The New School for Social Research reports that while DL students are required to log into discussions three times a week, many participate four or five times a day. Contrary to the traditional model, teachers often find themselves asking questions in chat sessions rather than lecturing. This often fosters a sense of intellectual adventure amongst the participants rather than a passive ingestion of set material. A blessing for anyone who has ever struggled with study notes, the transcripts of these sessions can be automatically saved for later review. The level of technology being used varies between institutions.
More advanced systems integrate real-time audio and video.
Videoconferencing platforms, such as JetNet, take the chat session several leaps further. Classes in disparate geographic locations can combine efforts on a common project and show results in real-time. Similarly, an instructor can now give a live lecture and take immediate questions from viewers thousands of miles apart. Computer-based DL is hardly ten years old and must fight for respect against scholastic methods which have been in use since the time of Socrates. However, the arguments in favor of DL are growing rapidly, despite opposition.