This article examines the distinct differences between 'distance education' and 'e-learning' in higher education settings. Since the emergence of the new information and communication technologies (ICT), many have related to them as the new generation of distance education, and some have referred to their implementation in academia as challenging the very existence of campus-based universities. Many policy makers, scholars and practitioners in higher education use these two terms interchangeably as synonyms. But the fact is that distance education in most higher education systems is not delivered through the new electronic media, and vice versa -e-learning in most universities and colleges all over the world is not used for distance education purposes. 'Distance education' and 'e-learning' do overlap in some cases, but are by no means identical. The lack of distinction between 'e-learning' and 'distance education' accounts for much of the misunderstanding of the ICT roles in higher education, and for the wide gap between the rhetoric in the literature describing the future sweeping effects of the ICT on educational environments and their actual implementation. The article examines the erroneous assumptions on which many exaggerated predictions as to the future impact of the ICT were based upon, and it concludes with highlighting the future trends of 'distance education' and 'e-learning' in academia.

This paper provides a synthetic overview of the complex dimensions that shape the interrelations between the massification of higher education systems and their structure and composition. Many higher education systems worldwide expanded extensively in the last decades, and have undergone wide and deep structural changes. Most notably, the diversity of many higher education systems has increased dramatically, both horizontally and vertically. We address in this paper the following issues: external and internal boundaries of higher education systems; top-down and bottom-up forces; globalization and supra-national trends; flexibility; and public and private sectors. These themes highlight most crucial issues to which higher education policy makers are advised to pay attention to when deliberating what are the best ways to implement the expansion of their higher education systems, and what should be the desirable diversity in their national contexts.

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The discourse on the implementation of the digital technologies in higher education settings focuses mainly on students’ learning rather than on professors’ teaching. The little attention paid to the crucial role of teachers in online settings results in a restricted and moderate adaptation of the technologies in higher education worldwide. In most higher education institutions, the new technologies are used mainly for add-on functions and not for substituting face-to-face encounters or for an intensive web-enhanced teaching. This article starts with briefly explaining why most students, particularly at the undergraduate level, are unable and/or unwilling to study by themselves without expert teachers to guide their knowledge construction, discusses the problematics of digital literacy of teachers, examines the main reasons for the reluctance of many academics to utilize the technologies more fully in their teaching, and concludes by recommending some strategies for incorporating more fully the huge array of the technologies’ capabilities in higher education institutions.

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