Teaching Without a Classroom: Delivering Courses Online

Technology has changed the way we deliver courses. The professor who used to carry a few scribbled notes (or a whole armload of handouts) to a classroom equipped only with chalk and a blackboard is a thing of the past. More likely, the instructor will carry a laptop or disk, or perhaps nothing – relying on a PC-equipped teacher’s station and the Internet to provide the tools needed for teaching a class. Recently, however, colleges and universities have begun to go one step further with technology by removing the classroom altogether and instead creating a virtual classroom. Online courses in which students have no classroom contact with the instructor are becoming more and more common, and several entirely online universities have been established. Traditional universities are expanding their offerings to include online courses in addition to traditional lecture/classroom courses. This paper explores some of the issues that arise with online courses