Virtual form of education in lifelong learning - chance for the country

Abstract

The availability of education, including lifelong learning, is one of the value measures of quality of life in advanced countries. However, there are still significant differences between a township and a rural region. Centres of education are mainly situated in big cities; smaller municipalities are separated from these centres by tens or hundreds of kilometers (according to the conditions of the Czech Republic). While educating young people, it is usually accepted that they commute towards education; there is a whole range of social and cultural aspects; and above all, they have time for that - it is their main “working” load. The opposite situation is the case in lifelong learning, which is conducted in parallel with full-time employment but is necessary for effective and competitive performing of the employment. For participants of lifelong learning it is impossible to commute big distances; their working load does not allow it. Thus, those forms, in which so called „education which goes to the students”, are chosen.

ICT brings an enormous opportunity to bring education closer to the rural regions. A text form of e-learning is practically already standard; but a voice and image broadcast give us inexhaustible possibilities of usage. The aim of this paper is to propose and verify methods of distant (virtual) education with the use of multimedia tools.