Distance education now affords educators a golden opportunity in a cost-effective manner to make up for decades of lost ground in education by enabling large numbers of people from preciously disadvantaged communities in developing countries to undergo training in tertiary courses that were completely inaccessible before, thus succesfully improving their qualifications. The real challenge, however, is to present distance-education courses in developing countries that conform to the highest national and international requirements and standards, even though the playing-fields for developing and developed countries oft-times exhibit vast discrepancies. Could this challenge, therefore, be met, or are the existing problems here to stay? Owing to the fact that distance-education programmes presented in the context of developing countries are bedevilled by very distinct problems, the present paper will, in the first instance, be devoted to a discussion of a set of universally acceptable criteria that ought to obtain for distance education. Following, an investigation into the extent to which these criteria could possibly be satisfied within the context of developing countries. In conclusion, various strategies will be devised to ensure the universal comparability of all distance-education courses.
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