Selection of Appropriate Media and Technology for Distance Education

The technology has revolutionized the world of education. The role of teachers has been changed from merely delivering information to guiding students in their discovery of knowledge. Innovative technologies have enhanced distance learning. The term distance education has been applied to a tremendous variety of programs serving numerous audiences via a wide variety of media. Distance education is one of the tools that promises to remove the barrier of geographic location, because it increases time and place flexibility, provides just-in-time learning, reduces costs, and has quicker time development than traditional material development. The technologies used for distance education fall into two categories telecommunications technologies that connect instructors to distant learners and classroom technologies that record, present, and display instructional information. Communicating with someone via the right communication media seems to be difficult nowadays as people use various mode of communication media and senders do not have any knowledge about receivers? current communication media, especially in ubiquitous environment. Thus, we propose the method how the most appropriate media to reach the receiver can be selected based on the effective measures. Also, it's describes common media selection models and suggests strategies for the design of media combinations for a better learning. Indeed, the paper is concluded with the media design implementation in a distance education and showed some questions to consider when selecting media such as- how accessible is a particular technology for learners?, what are the best technologies for supporting this teaching and learning. The result is information and decision-making model that assists in the selection of appropriate teaching technologies to enhance student learning