The remit for this review was quite broad, requesting coverage of the relevant literature on costing since 2000 as well as on costing-relevant aspects of open educational resources (OER), massive open online courses (MOOCs), mobile learning and distance education (DE) in developing countries. Given the limited space, the review had to be selective. Since the remit also requested the review to be structured in a comprehensive manner, we used the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the direct teaching costs of DE as the guide for selection. The real difference between pre-2000 DE and DE today is due to the impact of ICT.