Research On Online Tutorial In Network Distance Education

With the Internet's high-speed development, online teaching and learning has become the increasingly popular teaching mode in higher education. Online teaching and learning is in educatiors' good graces all over the world, because it is flexible, open and sharing, and it can offer the chance and condition of life-long learning for all. Through sharing quality resources across time and space, online teaching and learning can reduce the costs and improve the social benefits, especially in founding a knowledge society of life-long learning and general learning, and in accomplishing higher education in a popular style.Although the colleges and universities for distance teaching offer varied learnin materials, they are not enough, the students need more learning support services like tutorial, answering questions, guidance for learning skill and correcting the papers, and so on. Only in this way, the students can overcome the loneliness in self study and become active distance learners. There has been over three million distance learners at school in China, offering online learning support for so many studengs is an important task in ensuring the quality of distance education in China.Currently, the colleges and universities for distance teaching provide students tutorials mostly through Internet, they are so important for the students that I investigate the students in School of Network education of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunicatios (ab. BUPTNU) and Tianjin Radio and Television University in the spring and autumn term in 2005.1 make use of methods of questionnaire investigation, interviewing, observing and literature research to reveal the status that students take part in online tutorial and the factors affecting them, then I introduce 4 cases to present the improvement teachers made and evaluate the results. As there are not meaningful interactions between teachers with studentsthe or between students with students in curricula forums in both universities, and students also think synchronous online tutorials is more helpful to them in questionnaire, so this study centres on the synchronous online tutorials in BUPTNU. Through one-year's investigation and analysis, I find the following conclusions:a. A stable and open network teaching and learning platform is the basic condition for the normal network distance teaching and learning, especially for the normail online teaching and learning. At present, the lag in network infrastructure is still the bottleneck in online tutorial in China.b. The arrangement for synchronous online tutorials must centre on distance students, according to the need and characteristics of in-service adult's working and living.c. A rational ratio between teacher and students is the important factor ensuring the quality of online tutorial.d. Teachers in online tutorials must be experts of online teaching and tutorial, and they should pay attention to trainings before they work.e. The colleges and universities in distance education should help students shape up the habit of self learning, should offer the training for information technology for them and keep sustained attention.