In the last years there was an exponential growth in the offering of Web-enabled distance courses and in the number of enrolments in corporate and higher education using this modality. However, the lack of efficient mechanisms that assures user authentication in this sort of environment, in the system login as well as throughout his session, has been pointed out as a serious deficiency. Some studies have been led about possible biometric applications for web authentication. However, password based authentication still prevails. With the popularization of biometric enabled devices and resultant fall of prices for the collection of biometric traits, biometrics is reconsidered as a secure remote authentication form for web applications. In this work, the face recognition accuracy, captured on-line by a webcam in Internet environment, is investigated, simulating the natural interaction of a person in the context of a distance course environment. Partial results show that this technique can be successfully applied to confirm the presence of users throughout the course attendance in an educational distance course. An efficient client/server architecture is also proposed. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.