We have already seen that the Internet's greatest potential for education is its capacity to bring people separated by space and time together online and to give them access to learning resources from around the world. This form of communication mediated by the computer offers great opportunities for interaction that is essential to the learning process. Bates (1995, p.52) makes the distinction between individual interaction and social interaction:
There are two rather different contexts for interaction: the first is an individual isolated activity, which is the interaction of the learner with the learning material, be it text, television, or computer programme; the second is a social activity, which is the interaction between two or more people about the learning material. Both kinds of interaction are important in learning.