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This handbook examines distance learning course development, delivery requirements, policies and faculty requirements.

This article examines distance learning from a gender perspective. In any new area of enterprise, expectations have an important effect on planning, implementation, and evaluation. When it comes to distance learning, a variety of images of what this exciting new technology will look like and what it can empower us to achieve will determine how we develop it. In a study about technological experts' expectations and desires for their own technologies, the fantasies articulated by women and men are different in important and predictable ways. Women wish for small, appealing objects that allow them to collaborate, to create, to share their work, and to integrate their work and home lives. Men wish for magic wands that give them enormous power, fabulous speed, and infinite wisdom. This culturally sanctioned difference in technological expectations has real implications for the future of distance learning. Both perspectives are needed if distance-learning technology is to be successfully integrated into our school system.

Online distance learning (ODL) has become a global phenomenon transcending national, political, and geographical boundaries challenging distance educators to re-examine notions of teaching and learning and issues of culture inherent in cross-border delivery of online courses and programs. Rogers, Graham and Mayes (2007) note that the sheer amount of learning content being developed in the West (defined for this chapter as Eurocentric, North American, Australasian) and exported via the Internet to other countries, highlights the crucial need to explore questions of culture more thoroughly in our online course designs to provide a more equitable learning experience for all. Global universities are faced with the choice between continuing to expect all students to adjust to traditional English-western academic values and uses of language, or changing their processes to accommodate others (Pincas, 2001).

In an atmosphere of shrinking state funds for edu cation and the glistening power of information technology, the administrators of educational institutions, especially higher education, are investing heavily in the construction and increased use of distance learning classrooms. Yet, in this rush to be both economi cally streamlined and technologically advanced, few policy makers are inquiring into the educational bene fits actually proffered to the end users, that is, teachers and students. This article advances such an inquiry by revealing how the equipment in such facilities explic itly or implicitly embodies, and thereby determines, pedagogical choices. Such "hardwired" pedagogy may enhance the type and amount of data flow, but it effectively restricts the options for teaching and learn ing on the part of both the teacher and the student. Furthermore, virtual classrooms functionally transfer parametric control of classroom interaction from the participants to the equipment and therefore to the technicians, accountants, bureaucrats, manufacturers, and engineers.

Globalization, the Internet, and access to telecommunication networks have increased the demand for education and educational quality across the globe. The reasons for this demand explains Carnoy (2005) are two-fold: The first is economic, the rising payoffs to higher education in a global, science-based, knowledge intensive economy make university training more of a "necessity" to get "good" jobs, which in turn, changes the stakes at lower levels of schooling and the demand for high-quality secondary schools. The second reason is socio-political: Demographics and democratic ideals increase pressure on universities to provide access to groups that traditionally have not attended university. In this context, online distance learning (ODL), which can transcend local, state, and national borders, has the potential to reach out internationally to enhance learning for diverse learners in varied geographical and socio-cultural contexts and increase inter-cultural awareness and communication. In addition, demand is propelled by rising awareness of the potential for online education to provide services to nearly any location on the planet.

This article is focused on distance learning in higher education. It analyses and compares the development of distance learning and conditions of distance learning in different countries. It describes significant differences in the development of distance education in higher education in individual countries. We meet with various forms of implementation of distance education. The divergence in approaches towards distance education in different countries is caus ed by different cultural aspects, the tradition of distance learning, the development of information and communication technologies, and different legislative norms in the area of education. There are many types of organisational models for distance education. A particular model might be dominant in one country, while in another country there may exist a variety of different organisational models for distance education.