This work discusses issues relating to distance education and distributed learning. There are essays covering: rethinking assessment for the online environment; the role of collaborative learning in social and intellectual development; and the embodiment of knowledge in virtual environments.
Charalambos Vrasidas is Coordinator of Research and Evaluation at the Center for the Application of Information Technologies, at Western Illinois University. He is also a Visiting Professor at Intercollege, Cyprus. Originally from Cyprus, he came in the United States as a Fulbright scholar in 1992. He earned his BSc and MEd from Western Illinois University. He holds a PhD from Arizona State University in Curriculum and Instruction with emphasis on educational technology. His research interests include distance education, face-to-face and technology mediated interaction, and evaluation of educational technologies. He has developed numerous projects for online learning in a variety of settings. He has published several articles in scholarly journals and presented more than 50 research papers at national and international conferences. He is the representative of Cyprus in the International Council of Educational Media, UNESCO affiliated organization. He is currently working on the Teaching and Learning Online project designed to prepare teachers how to develop and teach online courses.
Gene V Glass, Professor of Education Policy Studies and Psychology in Education at the Arizona State University College of Education, earned his BA from the University of Nebraska (1962) and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin (1965). He has been a faculty member of the University of Illinois (1965–1967) and the University of Colorado (1967–1986). He served as Associate Dean for Research in the ASU College of Education (1997–2000). Glass has been a Visiting Scholar at the Max-Planck Institute for Psychiatry (Munich) and the Center for the Study of Evaluation (UCLA). Trained originally in statistics, his interests now include psychotherapy research, evaluation methodology, and policy analysis. In 1975, he was elected President of the American Educational Research Association.
He served as editor of the Review of Educational Research (1968–1970), Editor for Methodology of the Psychological Bulletin (1978–80), and co-Editor of the American Educational Research Journal (1983–1986). He was twice (1968, 1970) honored with the Palmer O. Johnson award of AERA; in 1984, he received the Lazarsfeld Award of the American Evaluation Association.
He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His work on meta-analysis of psychotherapy outcomes (with M. L. Smith) was named as one of the "Forty Studies that Changed Psychology" in the book of the same name by Roger R. Hock (1999). His recent efforts center on the creation of scholarly electronic journals; he currently edits two—Education Policy Analysis Archives, Education Review—and is Executive Editor of the International Journal of Education & the Arts.
