Digital Immigrants in Distance Education

Abstract

The constant growth of methods of education that incorporate the Internet into teaching-learning processes has opened up a wide range of opportunities for students across the world to gain entry to undergraduate or graduate degree programs. However, if the enrolling student is a digital immigrant, the chances of success may be limited by the difficulty of using the Internet to communicate. This laid the groundwork for a qualitative study aimed at determining, from an ontological, epistemological, methodological, and instrumental approach, and from a teacher’s perspective, the main technical and communication challenges faced by digital immigrants as they follow an online higher-education study program.

Keywords:

• higher education,
• digital immigrants,
• andragogy,
• online education,
• social networks