Distance education makes heavy administrative demands: the organisation of it is a different kind of activity from the running of a school. Any institution involved in distance education needs to work out how to provide the services which its students need and these, in turn, are different in kind from the services which a school or college provides to its students. As we saw, some distance teaching programmes are organised by specialist distance-teaching colleges, while some are organised as an extra activity by colleges of education or university departments.