Introduction

Distance education is an exciting new area of education which seems to have something to offer to almost everyone, wrote one of the contributors to this book recently. Linked throughout its history to developments in communications technology, it has benefited from the rapid advances in the 1980s and early 1990s in electronic telecommunications. The 1980s also saw the foundations of the Asian distance teaching universities, many of which already have hundreds of thousands of students. In the 1990s a number of universities have begun to offer professional qualifications at degree level in distance education. Few will query the need to offer a first book on the theoretical principles of this area of education.