Creating new perspectives on teacher education through open and distance learning

Abstract

Teacher education through open and distance learning (ODL) is not only crucial to addressing current and future needs of learners around the world; it also encapsulates the possibilities of several much-needed new perspectives on those two fields as well as education more broadly. This chapter demonstrates that proposition by synthesising four selected themes that run across the preceding chapters, and by positing those themes as providing rigorous and sustainable responses to the book’s key issues and organising questions as expounded in the first chapter. This chapter then elaborates on five new perspectives drawn from the implications of those themes, and on responses for future policy-making, practice and research in the intersection between teacher education and ODL, as well as in wider contemporary educational debates.