Professional Continuing Education for Rural Teachers: Promising Prospects for the Future.

For decades, teachers in British Columbia's rural schools have been expected to be professionally up-to-date but have had limited access to continuing professional education. The rough terrain and great distances between communities have made the provision of continuing professional education expensive and difficult. Their lack of access to continued training has been a major source of dissatisfaction among rural teachers. However, experiments since 1979 with interactive satellites and teleconferencing suggest that the traditional barriers to providing continuing training for professional groups in remote communities may have been overcome. The experiments include the interactive satellite transmission of an undergraduate course, four hours per week of live interactive programming for various professional groups, and plans for courses designed around a teleconferencing bridge allowing student-teacher conversation via long distance telephone lines. (SB)