Millions of dollars are being spent in teaching and training instructors to develop web-based composition classes. While theory may abound, little is mentioned about the stakeholders in this enterprise. Due to this lack of research into the experience of the online student, one essential piece is missing when educators build and design entire curriculum that will do what its supposed to: teach students what they need to learn for a particular class.

This research project attempts to address that lack. Focusing on the experiences of students, this case study follows a first-year online English composition course for a semester. The participants consisted of nine students and one instructor. Due to evidence found in the artifacts collected, seven domains present themselves as areas of concern for the online educator:

The primary data source in this research project was the complete transcript (electronic text) of all the public online communication between students and the instructor during the term. Embedded units in the analysis were an online attitudinal survey, a writing attitude survey, essay comparisons, class artifacts, and self-reports.