Some students expressed that at times they felt isolated from me. If they had a question, they could not get it answered quickly. They had to ask their peers or send me an email message.
The chat room did not work for any students in the media center. There could be several reasons for this, but the most likely is our school's internet server. This machine limits chat access by students during school hours. When students tried to get into the chat room, they would get a special "access denied" page from the school's server.
Twice the server failed. Our power supply in Beaverton is sometimes unreliable, and whenever the power fluctuates, the server crashed. Both times this happened, school was not in session, so this was not a big problem, but it did cause significant worry for me.
The online problems were sometimes very difficult. Some of them came from a sophomore level college physics class. If the student input an incorrect answer, a hint would appear. Several students commented that the hints were sometimes too vague and unhelpful. This was sometimes by design, so that students would have to re-read the materials and formulate several different plans of attack for the problems. Likewise, sometimes the hints were too helpful, almost providing the solution. In writing the questions, it was a real challeng for me to make the hints enlightening, but not too helpful.
My physics tests all include application type problems. Online students had no hand's on experience, they had only simulated experiences. A test question may appear simple to a student ho has done a related lab activity and look foreign to a student who has only had virtual activities. For this reason, I tried to make test questions that neither leaned more toward the in class student's experience nor the online student's experience.
Some students do not have internet acces at home while others do. Students with access at home could spend much more time looking at the material. Also, the on class students could also view the online material if they wished. For this reason, the in class students with internet access at home have an advantage.