Such efforts may start with clearly articulated plans, but they must evolve as new problems and issues are addressed. We ethnographically interviewed 21 college instructors who had taught in both formats. Four of the interviews were by telephone and 17 by email. Interview fragments were categorized and counted for frequency to highlight emerging trends. This has far-reaching consequences for online classes, in terms of greater equality between students and instructors, greater explicitness of written instructions required, greater workloads for instructors, deeper thinking manifested in discussions, initial feelings of anonymity giving way later to emerging online identities.
Authors propose a model with two competing systems, isolation effects and community effects.