Several institutions have started offering distance education courses via Internet and through video teleteaching modes of reaching out. They have, however, assumed that such courses would be effective for distance learners. The author undertook a study by designing, offering, implementing and evaluating the effectiveness of two short courses for teacher education, one via Internet and the other through video teleteaching. The course, PROJECT YOUR VISUALS, was offered free of charge from the website: www.netexpertsindia.com/netprof for a period of three months and the course, INNOVATIONS IN TEACHING FOR HIGHER ORDER LEARNING was conducted through one-way video and two-way audio/fax for one week. With a view to generalise the results, both the courses were offered by simulating the state-of-the-art practices followed in contemporary courses. Purposive random samples of participants were taken from both courses and their responses were studied. Their pretest-to-posttest gains were plotted and compared. The Internet course resulted in 49% gain with astandard deviation of 19.1%. In terms of relative gains defined as posttest minus pretest scores as a percentage of 100 minus pretest scores they gained 61.2% with astandard deviation of 19.71. Application of the Student's t-test revealed that the gain on both measures was significant at 0.05 level. Likewise, the video teleteaching course resulted in comparable figures. Rating scores of similarly selected samples showed that the participants considered such course as worthwhile. Ideas of emailing, chat session and assignments etc were all evaluated. It may be concluded that the two methodologies have their future potential for such courses and distance learning. Relative merits and limitationd of the two methodologies have been presented in a tabular form.
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