Distance education is frequently offered by conventional universities that also serve traditional, on-campus students. These "dual-mode" institutions face several special problems, many of which go unrecognized by those responsible for overall university administration. The experience of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, which with 6,000 off-campus students has become Canada's major dual-mode university, has brought to light many of these special problems: (1) distance education programs often develop informally and never become focused, purposefully administered educational efforts; (2) distance programs all too frequently generate substantial income that benefits the institution in general but not the program or its students; (3) distance program students are frequently accorded second-class status by decisionmakers because of their low profiles on campus; and (4) those who serve distance learners often mistakenly assume that the needs of distance students are identical to the needs of those on campus. Additional problems develop when (5) dual mode schools try to adapt traditional student support services rather than create new ones; (6) the distance learner's main link with the school is an undertrained teaching assistant; and (7) distance program instructors are encouraged to pursue traditional discipline-based research but not encouraged to conduct research on aspects of distance learning or to concentrate on teaching. (PGD)