Distance learning, also called distance education, e-learning, and online learning, form of education in which the main elements include physical separation of teachers and students during instruction and the use of various technologies to facilitate student-teacher and student-student communication.
Distance learning traditionally has focused on nontraditional students, such as full-time workers, military personnel, and nonresidents or individuals in remote regions who are unable to attend classroom lectures. However, distance learning has become an established part of the educational world, with trends pointing to ongoing growth. In U.S. higher education alone, more than 5.6 million university students were enrolled in at least one online course in the autumn of 2009, up from 1.6 million in 2002.
An increasing number of universities provide distance learning opportunities. A pioneer in the field is the University of Phoenix, which was founded in Arizona in 1976 and by the first decade of the 21st century had become the largest private school in the world, with more than 400,000 enrolled students. It was one of the earliest adopters of distance learning technology, although many of its students spend some time in classrooms on one of its dozens of campuses in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico.
Various terms have been used to describe the phenomenon of distance learning. Strictly speaking, distance learning (the student’s activity) and distance teaching (the teacher’s activity) together make up distance education. Common variations include e-learning or online learning, used when the Internet is the medium; virtual learning, which usually refers to courses taken outside a classroom by primary- or secondary-school pupils (and also typically using the Internet); correspondence education, the long-standing method in which individual instruction is conducted by mail; and open learning, the system common in Europe for learning through the “open” university