Students’ difficulties in a Web-based distance education course : An ethnographic study

Cutting-edge digital communications and learning technologies enable universities to implement distance education to reach more diverse populations and to provide more available learning environments twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Internet-enabled courses that rely primarily on asynchronous, text-based communication media are a rapidly-growing means of providing such courses (National Center for Education Statistics, 1998)1. Here, we describe a detailed study of one such course, particularly the students’ feelings of distress.