ABSTRACT
Given that the first courses over the Web did not really start to emerge before 1995, there has been a rapid expansion of online learning. According to a survey of universities and colleges in the USA in 2002 (Allen and Seaman, 2003), over 1.6 million students in degree-granting higher education institutions in the USA took at least one online course in the autumn semester of 2002 (11 per cent of all US higher education students), and over 500,000 (3.4 per cent) took all their courses online. These figures were expected to increase by 20 per cent by autumn 2003.
