Maciej Słomczyński
University of Warsaw

Dorota Sidor
University of Warsaw

Educational failures in distance learning

Educational failure is an inseparable element of the didactic process. However, it is taken into consideration mostly in the context of primary and secondary school learning, rarely in higher education and hardly ever - in academic distance education. The paper's goal is to gather and to systematise rather distributed remarks relating to educational failure in distance learning. The authors suggest and describe a modified (compared to traditional theories) categorization of educational failure reasons (related to learning process, to teaching process as well as to environmental conditions - distinguished from the most frequently mentioned: biopsychological, educational or socioeconomic). The authors emphasise the necessity of taking up activities preventing educational failure (prevention, diagnosis, therapy) in distance education.