The web is SO interactive... why are so many online colleges so minimally interactive?
If that's not purely rhetorical, I have some thoughts for you. In every vibrant online community I've been a part of, there's an "expert" population. People who really know about [whatever the community is focused on], and are willing to freely give their time to spread the word and help newbies, because they like the topic and they like teaching. So you have 1,000 different newbies all asking the same 5 questions, having made no effort to discover the answers to those questions by reading previous posts, and 5 or 10 folks semi-patiently re-answering them, but also discussing more-advanced topics among themselves. Every now and then, a moderately-experienced person will come along, and will stick around if the more-advanced conversations teach them something.
In an online college situation, there are rarely any resident experts, pretty much by definition. And people outside the class (who could form the expert group, or even be the mid-range crowd) aren't allowed to drift in. The community is just too small to take on a life of its own.
When I went back to school to get my accounting hours, I took an online business stats class, because I wasn't sure my prior hours of psycho-stats would count. I like stats, and since the class wasn't very mathy, what I remembered from previous (very mathy) classes was enough to make me the expert among the student group. Let me tell you, there is nothing fun about answering the same question ten times over without the reward of being part of an "expert" peer group. Particularly when most of the people didn't come back to read the answer, much less express appreciation.
I do taxes for a living, and on the tax boards, the expert group (who are all full-time workers) give their time even during tax season, because we know that what we learn from the group (from other experts' comments, or from looking up an answer we didn't know, or not infrequently because one of the midrange group has specialized knowledge in an area previously unknown to us) is well worth the time we put in.
