长期以来在国际上远程教育是一个独立的学科专业,而我国目前的远程教育仍然是教育技术专业的一个方向。本文以国外有一定知名度的六所大学所开设的教育技术专业和远程教育专业硕士课程为样本,对两个专业的课程设置进行比较分析。研究结果表明,教育技术硕士课程和远程教育硕士课程各自有着独立的学科体系和专门课程。文章认为,面授教育、远程教育、教育技术应该是教育领域的三个分支学科,作者进而勾画了三个学科之间既相对独立、又相互联系的关系图。最后,作者认为,我国亟待建立独立的远程教育学科专业,培养远程教育的专门人才,使我国的远程教育能在建构终身教育体系中发挥应有的作用。 For a long time in the world of distance education is an independent discipline, and our current distance education is still a direction of education technology. In this paper, a master’s program of educational technology and distance education opened by six universities abroad with a certain reputation is used as a sample to conduct a comparative analysis of the two professional courses. The results show that the educational technology master’s program and distance education master’s program each have an independent discipline system and specialized courses. The article holds that face-to-face education, distance education and education technology should be three branches of education in the field of education. The author then delineates the relationship between the three disciplines which are relatively independent and interrelated. Finally, the author believes that our country urgently needs to set up an independent discipline of distance education and cultivate specialized talents in distance education so that our distance education can play its due role in building a lifelong education system.