Editorial by Farhad Saba to mark the start of Distance-Educator.Com's 8th academic year (Stephen's Web also started in 1995, so the perspective is interesting to me). Saba reflects some of the malaise that has characterized the field over the last few months. "The field is suffering from what Dr. Michael Moore... calls a 'conceptual confusion'." But I don't agree with Saba that the cause is "the result of new terms" that do not adhere to classical studies in distance education. In some cases, quite the opposite: while our origins in distance education sometimes help us, they sometimes hold us back. The root of online learning is not merely in distance education: we derive concepts from media studies, information technology and even, as the arcane field of epistimology becomes a science, philosophy. Indeed, if we have a conceptual confusion in this field, it is generally because one or another of these progenitors claims sole ancestry.
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