Distance learning in engineering graduate education from a stakeholder´s perspective

The delivery of academic content to geographically distributed students (or what we will refer to as distance education) has played an increasingly vital role in higher education in the past few years. The evolution is driven in part by technological advances. Today´s distance learning environment is more likely to consist of lectures over two-way video complemented by material on the world-wide-web than of the pre-recorded video cassettes that were prevalent a decade ago. Universities such as Stanford and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are now offering exclusively web-based graduate programs in engineering and information technology. The success of distance education efforts in improving access to education while maintaining (and maybe even improving) educational quality depends on the major stakeholders perceiving benefits in distance education that outweigh the cost of adapting to this new paradigm. We identify three groups of major stakeholders in the distance learning process: students at remote locations, at whom distance education is aimed; students on campus, who often share a virtual classroom with their remote colleagues; and faculty members who teach distance courses. At a higher level, corporations, government and taxpayers are also stakeholders in the sense that they have a vested interest that high quality education be accessible to the most people in a cost-efficient manner.