This paper summarizes some of the best ideas and practices gathered from successful online instructors and recent literature. Suggestions include good online class design, syllabus development, and online class facilitation offering hints for success for both new and experienced online instructors.

Visual Turn’s comments:

“Recent literature”? This article was published in 2004, and all but one of the citations are even older. While the article contains some ideas that are still useful, seven years is a vast amount of time on the web. Most of the largest web services around today had not even started by then: Flickr (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), Facebook (everyone 2006), Tumblr (2007). Seems to me that while some of the fundamentals have not changed, “teaching like a pro” in 2011 might involve knowing a little something about more recent developments. This article is way past its “sell-by” date.