ABSTRACT
Distance education has moved, in some jurisdictions, from the political and educational margins into a position where it is viewed by governments and institutions as a mainstream educational process. Distance learning methods and information technologies are converging with classroom strategies to create what will be a substantially different and exciting educational environment. In so doing, they present intriguing challenges to deeply embedded norms and values, to organizational systems and structures, and to university cultures. In Australia, this convergence is termed ‘flexible learning’. While rhetoric still outstrips reality, some universities are revolutionizing their approaches to how, where, when and what they teach. For them, ‘flexible learning’ is mainstream educational strategy, not a marginal experiment. This chapter analyses the experience of one institution — the University of South Australia — in taking a whole-institution approach to flexible learning. In particular, it examines some of the key policy and structural issues that the university has faced in the 1990s.
