The most prominent advances in distance education in the past 30 years have been in the university sector, beginning with the establishment of the Open University (UK). That institution represents the first attempt to establish a fully integrated distance teaching system with subsystems for developing course materials and providing student support and instruction.

Open universities have been set up in places as varied as the Netherlands and Thailand, China and Germany, and Hong Kong and Indonesia. Governments in industrial and developing countries alike have seen the establishment of single-mode distance teaching universities as a means of addressing national education needs. These needs include:

• Increasing access to higher education
• Filling gaps in the provision of higher education
• Meeting priority needs such as teacher education.

Dual-mode universities too have flourished and grown in number. And as governments face growing resource constraints, they have begun to turn to the idea of adding distance teaching components to existing universities. This organizational form has a far longer tradition than open universities.