ACCORDING TO A POPULAR APHORISM, we cannot stop the inevitable progress of time; we can only hope to shape its direction. And distance education, whether or not it is the technological tsunami predicted by Toffler, is definitely the wave of the future. Touted as "one of the first in-depth attempts to track national trends in distance education at the university level" (Mendels, 2000, p. 1), a survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics reports that fully 87 percent of all large public universities, those with 10,000 or more students, offer distance education courses, primarily through the Internet. McGill University in Montreal, for example, offers courses on occupational health for doctors working in Africa and Penn States World Campus offers courses on agriculture for farmers working in remote areas. With just a brief search of Petersons.com, a distance education directory, students can locate courses or degree programs in computer science and electrical engineering from Stanford, busin ess administration from Duke, library science and pharmacy from the University of Illinois, or Egyptian art and archeology from the University of Chicago, to name just a few (Koeppel, 1999).
What then is fueling this boom in distance education? At least part of the answer lies with marketplace demographics. Newspaper articles are replete with narratives describing the typical distance education student-the working mother who logs on at 10 p.m. after cooking dinner, helping with homework, and putting the children to bed. Or that student may be a "37-year-old father of two" and "worldwide marketing manager" for a Fortune 500 computer company who travels on business, "sometimes for weeks at a time," and who therefore cannot take courses on campus, not even weekend courses (Mendels, 1998, p. 2). Or it may be, to cite an example from my own experience, a career Army officer who spends long hours on a cargo plane delivering military equipment to all parts of the globe and who makes profitable use of those long hours by logging on and doing his coursework during the flight.
Adult learners, then, are one of the fastest growing markets in higher education. And these information age professionals, as one author describes them, need to "constantly increase their knowledge base and upgrade their skills to support their multiple career changes" (Boettcher, 1999, p. 1). State-of-the-art technical skills and subject matter expertise are the keys to better jobs and new careers for professionals. With an eye on increased productivity, lower costs, and a sharper competitive edge, business today requires a well trained, up-to-date workforce. Distance education courses meet this demand and, thanks to the Internet and its related technologies, time and distance are no longer an impediment to higher education. As a result, the more optimistic futurists foresee distance education as the portal to lifelong learning. In fact, learning is one of the key issues in distance education currently under discussion.
Virtual Classrooms
Do students in "virtual classrooms" learn as well as students in traditional ones? Almost every article about distance education poses this question and several have attempted to provide …
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