Distance education earned its place among the options available to a variety of learners throughout the world a long time ago. Correspondence education, for example, has been a fact of life for generations of certificationand degree-seekers in industrialized countries since the turn of this century and in many countries of the Third World at least since the early 1960s. In recent years, distance education has been adapted to play a broader role in supporting programs that extend beyond the traditional correspondenceschooling model to include community outreach components, such as literacy, skills training for jobs in the trades, preparatory courses for advancing within the education mainstream, radio and other hard technologies as aids to formal education, and citizen/entrepreneurial support activities of great variety. The evolution from its origins as a compensatory option toward a more complex and development-oriented mission, however, has proved to be problematic for distance education.