Distance education implies a distribution of students, an obvious obstacle to learning.
However, Web technologies also allow school children to interact with their peers internationally. Distance education holds the promise of individualized learning on the users timeframe, but two-way communication between student and teacher must be supported. Collaboration between the learner and leading experts is technically possible through a hierarchical structure linking learners and a mix of distance university and leading expert partnerships. Learning remains a group activity even if conducted electronically, therefore multi-user collaboratory tools are needed to support group navigation, sharing of group experiences, and group authoring of content. Collaboration is a particularly demanding distance education application because it cannot use caching and a hierarchical server structure, approaches which serve information access and delivery applications so well.