The practice of distance education driven by ICT is a twentieth century innovation that has successfully created a niche for itself as an educational provision across the globe. In higher education alone, millions of adults (estimated in Asia to be around 12 million) are enrolled in programmes of study through distance education (DE). You are a typical DE learner. Like you, some 20-30,000 working adults in Malaysia are registered to undertake formal study leading up to a qualification in one of Malaysia's many DE providers.

There is no one single definition of DE that captures the variety of practices of this provision. However, over the years, DE practitioners seemed to have converged around a working definition as follows:

While as a provision, distance education has been mostly applied in Higher Education, the use of the method has also found a place in pre-tertiary education through ‘open schools', correspondence schools, radio schools and home schooling.