Course materials are all assembled for access before the course begins. Time and effort are required to ensure that students have access to these materials as they progress through the course. There are also issues involving the amount of time an instructor is available to the students taking this course. To provide timely feedback, instructors must be actively involved with the virtual seminar several times a day. Setting e-mail office hours is one way instructors can communicate feedback to their students on a regular schedule.
Time is also an issue with access to on-campus computer labs for students.
Not everyone has Internet access at home, therefore labs must be available for these students to use. Especially during the first week of the course, trained technicians as well as course instructors should be available in the labs to assist students in getting started. Scheduled time in a computer lab, for the whole class, will cut down on a lot of confusion later. There are increased demands on faculty to understand the dynamics of discourse and to respond to the differences among the learners in the course. As facilitators of a seminar discussion, faculty must learn to identify text discussion styles that discourage or marginalize discussion by others.