“Education over the Internet will be the next big killer application,” says John Chambers, President and CEO of Cisco Systems. He also states that online learning will be much bigger than the last killer application of the Internet — e-mail (Friedman, 1999). The recent surge in online learning has opened up the eyes of many educators to the growing possibilities of online learning and teaching. As these online offerings continue to grow, the educational impact will have far reaching implications for schools, teachers and students. In order to better understand the effectiveness of the online environment as an instructional delivery medium, research needs to be conducted focusing on factors that contribute to the effectiveness of the learning environment. In particular, individual learner differences are an important variable when evaluating online learning success. This chapter will discuss various individual learner differences and how they relate to student success in the online learning environment.
Individual Learner Differences and Second Language Acquisition: A Review