Patricia Comeaux is a professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Early in her university teaching career, 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. Since the 1990s, her research has focused on the qualitative assessment (observation and examination) of the interpersonal nuances involved with 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 topic of collaborative learning in higher education and the impact of interactive technologies on communication and learning.