Pedagogical Issues and Gender in Cyberspace Education: Distance Education in South Africa

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the pedagogical and gender issues embedded in distance and cyberspace education. Pedagogical issues to be addressed relate to access, teaching and learning, quality, and research within distance and cyberspace education. The paper will further analyse the gender dimension in cyberspace education in South Africa. Our paper limits itself to cyberspace teaching and learning as a process that takes place using the Internet or the World Wide Web, or uses some digital information and communications technology (ICT). We understand ICT to be a broad concept that includes all forms of electronic communications in both digital and analogue forms. Pedagogical issues in this paper are covered in a broader context, but our analyses of gender issues is limited to cyberspace education. Some literature refers to latter modes of learning as "e-learning" (Bates 2001). Different people have defined the concept, and the more common definition is that cyberspace is the total interconnectedness of human beings through computers and telecommunications without regard to physical geography. William Gibson is credited with inventing or popularising the concept in his novel.