Written for educators and education professionals, this groundbreaking volume offers a comprehensive introduction to educational computer-mediated communication (CMC). As editor Linda Harasim notes at the outset, although online education already exists as a field of practice, there is a critical need now to build a research discipline and knowledge base to guide research developments in the field. Online Education fills this need by presenting theoretical frameworks, design paradigms, and research methodologies for analyzing and shaping this new field of educational activity. In one volume, the contributors provide a range of perspectives and approaches for understanding the educational applications of such innovations as electronic mail and computer conferencing networks. The final chapter provides an extensive bibliography, making this an extremely valuable resource for researchers, developers, and educators working on educational CMC.

Divided into three sections, the chapters address the questions posed by educational CMC from the perspectives of theory, design, and methodology in turn. Each contribution is written by one of the leading theoreticians or practitioners in the field and, although the volume represents a rich diversity of approaches, common themes link the chapters. The contributors emphasize that online education is a new environment with new attributes that requires new approaches to understand, design, and implement it. They focus particular attention on the essentially group or socially interactive nature of the online educational environment as the conceptual basis for research and design and explore the augmented environment that the computer provides for educational activity. Finally, each looks at fundamental practical issues: What are the effective uses of these new computer-mediated communication media? Can we simply transfer existing conventional instructional practices or do we need to develop a new set of practices better suited to the new tools?