I know what you're saying is right, because I recognize it, but I'm not sure I wanted to know it.

Traditional university courses barely provide support service, for students, much less for families. We don't have a mechanism for helping families to cope, but through teleconference, we can and do provide a forum for students to express and share their confusion and ambivalence, and to provide support for each other.

University courses can be relatively inaccessible because of costs or the intimidation people feel when confronted with academic regulations and standards. These factors limit the potential of credit courses for breaking down women's isolation.

The same technology that facilitates access also imposes barriers to learning. To benefit from teleconferences, students must speak and exchange ideas with others. Some lack the confidence to do this. One student said that she could not speak into the microphone and breathe at the same time. Although she pushed herself to contribute to discussions, it was an exhausting experience for her.

Feminist teachers are committed to a learning process in which students are active and have substantial input and instructors are responsive to students' needs. One of the drawbacks is that distance education is pre-packaged, predetermined by the instructor and relatively inflexible, although the teleconference medium provides an opportunity for student input.

The Last Word

That was one of the most interesting books I've ever read. I couldn't put it down. I went out in the kitchen with it; I went to the bathroom with it; I went to the bedroom with it. My mother came down for the weekend and I told her that it was a book that she has to read.

Despite the limitations we have noted, comments from the students indicate that they have found the course enlightening and encouraging, if at times challenging.

Our experience has demonstrated the trans-formative power of such courses for isolated women, but we recognize that it represents the formal, academic end of the learning continuum; we need a variety of more topically focused, informal learning experiences available to women throughout the region, using these same resources and technologies. To develop and deliver programs, we must attract the attention of the university, establish women students as priorities, and harness human and material resources on their behalf.

The technology of distance education enables the university to reach out to isolated communities. The challenge is to use this link to reflect the vitality as well as the problems of isolated women students going back to the university, and in the process transform the institution into one which serves women students better, whether isolated or not.

NOTES

1. Unless otherwise indicated quotations are from the audio tapes of the 1986 fall semester teleconferences.
   
   
2. D. Anger et al., Women and Work in Newfoundland. Background Report, Royal Commission on Employment and Unemployment. St. John's, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1986.
   
   
3. The specific book to which this student refers in Meg Luxton's More Than a Labour of Love: Three Generations of Women's Work in the Home. Rather than emphasize this particular book, though, we would like to stress the strongly positive reactions students have to many of the readings and films in the course, materials that speak directly to their personal realities in ways that they have not experienced previously. We would be pleased to provide an outline of the materials we use in our course to anyone who contacts us at:

School of Continuing Studies and Extension
G. A. Hickman Building, Room 1000
Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John's, Newfoundland
A1B 3X8

L.Emily Elliott Impossible Tasks Before Breakfast