In 1981, I was asked to participate in the project group that created the first online educational program. The program, which started up in 1982, was the School of Management and Strategic Studies at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) in La Jolla, Calif. We employed computer conferencing, a kind of early discussion forum software, to carry on asynchronous discussions among teachers and students. Our program was successful for 10 years. I taught in it and trained teachers during that time. Throughout the 1980s, we inspired other programs and had a significant impact on the growing field of online education.

Several years ago I was shocked to discover that the field of online education had been colonized by salespeople and administrators who knew very little about it. Here was a paradoxical situation: We who had started the field nearly 20 years before and those who followed us in initiating experiments and projects on many campuses across the country were now ignored at the very moment when online education entered the national debate over education reform! People with no experience and fantastical ideas about automating education with "star" professors, marketing "learning packages" and prestige "branding" occupied the entire space of public discussion.

Meanwhile, most faculty were outraged at the suggestion they could be replaced by computers. David Noble's influential articles on "Digital Diploma Mills" mobilized the opposition. The whole debate was falsified by the assumption that online education was teacherless education.

Is this a real issue? You may well ask, so incredible does it seem that our universities would sponsor a technological advance the purpose of which is to eliminate teachers. But, yes, it is real. An alumnus of Princeton University recently forwarded to me an e-mail invitation he had received to enroll in an online program based on the course, "Animal Behavior." The courseware, said the e-mail, comprises four hours of audio--delivered via CD-ROM or the Internet--(synchronized with images, animations, video and text) subdivided into segments of one to four minutes, so participants can proceed at their own pace and select their own path.

Now there is nothing at all wrong with a professor designing a beautiful and interesting CD-ROM combining lectures and visuals in an exciting package. But why is this marketed as an online "course" and not a computerized "textbook"? The confusion is dangerous. It feeds the expectation that online education will replace teachers with CD-ROMs.

Fortunately, this confusion is gradually dissipating as faculty and faculty organizations work to refocus the online education debate. They have moved beyond their initial rejection of the new technology to proposing legitimate implementations. In 1999, I participated in a yearlong seminar at the University of Illinois, organized by John Regalbuto. This seminar aimed to bring people with actual experience back into the debate, to make their contribution visible once again and to reflect on the lessons of the field.

A subsequent seminar report, "Teaching at an Internet Distance," concluded that online education was about how to teach, not about replacing teachers. It argued that we should listen to experienced teachers to learn how best to introduce the new technology. This is what everyone needed to hear, and it was later echoed in statements from various accrediting agencies, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors.

Implicit in the University of Illinois report is an important philosophical point. It is often assumed that technology shapes society without itself being subject to profound social influences. Supposedly, the most efficient configuration of technical resources will be discovered by technologists and will then determine social evolution. But this assumption is now challenged in technology studies. We have learned that technologies are the products of society through and through, that they meet the demands of various social actors and that they reflect rather than determine society.

Unfortunately, the new approach to technology is not widely understood. The online education debate was carried on at first as though we already understood the technology and its effects. This is why the debate polarized so quickly around "for" and "against" positions. The University of Illinois report makes it clear that technology does not have an agenda, that it can be implemented in different ways with very different social implications. There is no inevitability here but rather a responsibility for making the best choices. A far more sophisticated discussion of online education is possible on this basis.

It is notable that the fuss over online education has subsided somewhat in the last two years. The task now is to bring faculty influence to bear on the design of programs to better adapt them to the traditional conception of learning to which we are committed.

This will require us to focus efforts on the development of software for online discussion. In the online environment, the human interactions so essential to learning can only take place in asynchronous forums. But current Web-based software offers primitive tools for online discussion. A new generation of educational software will have to address our pedagogical needs as teachers rather than feeding into a dubious agenda for automating education.