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DISTANCE EDUCATION:
A LONELY AND ISOLATING EXPERIENCE?
Article by Mark J. W. LEE and Anthony CHAN. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education Vol. 8 No. 1, Article: 7, January 2007.
At most higher education institutions, distance learners have the highest risk of dropping out of their programmes of study (Peters, 1992). This can be attributed in large part to the isolation experienced by these students (Rogers, 1990; Peters, 1992; Okun, Benin & Brandt-Williams 1996; Hipp, 1997; Lake, 1999; Delahoussaye & Zemke, 2001).
Students of all kinds want to have a sense of belonging to a larger university community, rather than simply being an enrolee, or worse still, a statistic, in a course. For many on-campus students, their involvement in the campus community forms an important part of their social lives and plays an integral role in their personal and academic development.
