| Distance education has made anytime/anywhere learning experiences possible. Students, including those in Taiwan, are seeking opportunities to extend their linguistic, cultural, and intellectual understanding to other parts around the globe. The World Wide Web, owing to its information abundance and immediacy of retrieval, introduced a highly viable alternative to extend the virtues and minimize the defects of traditional classroom practices.; This paper is an intellectual autobiography based on a reflective practice—my two year online teaching experience at a distant location to a group of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students in Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages in Taiwan, whose initial distance learning experience consisted of elective courses in communication and film studies. The intent of the study was to discover the hidden praxis of technology in distance education thus offering guidelines for educational administrators and practitioners in constructing their own programs.; The pedagogy of my online courses was derived from an e-learning paradigm, iLEARN, which was an interactive learning framework I designed based on educational theories that emerged from constructivism, distributed and collaborative learning, as well as social and situated cognition.; Standard techniques, such as participant observation, online focus groups and interviews, were used in this study to analyze students' perspectives toward the effectiveness of the courses. Observations of student interactions relied on their discussions in the electronic bulletin board, chat room, E-Mails, and online file exchanges. Periodic surveys and self, peer and superior formative and summative evaluations were used to assess students' evolution of understanding and internal exploration of themselves. Multiple-source documents and literature in various fields were analyzed to examine the issues that emerged in my practices.; It is concluded that transformation, emancipation, collaboration, and humanization are the four criteria of successful education. Despite the central role of technology in distance education, human elements, including teaching and learning strategies adopted for postmodern education practices, transcend the importance of the electrons transmitted over the Internet. Distance education can be as effective for multimedia-intensive courses as it would be for text-intensive courses; even a highly unusual class of students, such as EFL students, can benefit from it. |
