The campus can expand without expensive new buildings and dorms. There is also a prevailing myth among administrators that DE provides more efficient use of professor time. Such interaction can be arbitrarily prohibited, in the interests of efficiency, but the quality of instruction and learning will certainly suffer. Also, to have a powerful educational communication tool and not to use it is tantamount to mal-practice. Witness the rapid trend for colleges to link dorm rooms to computer networks.
Personal computers are so commonplace they are akin to furniture.
We now have a world-wide store of information on the Internet available at the click of a mouse. As of last October, the Internet had 28,876,019 World Wide Web sites, growing at the rate of 2-3 million per month. Desk-top televideo conferencing, although technically primitive, does work and is available to anyone who buys an inexpensive camera that plugs into the personal computer. At least four companies, including one involving Microsoft's Bill Gates, are planning to blanket the globe with coverage from low earth-orbit satellites that will provide very high speed televideo transmission in both uplink and downlink directions. Effect on Educational Practices DE forces educators to re-assess how instruction is done.