ABSTRACT
Teachers in distance education, whether course writers or tutors, have to acquire skills and attitudes which are quite significantly different from those to which they became accustomed in traditional teaching. Frequently the circumstances could be improved through the use of some additional resources, which would make distance education a little more expensive than it would be otherwise, although still very much cheaper than traditional education. The training of those who staff courses which use distance teaching should therefore be a major concern of all who are interested in the future well-being of distance education. However, the real lesson to be learnt from the use of different forms of technology is that the educational quality of the learning materials is far more important than their mode of delivery. The chapter argues that the quality of production of the materials is almost as important as their educational quality and cannot in fact be divorced from it.
