ABSTRACT

This chapter extends the author’s previous Handbook of Distance Education discussion on ethical dimensions of distance education to recent studies and reports. The primary focus is on students and teachers as actors and decision makers, based in a recognition of how two contextual factors—institutional priorities and an increasingly global, cross-cultural teaching-learning context—strongly influence ethical decision making by both groups. The author argues that distance education is fundamentally a relationship, and that the primary ethical issues characterizing it are ones of responsibility and care.