A number of issues in contemporary distance education are reviewed from the perspectives of distance education as practice and as a field of study. In the practice of distance education, government agendas are supplanted by institutional agendas, the clientele shifts from undergraduate second-chance learners to fee-paying postgraduates, and the models and methods are under challenge by the online revolution. As a soft-applied field of study, distance education research is susceptible to externally set agendas and prone to external criticism. Distance educators need to address these externally defined issues in terms that speak to its critics.