Faculty need to consider learning objectives, learning styles, accessibility, cost, and available technical support when designing distance learning courses, says Laurie Hillstock, manager of distance learning at Clemson University.

Nova Southeastern University's Master's in Health Law program is designed to encourage the creation of learning communities in which students view each other as partners rather than isolated individuals who happened to be working toward similar goals.

Susan Baim, assistant professor of business technology at Miami University-Middletown, uses weblogs to supplement her face-to-face courses to

Kristopher Wiemer, instructional technology specialist at Philadelphia University, encourages instructors to adopt active-learning strategies such as hands-on activities, interaction, and research “to make sure students are engaged and aren’t just sitting there like sponges.”

Instructors who are new to the online classroom often struggle with the issue of how to be rigorous while creating a safe learning environment, and mistakenly think, “You can be nice or demanding, but somehow you can’t be both.” “That’s absolutely not true,” says Andrea Sanders, associate professor of English at Chattanooga State Technical Community College.

Engrossed in a flow of online teaching, I was suddenly aware of insistent knocking. Because teaching is interrupted only for emergencies, I paused in midsentence to open the door. A student worker handed me a document that I had already accessed online. When asked, the student worker said she was told to distribute the document to faculty. Rather than place the document in either of my mailboxes, she had brought the paper directly to me.

In order to have a productive learning environment, the instructor needs to develop and maintain a sense of trust between and among the students and the instructor through good course design and facilitation, says Nancy Coppola, associate professor of humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

The Buck Institute for Education's definition of project-based learning-"a systematic teaching method that engages students in learning knowledge and skills acquired through an extended inquiry process structured around complex, authentic questions and carefully designed projects and tasks"-shares many of the same tenets as online learning. However, little has been written about the links between the two or about how to incorporate PBL into an online course.

If we had been asked if we were prepared to teach online before teaching our first online courses, the answer would have been a naïve "Yes." We had attended several training sessions and thought that we were ready! In retrospect, after teaching more than 30 sections of online courses over the past five years, we agree that the answer should have been a definite "Maybe!"