• Multimode Integration. The boundary between information technology (IT) application in education and distance education will become blurred. Distinctions between different forms of educational telecommunications have fallen away. New wireless bandwidth services further help to blur the distinctions. Moreover, educators must help all learners become adept or at least get familiar with distributed interaction by using multiple technologies, for skills of information gathering from remote sources and of collaboration with dispersed team members are central to the future workplace as learning to perform structured tasks quickly was central to the industrial revolution.

• Learner-Centered Environments. With the advances in natural language processing, reusable learning objects, and agent technology, learners will simply talk to their computers, describe the desired learning goal, and piece together applications by sending intelligent agents to grab suitable learning objects from learning objects repositories around the globe, and insert into their own plug-and-play learning environments. Thus, instruction will be learner-centered, collaborative global learning, with learners engaged through technologies, and with teachers taking on the role of facilitators. Students will take increased responsibility for their own learning, defining their own learning agendas, using educational resources.

• Service-Oriented Institutions. The quality of services of distributed learning institutions will become a key competitive advantage for e-learning institutions. The services include at least three levels: pedagogical services, learning services, and infrastructure.

Nevertheless, most of today’s learning environments are focused mainly on infrastructure and neglect the personalized pedagogical services and learning services aspects of the institution. According to Jafari (2002):

Although new versions (of Course Management Systems, CMS for short) include easy-to-use Web authoring tools, most offer passive services. As a result, some instructors spend more time teaching a distance-learning course than teaching the same course in a classroom setting. This problem results mostly from the time-consuming operational nature of online courses. It is not unfair to call the typical CMS a “dumb software environment.”…We need smart learning environments that offer personal services with capabilities tolearn, reason, have autonomy, and be totally dynamic.

Some of the challenges associated with distributed learning include inadequate end-user quality of service (QoS), inadequate materials, lack of interactivity, and shortcomings in learning paradigms (Vouk et al., 1999). For example, in most existing Web-based distributed-learning systems, course materials are arranged by the course authors in order to cover one or more topics and convert them in interactive linked HTML pages. The course materials are then placed online to make them downloadable or visible to the students. The students can use them only by following the path established. Besides, as the instructors and tutors are not always available online, the need for assistance and interactions between students is particularly salient. Research shows that in terms of course design, development, and maintenance, as the number of online learners increases, serious problems in balancing cost, quality, and efficiency in course development and maintenance emerge.