3 interesting points about the article Juergen Schneider

1. Very interesting to me was the discrimination between the coexisting premodern, modern and postmodern cultures in higher education. In Germany there has been a difference to the USA on the administrative level. Such thing as Bachelor and Master didn’t exist until a couple of years ago launched by the so called Bologna Process. Instead there was a system called “Magister” that included both Bachelor and Master within four and a half years. This system considered the student as self-responsible and self-determinant, what can be considered as autonomous. Students could choose freely from a pool of majors combining them with any and how many minors they felt for. The major Education had only two specific mandatory courses and one intermediate exam before students were permitted to graduate. There was no such thing as a predetermined class-schedule or compulsory attendance in the lectures and seminars, so students were able to learn in their own preferred way, whatever that was. This is what I would consider as relatively autonomous compared to the following.
Now that there is the Bachelor and Master system, university can be compared to school: fixed schedules, compulsory attendance in the lectures, no free choice of minors once one has taken the choice of a major, etc. In my opinion this is rather a step back to modern culture than a step forward to postmodern culture, autonomy, self-direction and variability.

2. Getting a coherent picture of the history in distance education makes problems and challenges in this field, such as defining and the usage of different terms, far more understandable. In addition to that I didn’t even know, that there was such a thing as correnspondence education in the past.

3. The hierarchical system model, clearly shows which parts of a distance learning system exist and how they influence and support each other. Having a coherent model of makes it easier to understand which roles in this system act due to which reasons having certain effects.