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As noted by Moore (2007, xxiii), the fifth section of the second edition of the "Handbook of Distance Education" focused on "some of the main consumers and suppliers of distance education programs," including elementary and secondary education, community colleges, universities, the corporate sector, continuing professional education, the armed forces, and the virtual organization. Each chapter considered the historical development of distance education within each arena as well as policy developments and possible future trends.

The U.S. Army has been conducting a variety of management education programs for commissioned officers. In both its traditional and its new distance education programs, the Army has established a goal of improving critical thinking and reasoning skills among its students to prepare its future leaders and managers more effectively for the challenges of the twenty-first century. For both the distance learning and the traditional education programs, the successful promotion of critical reasoning and thinking skills appeared to be among the most critical factors in directly or indirectly predicting student satisfaction with instruction, overall training, and usefulness or relevance of training. Distance education formats proved at least as, if not more, successful on a variety of comparison measures with traditional classroom formats when evaluated by field grade student officers. By logical extension, distance education can be expected to be a useful approach for teaching critical thinking skills for civilian management and leadership training programs.

Adolescents in rural and small city high schools in the western United States (N = 159) reported their perceptions of marriage and marriage education. They considered preparation for marriage important, but expressed lower familiarity with and lower intentions to attend programs than college students assessed previously. Youth valued parents, peers, volunteer couples, and personal experience as sources of information on marriage and were most interested in a brief, low-cost program led by a volunteer couple that focused on communication and conflict-resolution skills and issues. Youth attitudes toward and expectations of marriage reflected some realistic but many unrealistic expectations, consistent with their developmental stage. Implications for programming, research, and policy are discussed.