those who could relocate and totally reorganize their lives - not an option for many young familiesö (p. 4).
Distance education began as an attempt to make formal education more accessible. Colleges started to recognize that not all potential students could come to their campuses, and they began to develop correspondence courses and other forms of home study to meet these needs. Lynnette R. Porter (1997), who prefers the term distance learning to distance education, defines the term as ôeducational training information, including the instruction and experience that learners gain, although they are physically distant from the source of that information and instructionö (p. 1). She (1997) notes that some of its most critical benefits include the studentÆs ability to learn at his or her own pace, in a convenient location, and covering topics not readily available locally (pp. 13-14). However, correspondence courses are limited in their ability to involve the student; distance learning as it was first conceived was essentially a one-way process in which the student was the passive receptor of a body of knowledge.
Distance education in some form has been evolving steadily since the mid-1940s, but current technologies that provide interactive exchanges and varied kinds of information delivery have helped the original concept to develop into a genuinely effective educational alternative. As Corrigan (1996) argues, ôIn the industrial age, we went to school; in the information age, school can come to usö (p. 3).
John Bear and Mariah Bear (1999) observe that distance education can include traditional home-study correspondence courses but also encompasses cable TV and videotaped classes, guided independent study, home computers linked to university computers, and a wide variety of Internet interfaces (p. 4). Computer connections provide the greatest change in distance education since they allow instruction to become genui...