Excerpts
from "Online Engineering Education: Learning Anywhere, Anytime"

by John Bourne, Dale Harris, & Frank Mayadas, originally published in the Journal of Engineering Education, Vol. 94, No. 1, January 2005, pp. 131-146.

While online education may be primarily about offering to distance learners anywhere and at anytime, it may well play a remarkable role in bringing together the work of colleges and universities across the United States (and eventually across the world). Such collaboration will ultimately provide more choice and diversity of opportunity to learners with lower costs. For these reasons, online education will ultimately play a much greater role in changing higher education in the world than simply

providing education at a distance. Collaboration, partnerships, and lowered costs for higher-quality educational products with higher learner satisfaction will become commonplace as a result of providing engineering education with quality, scale, and breadth.~~

A common misconception is that online education is a solitary, non-instructor-led, self-paced activity. Nothing could be further from the truth! Why this mantra has penetrated the consciousness of the engineering education professoriate is unclear. Correcting this misperception requires an understanding of how modern quality online education is a vital people-oriented, instructor-led activity with remarkably high communication attributes compared with much on-campus engineering education. In this paper, we make the case that online education can achieve certain goals that are difficult to achieve in face-to-face education.~~