New Facilities for New Millennium: the Internet and Distance Education

Since the developments of geomatic sciences proceed rapidly and provision of higher education related to this discipline in academic environments does not enjoy the necessary coherence and coordination, instructors and professors have to search for new ways of providing academic courses. The Internet provides great potential for distance education. The Old Dominion University, located in Virginia, USA, is one of the few universities that have adopted distance education technologies as the main method of presenting courses. New types of university courses’ presentation that use the Internet technology are quickly brought on the network. (This article, while expressing the Old Dominion’s experience of adopting the new method in education, identifies the problems encountered during implementation of this experiment.) Distance education is a process in which the instructor is separated from students in terms of location and time, or students are separated from one another. The implementation of computer and electronic technology has influenced current practices in such a way that the professor and student can interact and communicate either immediately or with a delay whenever necessary.