 Some instructors find it really challenging to move into an online environment because they have not had experience of taking courses as students in an online space. Online learning is very fun, it's nothing to be scared of and it really impacts your face-to-face teaching in a very positive way. When we consider what the benefits are, one of the things that comes to my mind first is the opportunity for faculty members to really take time to rethink their design concepts, principles and the underpinnings of their course overall. As someone who's taught for a long time, having to rethink what I offer in terms of my courses has been a real beneficial process for me. Rather than showing up in a classroom with PowerPoint slides and having a conversation, I've really had to think hard about what's important for students to take away from my classes. I think it's helped me organize the material in a stronger manner and I think the thinking about learning outcomes, learning objectives and learning outcomes has been really beneficial in terms of strengthening courses that I've offered previously in the classroom. For instructors, they can prepare materials, they can include all different images and really be very tight and controlled on what they're presenting to students in that environment. They don't have to rely on how they're feeling that day. And for faculty who are interested in teaching online, it provides us opportunity to explore and to learn and to facilitate in a new environment that depending on one's approach to that environment can be a very rewarding experience. One of the advantages to being able to teach online from you as an instructor is that I can provide content that they can't otherwise easily see. So it might be a video, it might be a software demonstration, I can put together some material in exactly the way that I want them to see it and I'm knowing that they can watch it several times if they need to. I can free up time during my lecture knowing that, okay, I don't have to do this demonstration now, I can do it later. The benefits in my experience of teaching a class in a blended environment are very specific to the fact that I'm teaching them material that is about being online. That theater criticism, at the moment all arts criticism, is shifting to being delivered mostly online rather than in print. So it makes a heck of a lot of sense to have some kind of outputs of the course coming out in an online format. One of the challenges is to make sure that students are meaningfully engaged. How do you prepare learning experiences that are meaningful for them? Perceived challenges are probably greater than real challenges, at least when you're a beginner. I think that many instructors at the university level don't have a lot of experience or a lot of training for using electronic formats for teaching or online formats. So that becomes a pretty big challenge to develop the technology, just developing the workflows and developing the strategies of even videotaping something. Instructors really are very enthusiastic about what they're teaching and sometimes they see this as an opportunity to just present more stuff. So working with people, we're always trying to make them aware that you can't... This isn't doubling the course or making it one and a half times what it was before. What you want to do is you want to make it the same amount of work for the students and you want to use both environments in the best way to do the same amount of coursework that you would have maybe offered in a face-to-face course. So getting them to think very critically about what content needs to be there and which pieces are being done in which environment and making them all interact together properly without it becoming just a much bigger learning experience for the students. There are a couple of challenges to online courses, I think from an instructor's perspective. Preparation is very different, it's very intensive, it's a much longer process than organizing and preparing a classroom-based class. I think also as an instructor, we teach because we like our students and we like to get to know them and that's part of our professional development as well. So it is harder to get to know the students. I'm quite sure that many of us became educators because we really enjoy the student interaction. Whether it's in the lecture environment, whether it's one-on-one, whether it's the huddle after lecture is, I love that. I love that interaction, I love the back and forth. I love the light bulb moments and seeing the light bulb moments when they happen. So all online instructors have to leave that, I don't know, leave that behind is the right word, but certainly you're not going to experience it in the same way. The other big thing I think is that it's a huge challenge in online learning is the idea of community because I think any group of people that sits together to learn interaction and creating relationships with each other and bouncing ideas off each other and so on are a huge part of building a community. And so that is more difficult to achieve in an online setting because you're simply not face-to-face, you're not reading each other, each other's gestures, facial expressions and things like that. It's getting them past that feeling that they won't have the kind of engagement in teaching that they would normally have. And it's true, you know, I don't know students, I know student email addresses. It happens to me quite a bit. I hear in town, I'll go to a coffee shop. This happened to me a handful of times where I've ordered something and the person says, hey, are you Professor Skidmore? I said, yeah, yeah, who are you? I took your German 272 and I recognized your voice because I listened to all these prof comments. And I think, oh yeah, that's great, you know, and I feel like a star. But it's kind of goofy. But the thing is, I notice they're still engagement there. If that student has recognized me and then is willing to talk to me, clearly they've been engaged in that course. They've connected with it in a way, not the same way as we do face-to-face, but they've still connected. And there is that engagement. So that kind of gives me hope that this obstacle or this challenge of engagement can be met.