Nice article, reflective and enthusiastic.

Online teaching poses particularly thorny challenges to those of us who teach skills, however, as opposed to those of us who teach, as your article emphasizes, courses built around knowledge, concepts and ideas.
It’s an important distinction.
I’d agree that online concept/knowledge courses can benefit from asychronicity–it’s a commonplace among the digeratii that the Internet has obviated time and distance as obstacles to collaborative work, and teaching is indeed collaborative work. Papers and question-response tests are easily designed for assessment of student progress in acquiring concepts.
But having taught three different graduate-level workshop writing classes as “pure” online experiences as part of what SSC called The Laptop Initiative, I’d note that when the object of the online class is a performance skill — in my case, writing — teachers need to be forewarned that managing online mechanisms are difficult and inefficient.
Content and concept courses to a large extent are empty-vessel teaching, but workshops engage Socratic methodology, ongoing dialogues.
If Discussion boards are the equivalent of classroom participation, then online environments create an impossibly labor-intensive environment. While distance-learning is the hope of every administrator who wants to to liberate teaching from bricks-and-mortar, all of us need to be aware that much of the cost of going forward with distance-learning for Socratic courses is in faculty labor, a resource that is neither free nor plentiful. (see http://perryglasser.com/html/body_medieval_strategy.html , my essay originally in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1999)
For example, a class of 8 students in a writing workshop might reasonably be expected to submit 3 stories/essays/compositions/articles each per 15 week semester. Say all together, 24 artifacts for class discussion.
Those 24 artifacts posted online on a schedule devised by the professor invite discussion. A single artifact garners a minimum of 7 student responses and 1 faculty response. As in a vital class, several responses will also garner further responses, requests for clarification, debate, etc. At a seminar table, this interaction might take an hour–online, this interaction takes hours and hours–for each artifact. Each Discussion board entry is itself a mini-essay–so say a single artifact draws 20 responses. Just as a matter of arithmetic, that class now in a semester creates 480 Discussion board entries to be read (20×24), each monitored, composed and commented upon by the instructor. That calculation does not include postings for cognitive content while initially creating the online course–theory, if you like, or organized reading of a textbook, with the consequent clarification, conversation, etc. In practice, my classes of merely 8 produced nearly 1,000 discussion entries each. At 15 minutes per entry–far too little for students expecting considered thought– my time to teach an online class came to 250 hours–and that was just for discussion, not email or the actual reading on the artifacts.
Double that, if I had been crazy enough to try this in Freshman Composition with a registration of 16.
Some of those discussions were redundant content, as well. A conversation point made by student A is repeated by students B, C, D, and E, making nearly the same observation, while student F chooses to disagree. Online, where students are compelled to participate because dialogue is the modus operandi of the class, the less-able echo their peers, but there is no silence or eye-contact to generate further thought–just an asynchronous comment perhaps entered days later by a professor or by a peer. Which of us has not looked at a student and said, “And…?” and gotten better participation? Online, that comment is meaningless and has no efficacy. But at a seminar table, the faculty facilitator can instantly request further thought or clarification from any of the respondees, and the writer–student A — might do the same. That’s superior instruction, I think.
What can be accomplished in meat-space in minutes in virtual space takes hours. And my calculation for 8 is a dangerously low enrollment, terribly expensive by an administrative fee structure that charges students the same amount for online or traditional instruction. Imagine trying this with 18 students in Freshman Composition, each of whom is writing 5 or 6 essays. At some point, the quality of instruction has to fall off a cliff because of the crush on the teacher. At the two largest colleges in the US — Phoenix and Kaplan, both accredited, and both “for profit–Composition sections are closed with a registration of 6.

Best, and thanks for your provocative article,

Perry Glasser
English