Insofar as distance education courses may have limitations, I know that the traditional classroom approach to learning has limitations too. For instance, there are those traditional students who cheat in their tests or class projects, and we have not done anything to stop that. We do not care as long as we get good evaluations for the courses from students to get tenure and promotion. We ought not to be skeptical about distance education courses. What we ought to be concerned about is how we can make distance education courses work better for us.
Students love using computers and everyone does.
If computers excite students, us teachers and educators, we need to exploit them to our advantage in teaching and learning. Distance education could resolve that problem if structured well. In addition, distance education can make our work easier and save us money as we know it. Computers are fashionable and a new way of doing things. To defy that, otherwise, will undermine progress in student learning in a fast moving world, and we will just be left behind.