When I was first asked to teach an online ethics class way back in 1998, I cleverly built my online lectures the semester prior by transcribing what I said in the face-to-face classroom into text after each lecture. The result was eight-to-10-page documents (single-spaced!) for the students to read for each lecture. Somehow the students managed to read them—don't ask me how. Of course, nobody wants to scroll through long blocks of text online. The online environment is a fundamentally visual medium. Like most teachers in those early days of online education, I thought that I could simply do a brain dump from my head to the heads of the students using text as the medium. But my bigger mistake was to still work within the face-to-face paradigm.
