Faculty who consider online instruction a form of distance education fail to sort out the asynchronous nature of online instruction and how that becomes more of a pedagogy than a delivery mode. This view is further complicated because offices of continuing education on most campuses have been among the first to capitalize on new technologies for instructional purposes. This can create a political environment that further adds to the difficulty in working through the issues. Figure 3 Lastly let's remind ourselves of the context of online teaching. There is no standard model for online courses, nor is there a single teaching methodology that works best when teaching online.
Students vary in where and when they work on their online courses.
Thus, both the teaching and studying environments change. Additionally, features can be built into online instruction to minimize the possibilities of discrimination by virtue of the professor not responding to the unique needs of some groups of learners. Communication becomes central to instruction but in the form of electronic communications . For those who have not experienced instruction it is hard to envision how these differences operationalize into a meaningful teaching learning experience. You have been in this course long enough to have an opinion of how online instruction alters what you might normally do in a traditional course.