The modern Internet-based distance education is steadily moving forward, and has attracted more and more people's attention and gradually showed strong development momentum. But some pressing problems also exist. Based on the current situation of the development of distance education in China, combining many years of experience and practice of investigation in distance education, the characteristics of the development of distance education are elaborated in the article, the importance of multimedia courseware in distance education is pointed out, and the problems existed in distance education and their perfecting countermeasures are particularly analyzed.