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| Forms of Distance Learning | Distance learning is comparatively a new type of education. The ancestor of the distance learning is the correspondence learning. The student was given a set of learning materials by means of mail. The traditional set comprised textbooks, student guides, and assignments that the student was obliged to do within the particular time. No teacher support was offered. Later this type of  learning was united with the educational radio and TV programs. But generally this type of learning did not comprise any type of feedback and communication with other members of the educational process. At those times students and teachers saw each other only within exam sessions. New information technologies that appeared later, brought personal computers, printers, faxes, video tape recorders, audio players, and of course the Internet. All those tools influenced correspondence learning very much.
Nowadays the learning materials could be delivered to learners not only in a form of the printed books mailed to them. Due to the rapid development of the new information technologies and formation of new technologies like wireless communications, distance education is becoming much closer to the customary face-to-face learning.
Traditional correspondence education assumes that learners should work with a variety of educational materials obtained by the mail. In addition the learner should send back written assignments and results of the individual research activities. Nowadays the students make use of dissimilar kinds of educational materials: video- an audiotapes, CD-ROMs with educational courseware, and so on. Traditional mail in this structure is substituted by e-mail and fax.
Broadcasting courses
The TV and radio broadcasting for educational reasons is extensively used for teaching. Very frequently TV programs are included into the curriculum as well to the obtainable face-to-face educational programs. The advice is organized in a shape of the e-mail and asynchronous meetings. Students are given the assistance from the teachers, and send them back the reports about the current projects.
Educational forums - teleconferences and videoconferences
A lot of colleges, universities, and high schools make use of teleconferences. In such a way they join students who work at the similar topic into collaborative teams providing them with the support. These two types of teleconferences are used at the beginning of the course, presenting the introduction lectures. Meanwhile the seminars are systematized in a form of the desktop audio and videoconferences. Students work at their projects using teleconferences to make the presentation, talk about something with other students, and manage their own learning and research activities, in addition to to consulting the instructor straightly.
Courses on the basis of computer assisted instruction (CAI)
Having a personal computer at home the student could learn the subject by a variety of interactive educational software programs that are delivered in the majority of cases in a form of an educational toolkit with software and courseware materials. The student could work with these materials at his or her home computer, or could get the access to the same educational resources, but published on the suitable Internet web site. Distance education supported by educational software programs could be the part of the customary educational process or the dominating form of education, organized, for example, in a form of so-called learning environments, or learning spaces, virtual laboratories, etc. As a rule, the feedback in such cases is provided by e-mail and teleconferences.
Internet-based courses
This type of distance education could be developed in the Internet environment with the help of the interactive Web-based textbooks, e-mail, mailing lists, chats, asynchronous forums, computer modeling and simulation programs, and so on. Teaching on the Net could be incorporated with other kinds and ways of distance teaching.
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