On the Potential of Distance Education in the Age of Information Technology

In any distance-education situation students and tutors are at a distance from each other at least in the sense that they are not in the same room while learning and teaching. This means that distance education relies on media. It has two constituent elements, on the one hand the presentation of learning matter, which can be described as one-way traffic, on the other hand interaction between students and tutors, which represents two-way traffic. Both are brought about by media. This was so a hundred years ago, when print, the written word and, occasionally, phonograph recordings exhausted the media repertoire, and does so now that a wealth of more and less sophisticated media are available. What, equipped with media of various kinds, distance education is capable of is the theme of this essay.