Interaction in Distance Education: A Cultural Critique of Instructional Dialogue

Introduction

Distance education appears to be a quite popular education option for adult learners by its main features such as access to education material and flexibility in time and place. Distance learning has certain limitations as well as these superiorities. Many of these, such as not having a generally configured learning culture, physical distances between individuals, demand for a high level of discipline and autonomy, absence of a known learning atmosphere, reduction of face-to-face communication between individuals, and more emphasis on internal communication have been mentioned in literature (Bouhnik & Marcus, 2006). Among these, it has been stated that “interaction” is one of the most important elements that influence learning and a learner (Moore, 2001; Picciano, 2002). Interaction is a concept that has continued to be discussed from many different aspects and defined in a variety of ways. This chapter focuses on interaction concept by its theoretical and practical reflections in the context of distance education and in the final part, its influence on distance science and language learning are discussed within the scope of culture.