Online Class Personality

An interesting point came out in our discussion this week, class personality or community. How it takes more time for this to form and to change in an online environment versus a face-to-face one. That personality affects the dynamics of the interaction between teachers and students, which in turn affects the quality and effectiveness of the online experience.
I can't help but wonder if there is something that can be done to reduce that gap between both environments so teachers can get a feel for the class early enough to make any necessary adjustments. May be instead of just relying on a personal post in the beginning, the ice breaker could be an activity that involves collaboration between students. Chat could possibly be used too to figure out the class personality faster.

Hard to Evaluate Vitual Schools Effectiveness

So this week after reading some research that compares face to face to online schooling, I discovered that we don't have enough data and may be even no "formula" to do the comparison. What was surprising is the lack of data on virtual schools, I thought the use of technology allows for lots of data to be captured but may be we don't know what to capture to evaluate virtual schools yet.
Both environements are different and what's easy to measure in one might not be in the other and there are many factors to take into consideration. Hence, it was no surprise that the research came across weak and hard to draw any conclusions from. May be the approach itself is not correct, may be we shouldn't waste effort trying to create the perfect conditions to allow for a comparison. Instead, we could evaluate online schooling based on a pre-defined criteria independent of other environments.