Current and Future Demand for Distance Education

Abstract

“Distance education” means education or training where the instructor is not in the same room with the students. It doesn’t necessarily mean, as the attached maps and figures show, that all students live far from campuses (although many do). In this summary we first highlight our findings and then list questions raised and recommendations made by provosts in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau after they reviewed a draft of this report. A third of distance education students in the Fall 1997 semester, for instance, lived in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau. Distance education courses are offered over television, through audio or video conferencing, by mail, over the Internet, and through combinations of those methods. During the Fall 1997 semester, 4,115 students in 178 Alaska locations (and a few places outside Alaska) were enrolled in 293 distance education courses offered through the University of Alaska. ISER also interviewed representatives of 33 organizations that operate primarily in rural Alaska—because in many remote places, distance education courses are among the few sources of postsecondary education and training available locally. We asked rural employers whether they were satisfied with current distance education offering and what kinds of job openings they foresaw.