ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by indicating the diversity of form and practice in distance education, and discusses the characteristics of distance education presented by D. Keegan's definition of distance education. It introduces a number of attempts the first a systems model of distance education, the second a holistic model of distance education, and the third a transactional model of distance education. The problem in trying to establish a definition of distance education lies in identifying the common features of enterprises as different from each other as correspondence colleges based on postal tuition, radiophonic schools, and university programmes using electronic mail to reach off-campus students. Some proportion of learning activities in conventional systems takes place apart from the presence of a teacher, increasingly so as one passes up the scale from school to university education, while many distance education systems include elements of face-to-face contact with teachers.
