I cannot imagine teaching my online courses without some sort of communication tools. I know many professors that only ise the discussion forums for communication and it is not as effecitve in collaboration as some of the tools that we have used in this class. Students want additional means of communicating with their classmates and the professor. It is not enough to throw a topic out on a discussion forums to 20-30 students and expect them to provide meaningful exchanges between one another.
There is so much reluctance and resistance to change in higher education. We cannot use the excuse that it costs too much because some of the best tools to enhance communication or very reasonable or free. There are no excuses. If I had a magic wand I would ensure that every person teaching an online course had to be a student in both a really well constructed online course and a really poorly designed course.
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