Many students in the United States and around the world live in arts deserts, areas where they have limited opportunities to engage with various forms of artistic expression, cultural events, and creative experiences due to a scarcity of cultural institutions, performance venues, galleries, and community arts programs. This article explores the…

The Students and Parents In Cooperative Education (SPICE) Family Literacy Program serves central Maine's Regional School Unit #3 (RSU 3). SPICE's mission is to integrate childhood and adult education. RSU 3 spreads across 440 square miles. Over this vast distance, there is no one town where people gather. So SPICE educators went straight to their…

Many of Africa's challenges have scientific solutions, but there are fewer individuals engaged in scientific activity per capita on this continent than on any other. Only a handful of African scientists use their skills to capacity or are leaders in their disciplines. Underrepresentation of Africans in scientific practice, discourse, and decision…

In large continental landmasses such as Australia, forms of education, including correspondence schooling, emerged in the early twentieth century that allowed children in remote regions to access education. To make such schooling possible, other "technologies" of state provision were mobilised such as the postal system, rail network, and…

Distance learning, open source courseware, e-books, wikis, and many other innovative technologies have impacted the education fields by connecting any topic in any discipline to any learner in any place. Drexel University's School of Education capitalized on these possibilities earlier this year by hosting its second annual live and online Virtual…

Distance education strategies for remotely deployed, highly mobile, or institutionalized populations are reviewed and critiqued. Specifically, asynchronous, offline responses for special military units, Native Americans on remote reservations, prison populations and other geographically, temporally or technologically isolated niche populations are…

In response to the expense and unreliability of radio and telephone communications, the New South Wales (Australia) Department of Education and Training undertook a trial of satellite technology to deliver interactive lessons to elementary students in remote areas. The Gilat satellite system developed in Israel is described, including equipment,…

A purely geographic classification is not the best way to measure rural disadvantage in Australia. A service access model is described that incorporates the following elements: population center size; distance, time, and cost of travel to the service center; and a measure of the economic capacity of residents to overcome the cost of travel.…

Developed in the early 1980s, the Hill Areas Education project provides basic education to children and adults of Thailand's six ethnic minority groups, who live in the remote mountainous region of northern Thailand. The project delivers a locally relevant curriculum, equivalent to the six compulsory grades of the formal education system; promotes…

Describes the author's experience teaching a class of remote and isolated children using Air (broadcast) Lessons and Distance Education lesson materials. (WRM)

Examines some reasons why not all students are afforded equal opportunities to acquire technology skills. Identifies three main impediments to technological equalization: gender bias, geographic and socio-economic biases, and racial bias. Attempts to show how these biases work to prevent students from receiving equal opportunities to master…

Outlines the policy framework for vocational education and training (VET) in New South Wales (Australia), provision of VET through distance education to isolated learners and students in small rural schools, issues related to the child-to-adult transition of isolated students, and the varying educational needs of students following five different…

Discusses the impact on rural Australian schools of recent developments in distance education, including new communication technologies, changes in the concept of Distance Education Centres, the advent of open learning ("open" college courses delivered electronically by a consortium of universities), and interinstitutional networking.…

Distance education can improve rural education by alleviating geographic isolation of small rural schools and increasing educational opportunities for both students and teachers. In Australia, distance education technologies include telecourses for staff development and an electronic mail and bulletin board system linking schools. (LP)

In rural Alleghany County (North Carolina), one of the state's seven "cyber campuses" provides an expanded curriculum and advanced placement college courses to high school students and an array of community college and 4-year college courses to residents, who otherwise would be deterred from further education by their isolated location.…