TheseBest Practices have been developed by the NCPSA Commission on Technology and Distance Education in response to the emergence of technologically mediated instruction offered at a distance as an important and growing component of K-12 education. Expressing in detail what currently constitutes best practice in distance education, specifically electronically offered courses, they seek to address concerns that regional accreditation standards are not relevant to the new distributed learning environments, especially when those environments are experienced by off-campus students. The Best Practices, however, are not new evaluative criteria. Rather they explicate how the well-established essentials of institutional quality found in regional accreditation standards are applicable to the emergent forms of learning; much of the detail of their content would find application in any learning environment.