**Author details**

*Interactive Multimedia - Multimedia Production and Digital Storytelling*

and support, leadership of others and sharing efforts and responsibility.

has been added 'interdependence' in group activities in DL.

• Autonomy or self-directedness has been a core feature of adult learning for years and closely relates to TDT. DL, when considered as a social process relates to this complex construct. Autonomy has been described as both self-management of pedagogy and metacognition. Furthermore, to 'traditional' autonomy,

• Moore and Kearsley (1997) suggested autonomy, a third factor in TDT, influenced and interacted with dialogue and structure in transactional distance.

• Self-directed learning/autonomy/independent learning were all used with a considerable degree of equivalence in the literature and became popularised in

• Literature appeared to focus on measuring autonomy and relationships of factors within TDT, attempting to quantify and compare a complex subject using

• There appeared to be varying perspectives concerning autonomy and independence vs. interdependence. I disagreed with Thanasoulas [64] that autonomy was a departure from education as a social process. I supported Moore [4], Garland [68] and Chen and Willits [67]. An individual's ability to work online in groups

• Individual autonomy has been classified as self-management of pedagogy and metacognition. Both of these appeared to be important and occurring in DL. Studies exploring these involved constructs have attempted to quantify these

• Studies that have compared the different dimensions of autonomy suggested knowledge about oneself and self-strategies were more important than knowledge about tasks and goals, yet students must manage both 'academic' learning

statistical analysis and were often lacking a theoretical framework.

**4.3 Summary of research on autonomy**

the 1970s.

was essential.

complex subjects.

and the process of learning.

describe themselves as both independent and interdependent. The lack of correlation also suggested these features of autonomy were essential, but separate and distinct attributes. Although the attempt to quantify with statistical analysis something as complex as autonomy was fundamentally flawed, this study provided a particularly interesting idea: an individual's autonomy as a distance learner should be understood as including their abilities to work with others, or be interdependent. Autonomy is multi-faceted and interdependence appeared to be essential. These results suggested that there may be an attempt to move beyond the focus of independence in this environment and move towards 'interdependence'. Other) earlier findings support this 'personal control' [68]. It is suggested successful adult learners demonstrated appropriate dependency needs when participating in DL including: help, approval

**76**

Laura Delgaty Medical Education, Newcastle University, England

\*Address all correspondence to: l.e.delgaty@ncl.ac.uk

© 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
