Distance Education: Pros, Cons, and the Future.

This paper reviews the recent publications and researches on distance education and explores its promise and potential from the student's perspective, the faculty's perspective and the administrator's perspective. Our findings indicate that only the self-motivated and self-disciplined students are most likely to succeed in distance education. Although the majority of the researches conclude that there is no significant difference between distance learning and traditional learning, the conclusion is still open to debate. Faculty support is mixed. The fundamental reason is the lack of faculty involvement in the dominant administrator-centered advocacy. Successful distance education programs need to maintain a high level of faculty involvement. Administrators consider distance education as an important revenue source. In the foreseeable future, however, distance education cannot become a new revenue source, given its timeand labor-intensiveness and the cost of installation of new technology. Our examination of two notable programs confirmed our findings.