Distance Education and the Myth of the New Pedagogy

Distance education, broadly defined as instruction that is not bound by time or place, is bringing about fundamental changes in higher education. Writing in a recent online newsletter from the American Association for Higher Education, Ted Marchese describes the many "not-so-distant" distance competitors to traditional colleges and universities: the University of Phoenix, the for-profit university with some 50,000 students in 12 states; the Western Governors University, the competency-based consortium that was founded by 17 governors and is supported by 14 business partners, including Sun, IBM, AT and Britain’s venerable OpenUniversity, which has allied with several universities in the United States and will begin offering courses here this year.