New and rapidly changing Academic Curriculum suggest the use of distance education as it will allow a few experts to deliver instruction to more students and this addresses both
The shortage of trained faculty
cost of developing new curriculum QUICKLY requires many students (say around 5-10 times traditional class) to amortize cost
Distance Education is technically sound based on web curricula-- both synchronously and asynchronously -- today with very robust clear implementations available over next 2 years
Both delivery mechanism and identification of knowledge nuggets (such as Internetics or computational science) that are smaller than a traditional degree suggests different approaches to certification
Courses are given, graded etc. by multiple organizations -- University integrate degrees?
Similar arguments for distance training with relative importance of synchronous and asynchronous learning differing by customer group