Interview with Tony Bates on the Aspects and Prospects of Online Learning

Tony Bates is a world-known expert on distance education. He has published extensively on both traditional and contemporary distance learning practices. Besides teaching courses and delivering seminars in the area of distance education, he has also provided consultancy with a number of institutions around the world. These include both formal and non-formal education settings such as governments, universities, corporations, and projects. Professor Bates has recently been working in the field of online learning. He has published several milestone articles in this area. His articles shed light on important issues of online learning. He is one of the living legends who have witnessed how distance education has evolved into online learning over the year so that we decided to interview him on this topic. Because he was in Canada and I was in Turkey, we conducted the interview in several rounds of e-mail exchanges but it worked very well.