Introduction

When I was first invited to write this book in late 1999, cutting-edge colleges, universities, and corporate educators were only two years into their initial Webbased distance delivery offerings. At that time I guessed that perhaps 10 percent of colleges and universities in the United States were offering courses on the Web, and perhaps 25 percent of large corporations were doing the same. But statistics for those estimates were very hard to find. I was told that those numbers were significantly lower outside the United States.