My Thesis

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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 change, and...