ABSTRACT
Introduction The past 30 years have witnessed an amazing revolution in teaching and training around the world. Whilst forms of correspondence teaching have been practised for thousands of years, and refined during the last century in various correspondence courses, it was the creation of the Open University in 1969 that signalled a major change in the way teaching and learning was organized and practised (Perry, 1976). Since the creation of the Open University, Open, Distance, Flexible, Resource Based – and now Distributed Learning (DL) – have expanded dramatically around the world. Today 11 mega-universities currently enrol about 3 million undergraduates with hundreds of thousands following other, nondegree courses (Daniel, 2000). However, this number is dwarfed by those in industry, commerce and the public services who study using self-instructional material in the workplace and at home.
