David Murphy's Occasional Blog

Distance learning has come a long way since the days of postal correspondence courses. The greatest changes have occurred within the past five years as advances in technology and the prevalence of the Internet have opened the door to new modes of online teaching, learning and educational collaboration.

A while back Tat Meng Wong and Insung Jung asked me to help out with the final stages of a book they were editing along with Tian Belawati: Quality Assurance in Distance Education and e-Learning: Challenges and Solutions from Asia. I happily obliged and forgot all about it until last week heard a knock at [...]

It’s a simple truth that not everyone has the ability to put their life on hold so they can go to school full time.

In your journal collection (those of you who still possess such ancient tomes), do you have any first issues? On your shelf, is there a Number 1 from Volume 1 of a journal? I have just one, and you wouldn’t have to guess too hard to know that it’s from Distance Education, launched in Australia [...]

With the recent flurry of interest in Cardinal John Henry Newman (don’t tell me you missed his beatification on 19 September – that’s why the Pope made his ill-fated (‘ill-fêted’?) trip to the UK), attention has been given to his warm and entrancing notion of what constitutes a university. Yes, it’s a time for reflection [...]

Now I don’t often write to the newspaper (you know, the whole ‘Angry of Mayfair’ thing), but I couldn’t help myself when I read the opinion piece ‘Death by e-learning’ in the Higher Education section of ‘The Australian’ newspaper. Writtten by one Gerry O. Nolan, ‘an e-learning technical consultant at a university in Sydney’, the [...]

Oh dear, just when I was getting excited about Wolfram Alpha, Google rolls out another ‘new big thing’, Google Squared. Yes, there are similarities between the two and, interestingly,

Perusing the latest blockbuster issue of Distance Education (29, 1, 2008), the article by Don Bewley on the history of ASPESA (ODLAA’s predecessor) naturally caught my eye (and so it should – Som Naidu had flagged it with me!). Building on an earlier contribution by Alistair Inglis (Distance Education, 20, 1, 7-30, 1999), Don provides [...]

Popped into my old office at Monash yesterday and there, in brown cardboard wrapper, was a very welcome surprise: my copy of the International Handbook of Distance Education! Over three years in the making, and the product of countless hours by dozens of authors (60, in fact) from twelve countries, it has finally emerged,

Audio lectures in general … are a sensation for off-campus students … it is extremely important for the 6000 odd off campus students as generally we never even hear our lecturers speak – let alone chat to them or hear their lectures. These words were written by a distance education student in response to reading [...]