Opinion of managers and teachers of distance education in Iran

Abstract

Managers and teachers, barriers of distance education, guidance schools, high schools, information technology.

Distance education in Iran is a method whereby the learner does not attend physically in the class and training environment. The most important difference between distance education and other methods is the physical distance between learners, teachers and educational institution. This method of teaching has solved the problem of distance in order to provide learning knowledge and skills. The main purpose of this research was to study barriers (information technology, educational planning system, administrative and financial) centers of distance education from managers and teachers’ opinion in Kurdistan high schools. The study was a descriptive survey and the population of the research included all management and teachers (94 in number) in the Education year 2011. The sample of the study consisted of all 18 schools managers and 76 teachers who were familiar with different aspects of the system. Samples were selected via multistage random cluster. The instrument of the study was a questionnaire with 35 closed-item questions at Likert scale designed by the researcher, and one open-ended question offered to managers and teachers for the purpose of the promotion of distance education programs. In order to analyze data from the Statistical analysis of variance, t-test was used. The findings showed that among the many barriers of implementation of distance education in the given institutions, the following barriers can be mentioned: non-usage of information technology and non-access to these technologies, dedicating insufficient hours to teach specialized lessons and not having discipline in providing educational material, not having optimal managerial and official systems of distance education, having skilled persons such as educational, computer, … experts, financial inability of students in paying costs and not having financial support for students in these centers. Also, the results showed that there is a significant difference between teachers and administrators’ perspectives about the barriers of information technology and educational planning system of distance education, but there is no significant difference between financial and official barriers of distance education.