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Distance education, e-learning, and virtual university are similar terms for a trend of modern education. It is an integration of information technologies, computer hardware systems, and communication tools, to support educational professionals in remote teaching. This paper presents an overview of distance education from the perspective of policy, people, and technology. A number of questions frequently asked in distance learning panel discussions are presented, with the suggested answers from the authors. The survey presented in this paper includes communication, intelligent, and educational technologies of distance education. Readers of this paper are academic researchers and engineers who are interested in new research issues of distance education, as well as educators and general participants who are seeking new solutions.
Shih et al. (2003) studied this question.