Teaching Over the WEB versus Face to Face

This qualitative study investigated differences, from the point of view of instructors, between teaching college courses over the Web versus in more traditional face-to-face formats. Twenty-one college instructors who had taught in both formats were interviewed. Four of the interviews were by telephone and 17 by e-mail. Interview fragments were categorized and counted for frequency to highlight emerging trends. Results indicate that Web-based classes have a profoundly different communication style than face-to-face classes. This has far-reaching consequences for online classes in terms of greater equality between students and instructors, greater explicitness of written instructions required, greater workloads for instructors, deeper thinking manifested in discussions, and initial feelings of anonymity giving way later to emerging online identities. The authors propose a model with two competing systems--isolation effects and community