In browsing through your comments I find myself nodding in agreement with many of the reasons you've cited for liking to teach online--serving nontraditional students, flexibility of work time and place, and so on. In the part of northern California where I live and work, offering various sorts of distance learining is something of a necessity. The college I work at serves about 45,000 people across a county the size of Connecticut. Travelling from distant sites to campus for class just isn't an option for many of our students, and our online courses complement a well-developed videoconferencing network.
I think one other reason I enjoy offering courses online is that it forces me to think very carefully about course design--what do I really want students to take away from a specific lesson, how can I best help them learn those concepts or skills, and how can I assess what they've learned. Students in face-to-face classes will ask if they don't understand something, but my online students tend to rely more on their readings and the instructions I've posted. I try to make sure that "everything works together" in an online class, so that questions in one area are addressed by something else they read or do. Putting together a course that works is definitely an iterative process, but one that really gives insights into how our students learn.
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