Patterns of distance teaching in teacher education

Abstract

As school involvement ratios increase in developing countries and the numbers of school pupils correspondingly escalate, the need for trained teachers will continue to grow. Traditional training programmes have failed to meet the demand in the past and are unlikely to meet future needs. A partial solution, as many countries have discovered, is to use distance teaching to train teachers. This can be done for a number of different purposes within teacher education, however, and different methods or approaches can be used. This paper analyses these different purposes and methods and suggests a means of classifying distance teaching approaches to teacher education.