Online education has become a central component of the current discourse on higher education. Advocates tout it as a means of “delivering” instruction to a wide range of lifelong learners, as well as a key element in preparing individuals to succeed in the new economy. Critics foresee an increasing level of inequality throughout higher education. Even the more moderate observers predict that online education will provide a useful addition to traditional forms of instruction while helping to effect a reconfiguration of the postsecondary landscape.

Within the field of higher education, the community college sector represents a crucial site for investigating online education and understanding the implications of colleges' online involvement. Not only do community colleges enroll the majority of postsecondary students, but they also play a major role in providing distance education through a range of media. Courses may take the form of live or prerecorded telecourses, or use digital technologies such as interactive video-conferencing, multi-media CD-ROMs, and web-based instruction. Web-based technology can support “real-time” (synchronous) computer conferencing or, more commonly, asynchronous interaction through e-mail, listservs and/or threaded discussion groups*.

However, not much is known about the specific details of community colleges’ involvement with web-based forms of distance education, or the implications of that involvement for the role and trajectory of community colleges. At this early stage of online development, a detailed understanding of colleges’ approaches to online education is relevant to every level of postsecondary education, but it is particularly important for the community college sector, which enables access to higher education for the least-advantaged students.

Clearly, understanding the implications of web-based education requires a detailed description of current structures, conditions and practices. Focusing on the use of newer, digital technologies, this study explored these details at each of the fifteen colleges, thereby providing the foundation for informed analysis. The guiding research questions for this study were:

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What are the specific conditions shaping community colleges' approaches to online education?

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How are different community colleges responding to the challenges of creating online programs?

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What kind of evaluative framework are community colleges using in the process of developing and assessing their online programs?

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What are the implications of different approaches for the quality of online instruction?

The research was led by Rebecca D. Cox. Findings from the National Field Study are compiled in the CCRC book, Defending the Community College Equity Agenda, which contains a chapter on this topic.

* For this study, we examined courses that employed one or more of the newer digital technologies, and which conducted at least half of its credit hours off-site. This chapter focuses on colleges' online offerings.