There are numerous technologies with numerous characteristics that can be selected when developing distance education courses and programs. Designers should select the technologies that best suit the teaching and learning process and best assist learners in meeting the course objectives. Although there is value in asynchronous test, unfortunately, many distance education initiatives rely solely upon asynchronous and text-based technologies. Rovai, Ponton, and Baker (2008) purport that this decision is often rooted in faculty and instructional design teams' lack of technology skills and bandwidth limitations, rather than sound pedagogical and instructional design choice.

If you look at the list of technologies, you created a minute ago, you will not that there are many ways a discussion about learning technologies could go. For our discussion here, we are going to differentiate between synchronous and asynchronous technologies and list some of the most well known Web-based technologies.