Jennifer Vanberschot

The education system of our times has transformed greatly due to enormous developments in the IT field, ease in access to online resources by the individuals and the teachers adopting new technologies in their instructional strategies, be it for course design, development or delivery. The field of Distance and Online Education is experiencing continuing growth. Starting from simple form of correspondence courses, this field has passed through various generations, employing from simple to complex technology like radio, television to computes, satellites, Internet, Wiki and Web 2.0 applications. The Internet and the Wide World Web have fundamentally altered the practice of distance teaching and learning. Many of the universities around the globe are offering their courses online.

The emerging distance and online learning environments pose unique challenges towards marketing of distance education programmes. Distance education and online education is practiced in all the fields of human endeavor. Distance and online education has become part of our life, both personal and professional.

This is the right time to be sure how to effectively market the distance and online education programmes. Adequate attention needs to be paid to costs, impact, resource allocation and the return on investment, so that cost efficiency and cost effectiveness are met to the optimum. There are challenges facing for marketing in distance and online learning environments in the form of delivering what these environments are promising, how to find the right information, regular updation of the courses and not to forget the effective user interaction with the course developers and peers.