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Jennifer Maddrell Thank you for the comments! This is my first semester at IU and my fourth online course (I took two at NYU). As we are only in week 6 of the IU program, I have tried hard not to compare and contrast the NYU vs. IU programs. However, since you asked my opinion about this article, I will use my experiences to aid my response. One thing I really appreciated about the NYU program (that I have not seen, yet, at IU) is synchronous "lectures". Once a week, all students in my NYU classes got together to participate with the instructor in an 1 1/2 hour live session. They included audio chat and live screen sharing where the instructor delivered a live lecture with audio based question / answer and break out audio discussions. This was my favorite part of the NYU courses and made the student / instructor interaction *almost* the same as F2F. I was disappointed when my first two classes at IU were both 100% asynchronous. I was under the impression (from reading the IU course descriptions on the IST web site) that there were weekly "live chats" - they were mentioned in most of the course descriptions I read? For example, in 511 "Live chat will take place once a week for about one hour. Hosted by the instructor, these regularly-held real-time sessions will bring the class together in a lively and informal setting." So far in 511, we haven't had any live chats hosted by the instructor. However, what is interesting is that the students in the class have shared IM ids and I have nearly daily IM chats with fellow students - all outside the course interface, by the way. I guess that was our way of "community building". I think it is much harder to feel part of a "community" - or to get the same quality of interaction (with content, other students, instructors) - in 100% asynchronous sessions. However, I can't tell if ultimately the "Learning Effectiveness" suffers - too early to tell. I agree that the instructor is key in the success of an online class. However, I also think that learning effectiveness depends a lot on each student's motivation and dedication. In some respects, a F2F traditional setting is easier, but maybe not as effective in the long run. It is pretty easy to sit and get entertained in a lecture for an hour or two, complete some readings and repeat it all back in a paper or test. However, in an online setting, the student has to work much harder to pull the information that is made available by the professor and piece it together in a meaningful way. Since I am motivated to get the most I can out of this program, I too work really hard to complete all the readings, watch the video lectures, participate in the discussions and blogs, etc. However, I question how less motivated students would fare in an online setting? Thank you, again, for your comments! Jennifer Maddrell