Distance education has always taken advantage from the development of communications []. In the past post service and books, nowadays, the communication technology plays the same role, telephone, television, video conferencing, and now computer networks. The more we use technology in our day-to-day life, the larger is its reach and implications in all different areas. Technology is only one factor among many. The question is How did it fit it in ?. And when we try to answer this question, we must realise that our reasoning will not lie on one specific scientific area, but on a cross-section of several.
This research will not be purely a Computer Science topic, and even though we did come across some literature on the subject during our readings, we did not become specialists on the topic, and further more, it gave us an insight into the inter-disciplinary nature of this type of research. It would be extremely egocentric, not to say narrow minded, to assume that Computer Scientists could do without the expertise of Pedagogues, Psychologists and Social Scientists in such an enterprise. We expect that pedagogical experts will play a very important role in our research, and that we shall spend a reasonable amount of time interacting with other University's departments, such as the Psychology and Education Departments and other Institutes, such as Heriot-Watt's University Institute for Computer-Based Learning.