Abstract

While both classroom and online courses have their advantages and disadvantages, this author argues that the classroom model has been predominant in guiding online courses. Indeed, in many online courses, synchronous interaction between students and the professor is the major component of the course. Online courses where the students and professor only interact asynchronously have been disparagingly referred to as “high-tech correspondence courses.” This paper analyzes a representative sample of online courses conducted at a West Coast university business school and concludes using the classroom model to guide online instruction is not appropriate for what the author calls, Worldwide Working Adult learners. The term Worldwide Working Adult learners is defined as working adults who are geographically distributed worldwide; who often have changing work and travel schedules; and who have different life changes such as illness, military deployment, job transfer, or other life change that will affect their ability to make a specific time commitment to an academic course. The author concludes that a new model to guide online courses for Worldwide Working Adult learners should be asynchronous, open-ended, experiential, project-based, and highly interactive. The author analyzes various cognitive learning theories to guide online instruction and provides examples of activities for online courses for adult learners.