The articles in this collection were written to provide guidance for faculty who are thinking about teaching students at a distance. The material is also of interest to faculty who have moved beyond the thinking stage and are actually using technology to teach students from whom they are separated in place, time, or both. These articles represent the ideas of Indiana faculty members reflecting on their own first experience in teaching via distance education, or in teaching at a distance with a particular medium for the first time. Taken as a group, the authors represent most of the institutions presently offering courses via distance education in the state of Indiana. They write about courses employing a variety of delivery media: four authors delivered their courses entirely using the Internet and/or World Wide Web; seven used the two-way video one-way audio satellite television network managed by the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System; two used interactive video; one team created videotape courses; and two combined delivery methods, one using several types of video delivery and the other augmenting video delivery with a site on the World Wide Web. The essays have been grouped according to the method of delivery, with subgrouping by the author's institutional affiliation. In this way, faculty looking for guidance as they prepare to teach distant students, or to teach using a medium new to them, may be able to locate readily the suggestions for the specific technology that they will be employing.

This collection developed from discussions of the Faculty Development Committee of the Indiana Partnership for Statewide Education, a statewide consortium of all higher education for collaborative development and delivery of distance education. The Faculty Development Committee represents the interests of those faculty who develop or adapt course materials for distance learning. The group aims in various ways to assist these faculty in using the distance education technology infrastructure to maximum benefit in offerings of courses for distance learners. For example, the Committee has sponsored an annual workshop for distance education faculty held at Indiana University's School of Education. During the 1996-97 academic year, in addition to planning the agenda for the 1997 summer iteration of this workshop, the committee members generated a call for papers that would describe the initial experiences of faculty who have taught students at a distance via technology. The committee members hoped that these papers would serve as a guide to faculty who were about to begin teaching students at a distance and who could take advantage of the lessons their peers had learned. The call for papers requested that faculty first indicate their intent to develop a submission and then, two months later, submit the paper itself for peer review. The submissions received in May 1997 in response to this call were peer-reviewed by the members of the Faculty Development Committee and edited by staff in the User and Information Services department of the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System (IHETS). They are simultaneously being published in October 1997 on the IHETS Web site and in paper form. The authors of all papers hold the copyrights thereto.

Disparate though the courses and the delivery methods are, common themes emerge from the papers as a group. One is the concern that faculty share for creating among their learners a sense of community. Some faculty achieve this by devoting themselves at least as fully to the encouragement of student-student interaction as to faculty-student interaction; others describe their methods of incorporating group work, whether on-line or at remote sites. A message that emerges again and again, regardless of the medium, is the need for pre-planning and advance development of materials to be used in the distance-delivered course. Those whose courses are offered entirely or in part online, in particular, all include the strong suggestion that faculty begin development of their Internet-based courses a year in advance, while an instructor on the satellite network encourages faculty who will use that medium to evaluate test tapes of their on-camera style well before the beginning of the term to allow time for modification of habitual behaviors. Another caveat appearing in many articles is that Murphy's Law is fully operational in distance education settings: if anything can go wrong with the technology, it will - and instructors should be prepared to be flexible, resourceful, and good-humored when it does.

Each author, while echoing some of these common concerns shared across the collection, also adds a unique perspective, as each speaks from the conviction of his or her own individual experience and educational philosophy. The wisdom they bring to their considerations of this topic, initial experiences in teaching distance education, comes in many different forms from the pragmatic to the philosophical. The Faculty Development Committee presents this collection of articles in the confidence that these voices of experience, and the insights they convey, will be of value to faculty and to others involved with distance education delivery in Indiana and beyond.

- Nancy Millichap