One interpretation is that Kimberly, at 5 hours per week, isn't giving her students the quality experience that Manuel or Sharon is at 12. While this may be true of some instructor, somewhere, who spends five hours on 50 students, it isn't true of Kimberly. Her student feedback, retention and performance show the same distributions as do those of her two colleagues. So it's not that simple. Let's look a little deeper.
Public forum is where daily inquiry and response activities occur.
A DES provides authoring and course management tools in a single interface. Creating and modifying course content, controlling access to material, responding publicly and privately to student inquiries, grading assignments, reviewing the results of automatically graded tests, adding and dropping students and many other course management tasks are handled easily through a single DES Web interface. While individually these tools are excellent, there is no centralized database to coordinate them. Sharon is constantly clicking between windows and transferring scores from one application to another manually. Her beautifully designed Web pages are difficult for her to change.