Students' "loneliness" in Distance Education

This post comes from another activity of the Tutor Training course I and Isabela are taking. We were supposed to take an interview with a professional in distance education. I decided to interview Isabela because she is a more experienced professional in tutoring than me and she had answered my questions about many aspects of distance courses, from the tutors’ role to students’ development. Isabela said some interesting things that I didn’t mentioned in my activity and I would like to share in this blog with you.

It was about “loneliness” students feel and how the tutors have to deal with it. In her words, she said: “The primary means of Distance education these days are digital media, which has a multitude of resources. However, the student still has the feeling of helplessness and always seeks the figure of the teacher, who still has doubts about his own role. I think this feeling is very natural, since the educational culture of our country is supported in traditional teaching model. Thus, we are talking about a  paradigm shift that is beyond didactic or teaching methodology. This is a reform in the concept of education, how it occurs, and what is its possibilities in the digital age. Anyway, it is the implementation of a new culture in which both students and teachers belong”.

When I thought about students’ helplessness, I remembered what occasionally happened with my own students. Some of them asked me first about doubts they would had answered for themselves if they had read properly the lesson, or had done the activity first. In my first semester, I answered them, today I know that tutoring is not about telling the students what they want to know, but guiding them where or how to find it. Of course, this isn’t only part of the role of a distance education teacher, but also to teachers in classroom. This is about the shift Isabela mentioned. In our country, both students and teachers are used to the model where knowledge comes from the teacher alone, and students should only receive it. When tutors aren’t prepared for these changes, Distance Education loses its purposes, this is one of the reasons the traditional model still affects the learning process. With preparation, tutors may avoid this behavior from them and also from their students.