“A couple of years ago the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a long article about distance education. The article focused on an instructor in meteorology who seemed chained to his computer because of his promise to answer all posts within 24 hours. The headline on the article: ‘The 24-Hour Professor: Online Teaching Redefines Faculty Members’ Schedules, Duties, and Relationships With Students.’…
It was an unfortunate piece of publicity for the instructor, the university and distance education. It showed that the instructor’s department had not properly prepared him to design an online course and it sent the message to would-be online instructors that teaching online was onerous and unrewarding.
As someone who has developed and taught four online courses and who in the decade before retiring turned all of his residence courses into hybrid courses, I have found online teaching to be just the opposite: It is not an overtime job and it’s fun.
But in order to obtain that state of grace, one needs to design an online course with an attitude that it is different from a residence course. Instead of piling on the assignments that instructors must grade and making irrational promises to answer all posts, the instructor must design a course with one thought in mind: less is more.
That might sound heretical and antithetical, but it is not. That theory extends current pedagogical thinking about involving students more in their learning. The notion of a student-centered classroom in residence courses can be extended to online courses without any loss of quality and with the potential for a better course.
How does one do that?”