Extending the Reach of Technical Education with Distance Learning

Traditionally, community colleges serve students who live within the school's local region. Some community colleges are looking for strategies to increase geographic access to their technical education programs. Exploratory research on online technical education programs found some programs are using online and distance-learning strategies to make their programs more accessible. This paper examines two such technical education programs and the different ways they are making their programs available to students across the country. Looking at these two programs revealed that the types of online and distance-learning strategies and tools these programs chose to deliver instruction are, at least in part, dependent on characteristics of the technical equipment students are being taught to master. These characteristics include the equipment's availability and accessibility, as well as how expensive and/or dangerous this equipment can be.