The instructor as manager: Time and task

We and several other members of our faculty have been pioneers with the use of information and communication technology in education. For many years, we have worked with a variety of technologies to support group projects as learning experiences. In March of 1994, we were involved in one of the first courses to make use of the World Wide Web (WWW) as a tool to facilitate new forms of collaborative learning for our on-campus students. Later on, we extended this to also include off-campus students and combinations of on- and off-campus students. Throughout this process and to the present day, we have been personally aware of the burdens on the instructor in terms of the many and time-consuming management tasks that must be attended to in order for any technology-supported learning to occur. We define management tasks as all activities of the instructor outside of the content-specific aspects of a course. In this overview, we recap some of our own experiences with management tasks related to online learning and give some lessons learned. © 2001 Elsevier Science Inc.