Distance and Campus Universities - Tensions and Interactions: A Comparative Study of Five Countries (Issues in Higher Education S.)

Distance education is nowadays widely offered by fully-fledged distance teaching universities (DTUs), by conventional mainstream universities and by many professional and educational establishments. Its importance in higher education is likely to grow in the coming decades with the enhancement of universal access to universities, and in the face of decreasing student-faculty ratios, continuous cuts in government funding, and the growing importance of concurrent lifelong education for personal and professional development. International in scope, this volume compares the emergence and growth of autonomous DTUs in five higher education systems: the UK, Spain, Germany, Canada and Israel. An innovative cluster of each DTU in its national context is constructed, and the subtle and intricate relations and tensions between distance and campus universities, and the impact they have on each other are examined. One of the major thrusts of the book is to analyse the divergences between the different DTUs, all of which have been based declaratively on the UK Open University model. Future directions of both DTUs and conventional universities are projected and elaborated. The existent trends indicate that in the coming decades the boundaries between distance and conventional higher education will become more and more blurred. Paradoxically, both collaboration and competition between distance and campus universitites will grow in the future.