Providence Edu

Distance education has afforded generations of students the opportunity pursue their educational goals outside of the traditional school system.  It has allowed countless students the ability to further their education, while allowing them to maintain their obligations to their families and employers.  While distance education is not for everyone, it has certainly stood the test of time.  The following is a brief timeline of events related to distance education.

•    1840 – Isaac Pitman begins teaching shorthand by correspondence in the UK.
•    1858 – The University of London creates its External Program.
•    1883 – New York State authorizes the Chautauqua Institute to award degrees earned via correspondence.
•    1891 – The Colliery Engineer School of Mines renames itself International Correspondence Schools.
•    1892 – The University of Chicago starts administering the first university courses by mail.
•    1906 – The Calvert School of Baltimore becomes the first primary school in the United States to offer correspondence courses.
•    1916 – The National University Continuing Education Association is created in the United States.
•    1921 – Pennsylvania State College begins broadcasting courses on the radio.
•    1933 – The University of Iowa begins broadcasting courses on television.
•    1950 – The Ford Foundation begins offering grants to create and develop educational programs for television broadcasting.
•    1967 – The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is created.
•    1970 – Walden University is established.
•    1974 – California State University offers a Masters degree via correspondence.
•    1982 – The National University Teleconferencing Network is established.
•    1984 – The personal computer is named “man of the year” by Time Magazine.

With the advent of the personal computer and the development of the internet, distance education has evolved into an extremely important element of modern education.  Most every university in North America offers courses online, while an entire cottage industry has formed around the concept of online education.  There are countless online courses available to members of the general public.  The wonderful thing about online education is that there are no borders, and prospective students worldwide now have access to the same opportunities.  Online learning has the ability to make the world a better place.  In some ways, it already has.

This guide is not meant to be the one and only way to develop a lesson plan; however, it is going to provide you with at least some good methods to start with. A general overview highlights the key points of creating a useful and working lesson plan.

Below is a list of the steps that are usually involved in developing a quality lesson plan as well as a description of what each component should be. They will be listed in 10 of the best points.

1. The first thing that you will have to consider, obviously, is what you want to teach. This should be developed based upon your state or local school standards. You also need to be aware of what grade level you are developing the lesson plan for. Record a time estimate for your lesson plan to help you to better budget your time.

Once you have chosen your topic, you can begin choosing how you want to teach the topic in general. If you didn’t use the state standards to help in developing your topic, you will want to refer to them now to see what specific standards your lesson plan can fulfill.

Having your lesson plan properly set up with state standards, helps to prove its worthiness and necessity later. It also helps to assuring that your students are being taught what the state requires.

If you are able to blend your lesson plan with the local school standards, record links to those standards in your lesson plan in writing for reference later. If you are however, writing this lesson plan for a website, you will want to be sure that you include a title that properly reflects your topic.

2. Develop clear, specific objectives to be sure that your lesson plan will teach exactly what you want it to. You must note that these objectives should not be activities that will be used in the lesson plan. Rather, they should be the learning outcomes of those activities.

As an example, if you wanted to teach your class how to add 1 + 3, the objective may be that “the students will know how to add 1 + 3” or more specifically “the students will demonstrate how to add 1 + 3.”

Your objectives should also be directly measurable. What this means is that you need to make sure that you will be able to tell whether these objectives were met or not. You can certainly have more than one objective for a lesson plan if you feel that this would be more useful.

In order for you to be able to make objectives more meaningful, you may want to include both wide and narrow objectives. The wide objectives would be more like ambitions and they would include the overall goal of the lesson plan, for example, in order for you to gain familiarity with adding two numbers together.

The specific objectives would be more like the one listed above, in such a manner, as “the students will demonstrate how to add the numbers 2 and 3 together.”