In little more than 15 years, new communications technology has profoundly changed distance education Australia.

Professor Terry Evans, director of research in the Faculty of Education, has observed, documented and analysed the changes.

He says distance education played a significant role in Australia's development, and in the cultural evolution of the most sparsely populated continent.

The thousands of students who now use computers and high-speed modems to telecommute thousands of kilometres to study for university degrees are part of a tradition that began in Queensland and Western Australia in the period 1910-1911.

"It was back in 1909 that we can find the first case of correspondence schooling in Australia," he said. "A mother was having great difficulty getting her children to school during the winter months in Otway rainforest region of rural Victoria, so she wrote to the minister for public instruction to ask for something to be done for her children during the wet winter months when the roads were impassable.

"Someone had the idea of producing notes for her to use to teach her children. Correspondence schooling was born!

"Right from these early times, communications technology has been at the heart of distance education - the postal service and the methylated spirit duplicator were the forerunners to what we are doing today.

Deakin University has been involved in distance education since its inauguration in 1977. Terry Evans says Australians have become increasingly mobile since the 1960s, and students taking courses at Deakin wanted to continue them after moving elsewhere in Australia - and overseas.

Group tutorials by telephone were a part of Deakin's early distance education programs, but they were inconvenient because students - they were mostly adults who worked during the day - had to be available at specified times. The computer changed all that.

The latest wave of high-speed telecommunications and computer technology has ushered in the age of the networked university, with multiple campuses linked by videoconferencing.

Costs have come down, and convenience has increased - students can now set their video recorders to tape lectures and education programs shown during the night or early morning by Open Learning Australia, and communicate with lecturers and peers via the Internet, liberating them from the strictures of real-time timetables.

Students now have electronic access to a far wider range of resources - they can browse through library databases anywhere to find books, and have them sent out by mail.

In the next wave, once copyrighting issues have been resolved, students will be able to download publications electronically.

For the past two decades, Professor Evans has studied distance education and its impacts in partnership with Associate Professor Daryl Nation, of Monash University's Gippsland Campus.

Deakin University was one of eight universities chosen as national distance-education centres (DECs) but Professor Evans says other universities soon realised they were missing opportunities in part-time professional education, as well as the international market for tertiary education.

The 'DEC' designation soon folded as most universities adopted their own versions of off-campus provision or flexible delivery for some of the their professional upgrading courses.

"Likewise, flexible course delivery really took off in the TAFE sector," Professor Evans said. "It represented a new fusion between on- and off-campus studies."

The real revolution, he says, has been to allow people to return to education, to update their qualifications, or simply take courses for intellectual pleasure - education is now a lifelong process.

In a four-year study, funded by the Australian Research Council, Terry Evans and Daryl Nation have been investigating how the distance education has changed policy, practice and culture in universities.

"We've looked at how initiatives in distance education have propagated through selected universities, through cases studies of teaching developments, and by looking at entire departments that have undertaken initiatives using new educational technologies.

"We look at how they relate to government initiatives, how they began, whether they encountered any resistance within the organisation, and what changes were required in staffing, administration structure and resources."

Professor Evans completed another project in 1997 with Professor Paul Northcott, for the National Office of Overseas Skills Recognition, in which they evaluated the usefulness of distance education for bridging courses for overseas-trained migrants coming to Australia to upgrade their professional qualifications in fields such as medicine, dentistry, veterinary science and nutrition.

He has recently commenced another ARC-funded project on the internationalisation of distance education. "The problem for nations like Australia is that they need to understand the cultural and ethical issues involved in delivering courses in someone else's country.

"I will be looking at examples of how these matters are addressed between Australian and overseas institutions.

Intellectual property has become a big issue - "Universities are involved in knowledge production, and their business depends in part on their ability to protect their intellectual property," Professor Evans said.