By basing the online course on the existing traditional course, academic credibility and consistency are assured, while at the same time the online instructors are allowed enough freedom to tailor the courses for the Internet and the international teachers who take them. The typical adjustments that are made to the campus curriculum involve making the course materials more relevant to the actual educational experience of the international teachers. For the most part, the campus curriculum focuses on U.S. education with an emphasis on the Maryland educational requirements. Therefore, for the online courses, an international dimension is added. All the materials and requirements are uploaded to the course homepage, including written assignments, topics for discussion, and other pertinent matters.
Many courses involve research, both through online and traditional sources.
The latter can be a problem for some students, depending on their location and hence their access to resources in the English language. When this occurs, my colleagues and I try to assist by sending students some research via email that we conduct based on their submissions to us. Fortunately, we are finding that this is becoming less of a problem with each passing semester. The advent of the Internet and the subsequent design of programs that take advantage of the power of this technological tool have allowed individual students to take programs that previously were offered only on campus or to large cohorts in remote locations. This was the most exciting aspect of asynchronous communication in the course because it took on a life of its own.