I cannot stress enough just how valuable synchronous teaching is. I have been teaching online for almost 9 years now for several institutions, and only one uses synchronous components. While they are all good schools, the one with synchronous chat/lecture time is the one that students seem to stay most connected to from an undergrad perspective. Grad students tend to stay on target regardless, but undgrad students gain more value and stay enrolled more with this functionality in place.

While blogging is a great tool, does anyone else feel that students already feel so overloaded that they just will not participate?

Does anyone else have concerns about the level to which we encourage micro blogging? I find it difficult already to get students out of the habit of being too brief in their online communications so I worry that this will counteract my efforts. Students today are too used to a world of texting and tweeting that their established discussion boards end up the same way. It could be reinforcing bad habits.

Not all students will be on the same level on their knowledge or familiarity with these types of tools. How can we best accommodate these differences?

When a class is already in an online environment does it confuse students to utilize social media as well? How do we keep them on track with multiple portals?