Barriers to distance education as perceived by managers and administrators: Results of a survey

It is becoming increasingly unusual to pick up a professional training or education journal without seeing articles concerning alternatives to in-person teaching and learning. Distance education is not new, but the new technologies used for delivery in recent decades have fueled different perspectives, methods, and debates than had been the case starting a century ago. The technologies used to deliver education at a distance have changed, and have also allowed a broader range of teaching methods to be used. Still, no one believes now, if ever they did, that this is a panacea. There are many barriers to successful distance education—some are new but many have plagued distance education since it was first conceived. A survey was conducted to help better understand and more systematically study these barriers. From a review of the literature, experience in various distance education settings, and discussions with distance educators, I hypothesized that several factors might affect the barriers that an individual perceives. This survey addressed six such factors: 1) work place (e.g., community college, government); 2) job function (e.g., support staff; manager, researcher, student); 3) type of delivery system used (e.g., audio-tape, computer conferencing, ITV); 4) expertise of the individual regarding distance education; 5) the stage of the respondent’s organization with regard to capabilities in delivering distance education; and 6) the area i