How does distance education help meet professionals' needs for continuing education?

People who need continuing professional education generally are dispersed and unable to come often to a central location. Recent technological advances have allowed distance programs to bring professional continuing education closer to practitioners.

Two examples of such programs suggest their diversity:

• In Canada the Telemedicine program at Memorial University in Newfoundland delivers continuing medical education throughout a large, sparsely populated province with difficult geographic and climatic conditions.
• In the United States the National Technological University, a consortium of most of the country's major engineering schools that is based in Fort Collins, Colorado, delivers graduate programs and continuing professional education in engineering throughout the country and, increasingly, overseas.

Such innovations are seldom the direct work of government, though governments have generally been supportive of them. Most professional continuing education is provided at the behest of practitioners and their professional associations.

• Janet Grant, The Flexible Use of Distance Learning in a Professional Context: The Medical Experience

• Sharifah Shahabudin, Intersectoral Collaboration in Distance Education: The Family Medicine Program at University Kebangsaan. Available at: http://www.icde.org/icdeconf18/papers/y5shahab.pdf