Just How Relevant is E-education to Global Educational Needs?

The development of e-education has enabled distance education to overcome the lack of interactivity inherent in earlier forms of distance education based on correspondence and mass media, but it looks as if it is also pushing up the costs of distance education. In the 1960s and 1970s, the cost structure of distance education, and its ability to lower educational costs, was seen as a distinct advantage in the face of the need to expand educational provision. With the world population forecast to grow by over three billions in the next 50 years, the need for cheap ways of educating people must be paramount. This article asks just how relevant it is to global educational needs to develop more expensive forms of distance education that, in the absence of public funding, place increased financial burdens on the students.