When I began my undergrad in 2002, I was a fairly shy kid and had moved to a college two states away where I didn’t know anyone. I never would have thought that in three years I’d have been a founding member of an environmental club, vice president of a literary magazine, and the organizer of a writer’s group.

It’s difficult to overstate how much of an effect these student organizations had on the trajectory of my life. The environmental club implemented the college’s first recycling program, for which we needed to interact with college administrators and county officials. This was my first experience navigating different levels of organizational hierarchy to implement a program. We also networked with regional environmental advocacy to educate students about issues and mobilize them in petition and letter-writing campaigns, which provided me a taste of politics.

My role in this organization was one of the first items on my resume and gave me something to talk about in my first few job interviews. I likely would not have been seriously considered for my AmeriCorps position after college without it. But not only that, it provided me with leadership skills, teamwork experience, and a broad knowledge base in a subject other than my academic major.

The benefits of a traditional college experience are not limited to what students get from classes. College life provides an abundance of other enrichment opportunities, such as performances, symposia, and student organizations. And I worry that online students don’t have as much of an opportunity to tap into those activities.

Even if we accept that the majority of online students are nontraditional learners who are taking classes online precisely because they have complicated schedules that would not accommodate these activities, I wonder if more could be done to promote a well-rounded education among online learners.

Let’s look at student organizations, for example. In many ways, college campuses are unique environments as crucibles for grassroots organization, be it an activist political organization or a Frisbee club. It’s obviously easier for the first buds of a student organization to form on a traditional campus as classmates make small talk, share interests, and become friends.

But it’s important to remember that student organizations don’t simply emerge from the ether. There are physical and bureaucratic structures on every campus that promote their existence. There are designated meeting spaces for these organizations to use. There are bulletin boards used to advertise meetings and events. There is funding set aside for student-organization activities. There is a procedure in place for the college to legitimize the organization.

Without these physical and organizational elements, campuses would not enjoy the level of student enrichment they do today. And I fear that as universities expand into online classes, they’re missing opportunities to provide the full student experience to their online learners.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop online students from using third-party social-networking Web sites right now to form student organizations. Students can use something like Facebook’s Group feature to organize and Skype’s video conferencing for meetings. But the farther students need to reach outside their institution’s online learning environment to form these groups, the more initiative it takes, and the less likely they are to do it. I think we’ll only see a richness of online-student activities that approaches that of traditional students if we offer a comparable infrastructure to that of the brick-and-mortar institutions.

But how would one build a comparable infrastructure online? Perhaps each college or academic program could operate its own online discussion board, linked to existing student accounts, providing students the opportunity to share resources, experiences, and ideas.

As these discussions expose shared ideas, desires, and interests, students can form groups that meet synchronously through applications like Wimba. Tools like Blackboard Community System, a comparable software package to Blackboard Academic Suite, allows student groups to have their own uniquely branded space within the online learning environment. A student group using this as its hub could provide information, create discussions, or set up Wimba sessions for audio and video conferencing.

There are innumerable tools that could be integrated with the online learning environment in innumerable ways. But I hope that as online education progresses, extracurricular activity becomes more and more a standard part of the experience so that online learners have the same opportunities for growth that I did.