Distance education in the digital age: Common misconceptions and challenging tasks

This article discusses in its first part three common misconceptions related to the operation of distance education providers in the digital age: The tendency to relate to e-learning as the new generation of distance education; the confusion between ends and means of distance education; and the absence of the teachers' crucial role in the discourse on knowledge construction. The second part of the article examines four challenging tasks for the future development of distance education in the digital age: Bridging over the digital divide; designing cost-effective modes of utilizing the new technologies; redesigning the roles of actors in the distributed teaching responsibility within the industrial model of distance education; and creating effective quality assurance mechanisms.