Using chat rooms, IRC, and Instant Messaging capabilities, instructors and students can have virtual study sessions and dialog in real-time. Online office hours are most valuable on weekends and evenings for these non-traditional students. An instructor willing to spend two or three hours a week available online will usually find that the students who avail themselves of this benefit greatly. An added side benefit to the instructor is that they will usually get to know individual students better this way, much the same as instructors on-campus get to know the students that come by their office during office hours better than those who do not. Online courses do not take less time than on-campus courses.
Online courses take considerably more time than on-campus courses, for both faculty and students.
This may be the biggest surprise for everyone involved - certainly the students in CSCI 1401 found this so. The three hours you save by not attending, or giving, a lecture will be spent replying to emails, reading and replying to bulletin board postings, making telephone calls, and talking online in chat rooms or via Internet Relay Chat or Instant Messenger. Additionally, grading electronic submissions tends to consume more time than paper-based assignments. Have a backup plan or two or three. As Internet users know, technologies fail, usually at the worst possible moment.