have been descriptive, i.e., non-research based reports, in the Journal's "Grassroots" section describing isolated experiences in science teacher education (Jaeger, 1995), and another about an attempt Foreword • XIII as lending themselves to a constructivist pedagogy.The big question, of providing laboratory experiences, is the subject of a full section, in my opinion one of the core questions in this book, and then a final section deals with some issues of the logistics and infrastructure of program delivery.This book will, I hope, be read by everyone with an interest in education.This is not only for science educators or distance educators alone.Certainly one hopes that teachers of science in the classroom -most of whom are likely to be called on in the future to teach at a distance at least in blended learning conditions -as well as those who already do teach at a distance, and also the administrators and policy makers who have to allocate and manage the resources that are available for science education will study this book carefully and glean from it some of the valuable ideas it provides for the expansion and improvement of distance education in the sciences.Surely our students deserve better programs, the out-of-school population needs more opportunity of continuing education in the sciences, and society deserves and needs a better return on its education and training investment in the sciences than it has enjoyed until now.If this book goes even a short way toward sensitizing these populations to the challenges of teaching science at a distance and also the enormous potential for society and the individual of upgrading our response to that challenge, it will indeed prove to be a most important work -besides being a thoroughly enjoyable read. ReferencesAbdel-Salam, T.M., Kauffmann, P.J., & Crossman, G.R. (2007).Are distance laboratories effective tools for technology education?The American Journal of Distance Education, 21(2), 77-92.Jaeger, M. (1995).Science teacher education at a distance.The American Journal of Distance Education, 9(2), 61-75.Martin, E.D., & Rainey, L. (1993).Student achievement and attitude in a satellite-delivered high school science course.

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