A contrarian view at the Washington Post ...

Three years ago, I agreed to give online teaching one last try -- a composition class that met in person for three hours every other week, with the intervening week used for online discussion and exercises. We call these hybrid classes. It seemed like an interesting compromise.

The class got off to a bad start. By that time, the software had become more sophisticated and secure, and nearly everyone had a computer at home. But most still encountered problems logging on at first. The face-to-face sessions were supposed to be scheduled in a classroom with a cable connection, but they weren't. The students were supposed to know when they registered that the course involved Internet use, but they didn't. I don't want to make too much of these startup problems because most were quickly overcome, but, one way or another, about half the class dropped out.

If a student missed a classroom week, then a month intervened between our face-to-face contacts, and I would forget the student's name; sometimes I thought the student had nearly forgotten mine, too. If a student failed to do the online work -- a common occurrence -- I would have to spend part of the classroom time teaching what was supposed to have been learned earlier. We didn't cover much that semester. Class members never really got to know or trust one another.

Quite a mess, really, if you read the whole article. But not so surprising, and a lot of these things aren't alone online course problems (students being non-responsive, miscommunication, etc.), but I think a lot of the problems lie in how the courses were structured. Workshop styles may work better for these types of online writing programs and facilitate discussion more than hitting points on a required syllabus with the students teaching each other as much as the teacher is guiding them to learn.

More comments at The Fish Wrapper.

I think Downes is probably on to something in his short commentary that speculates the fault may have been more with the tools she was using than the inherent nature of online learning. I feel pretty strongly that our typical CMS's make it difficult for teachers to connect with students on a personal level--and hard for them to create immersive, compelling online spaces for learning and thinking (spaces that might naturally prompt deeper interaction without a teacher having to "prompt" for it).

This blog, LearnAndTeachOnline seems like a good source for information on the subject as well.