Those tenured faculty who aren t effective soon end up back on campus. Those ineffective adjunct part-time faculty from the business world soon end up out of academia. As a rule, the quality of instruction is as good as it is in the ivy-covered buildings. Students in a chat room can t hide in the back row or avoid eye contact to avoid being questioned. Moreover, class participation is monitored via instructor files of individual student responses, and of real time spent in discussion.
Favoritism based on gender, age, or appearance is minimized on-line.
Prejudice is less likely to be an issue when ethnicity is not obvious. Relevant library and web site resources are available day or night. Also, because instruction is on the World Wide Web, there is a much wider variety of instructional resources from which to choose, and more reading to be done. As a result, students and faculty report doing more reading. Because much of the interaction is via e-mail, students also do more writing, such as essay responses to questions based on assigned readings, analysis of current events, etc.