Global Online Education

This international team of online educators will show, true to the title of this chapter, that online education is already a global phenomenon. The World Wide Web, which affords so many educational applications friendly to designers as well as to the users, has lived up to its name by reaching nearly all countries through the internet infrastructure. Online education at first suggests education through the internet, but the “line” in online and offline refers more broadly to networked computers. By necessity in some countries, or by choice, Intranets and other systems of digital devices such as mobile phones, whether connected by ground wires or by satellites, can also serve as media for formal education and informal learning. Issues of access recurring in this chapter imply, however, a goal that all learners at least have the option of studying and communicating with other world citizens through the global internet, that is, online education in the fullest sense. (For more on what online education is, see McCarty, 2001).