I have a confession to make. I design multimedia for online courses. I extol the virtues of online learning to anyone who’ll listen. Yet I’m taking a course on-ground. And next quarter, when given the choice between the on-ground and online sections of a programming course, I’ll lean towards the on-ground.

Why? That’s certainly a question I’ve been asking myself. My stock answer is that I’m not disciplined enough for an online course. My wife’s amused by this rationale; she often tells me I’m the most disciplined person she knows. She has a point. I was raised by Scotch-Irish and German Protestant farmers and railroad men whose idea of taking it easy was waiting until after church to chop weeds. So discipline shouldn’t be a problem for me when taking an online course. What gives?

When I take a course on-ground, I know that I’m committed to be in that classroom 3 hours every week. I’ll show up because I know my absence will be noted. I’ll show up because I don’t want to miss any information. And this is important: I’ll show up for the experience of being in a classroom, of being a student among students. I like to see and be seen. Rational or not, it makes me feel like I’m a student.

That last reason is the most telling. Because other than this intangible, what exactly does a classroom have going for it? My current course is taught after work in an airless, overcrowded, and overheated classroom, in which a great number of my fellows are tuned out and concentrating on their Facebook pages or texting one another. I’m exhausted by the workday and hardly at my sharpest. My instructor is overextended and often underprepared and is further handicapped by balky classroom equipment, improper software, and the flagging energy level that frequents evening classes. While there certainly is useful information exchanged in our class, the real learning comes from the readings and exercises, activities that I complete because I want to learn and because I want to avoid the social embarrassment that could result from showing up at the next class unprepared.

So why not take the course online? Why not spare myself the frustration, fatigue, and inconvenience of the on-ground experience? It’s commonly argued that a well-designed online course provides similar or superior opportunities for the exchange of ideas, for meaningful exercises, for peer and instructor feedback, and even for social connections. And there’s the ability to time shift, to log in and participate during the week at times that work for me instead of the demands of the university schedule. The only thing really absent is face time, the presence of others and myself in a physical space. The feel of a classroom.

I don’t really have an answer. But I’m concerned that if it’s this difficult for me to make the switch from on-ground to online when there are so many compelling reasons to do so, then we must be missing untold numbers of potential online learners. And that leaves us with a challenge. We can design a course to create and deliver a viable learning environment. Can we make it feel like someplace students want to be?