TEACHING OVER THE WEB VERSUS IN THE CLASSROOM: DIFFERENCES IN THE INSTRUCTOR EXPERIENCE

To study the differences, from the point of the instructor, between teaching college classes over the WEB versus in a more traditional classroom situation, we interviewed twenty-one college instructors who had taught in both formats. We categorized and counted interview fragments based on emerging trends. The instructors indicated that bandwidth limitations, asynchronous nature of the medium and an emphasis on the written word give web-based classes a very different communication style than face-to-face classes. This has far-reaching implications for online classes, in terms of greater student/instructor equality, a need for greater explicitness of instructions and other instructional materials, more work for instructors, deeper class discussions, and initial feelings of anonymnity giving way later to emerging online identities.