In 2000, there were more than 3 million college and university students participating in distance education (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003, ¶ 7).
Access issues are minor in the United States compared with other parts of the world. Carr-Chellman (2005) discusses access issues related to e-learning in countries outside the United States such as Taiwan, where the cost of Internet access, the lack of basic computer skills, and the lack of Internet literacy widen the access gap. Jia Qi (Carr-Chellman, 2005) says that “the [Taiwan] government should commit itself to achieving equity in technical support, equalized use and public access to the resources on the Internet, and promote literacy of information and computer skills through collaboration with academia, industry, and local government” (p. 48).
The third barrier in e-learning is identified as a problem in the United Kingdom-retention and drop out (Simpson, 2005). Regarding lower retention rates in e-learning, the author says
Simpson describes yet another barrier in an e-mail he received from a student who wrote, “If you sit at a pc all day at work then doing it in the evening as well can not only be very fatiguing but positively harmful” (p. 98). To add to the story, Simpson describes a student at the institution where he works who spent five hours on an e-learning Spanish course, “roughly half an hour of which she had spent speaking Spanish, the other four and a half hours had been spent trying to get the software to work” (p. 98).
Simpson (Carr-Chellman, 2005) seems to think that the solution to retention and drop out is more of student support such as help lines, tutors, and online support. “Or it may be that answers will lie in the creative use of other forms of technology… for example… m-learning using mobile devices such as palmtop computers and WAP-enabled mobile phones that can access the Web” (p. 99).