Bridging the transition process for first-year students in distance construction programs : a case study in Australia

Distance education is widely adopted to deliver courses for students who are physically separated from the lecturers. Due to the heavy role that technology plays in distance education, as well as the varied socio-economic status of the students, it is unreasonable to assume that all first-year students can successfully complete the transition process into tertiary studies and begin immediately on core content knowledge. Central Queensland University has offered the construction programs exclusively by the distance mode since 1990. The University has developed its own framework to ease the transition process of first-year students into tertiary studies. Providing an orientation course and a meta-course as well as creating learning communities are critical to address the transition problem. The results provide a good guidance of the design and delivery of distance construction programs for first-year students and will be useful for other universities who are seeking to implement the distance mode.