Dialogue: A Theoretical Framework for Distance Education Instructional Systems

This paper presents a theoretical framework for viewing elements that comprise distance education instructional systems in terms of dialogue. The authors work under the assumption that learning is mediated by intrapersonal dialogue and facilitated by interpersonal dialogue. They describe every resource in a distance education instructional system (for instance, instructor availability, asynchronous communication networks, self-instructional texts) and provide analysis in terms of the dialogue mode it supports. The authors describe the framework they offer with: "(1) a unified, simple, and coherent description of the mechanisms at play in distance education systems, (2) clear-cut operational definitions, and (3) hypotheses that may be investigated empirically."

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