PATRICIA COMEAUX is a professor in the department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Early in her university teaching career (1983), she discovered the value of an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research when she designed and developed a communication-across-the-curriculum program at Illinois Wesleyan University. Since then, her teaching and research interests have been in observing and examining communication and learning in institutions of higher education. In the last 12 years, her research has focused on communication and learning in distant education settings. She has served as an outside project evaluator for a number of distance education-funded projects. In addition, she has published numerous articles on collaborative learning in higher education and the impact of interactive technologies on communication and learning. She recently edited a book on the topic titled Communication and Collaboration in the Online Classroom: Examples and Applications (Anker, 2002).