How can works and individual learnings be valued in distance learning? And, after all, how can we promote a distance learning student by giving grades and degrees? There is no doubt that a thesis or research piece plus a many-year-long process of elaboration in which tens or hundreds of messages are written and exchanged between a student and their tutors offer enough validation elements to evaluate if goals have been met. However, there is an extra added issue of vital importance that crops up before a personal piece of work to consider in the end: how do we know if the real author is the one who claims to be so? The same doubt that originated Steiner’s vignette in the New Yorker, in which a dog can be seen before a computer keyboard saying, "On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog", is cast again.

Undoubtedly, an essential worry for several basic issues underlies this anxiety: Can a learning program be wholly at a distance? What is the academic or professional guarantee given to those degrees? And what is most, which is their social credibility?

The paper Authorship and Acknowledgement of Identity in Distance Learning Individual Works: An experience (Miguel Zapata Ros , 2004) http://www.um.es/ead/red/10/ approaches the problem of authorship and acknowledgement of identity in personal pieces of work done in distance learning. Besides, this work describes and experience on the area and offers a reflexion on the topic.

Net learning, distance learning, e-learning, learning nets, distance training, identity on the web, authorship in distance works, identity acknowledgement in distance learning.