My colleagues impression of an online university is that she took a course and dutifully did her part but that no professor ever actually showed up to assist, mentor, inform, evaluate, or encourage her. She found this odd. I do too. Not all bad professors teach via modem and not all good instructors are without the tools of technology. Technology and education have always been uneasy bedfellows.
People write and speak as if technology in education is a unique new danger for the next millennium.
It is not. When the printed text entered academia, students and professors alike lost much of their ability to think and reason on their feet. Teaching critical thinking via in-class debate fell rapidly by the wayside. And that's a shame. On the other hand, both professors and students gained the ability to create more lasting, complex, and portable arguments and investigations via writing and print technology.