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CHAPTER II REVIEW OF LITERATURE Introduction Online instruction seems to be the ideal answer for busy individuals with a job and a family, who need more education in order to advance or just keep pace professionally (Holt, 1999; Macht, 1998). What could be better than a class that meets any time you are ready and have a computer available, for exactly the amount of time you have, and builds a close relationship with your professor and classmates through collaborative discussions (Gray, 1998; Vetter, 1997)? It could be the only way in which students who live far from a campus to take the classes or programs they need. Few studies have tried can characterize the online student. One found the largest group of online students to be women, over 25 years of age, who worked more than 30 hours a week. This characterization is essentially the same as the typical distance education student (Hoffman, 1999a). A report by a faculty group at the University of Illinois, however, has found many on campus students take many if not all of their classes online (Regalbuto, 1999). As distance and Web-based learning becomes more popular and more accessible, high school, college and graduate courses are being offered via the Web as part of complete diploma and degree programs by more and more institutions. Vetter, (1997) used an InfoSeek search with the term “online courses,” it returned 3.5 million hits. Corporations have found online learning to be a more economical alternative than the typical corporate training session (Himmelberg, 1998). However, little research has

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been done to understand some of the ramifications of this fast growing phenomena (Grossman, 1999). Different professors’ classes could have different class population characteristics, and could give those professors different impressions and opinions of issues confronting online instruction. In the future, as online education becomes more pervasive, the characteristics of the online student could...