It is important to recognize that teaching an online course consumes more time than does a face-to-face class.

Most instructors spend an average of 140 hours designing and developing an online course for the first time. After the design is completed, the content uploaded, and the course is used, development time drops off dramatically if other factors remain relatively the same. Those other factors might include changes to the knowledge base of the field, textbook changes, which semester the course is offered (summer as opposed to fall), curricular changes, and so on.

Time spent in the course communicating through discussions and email may also take a greater amount of time as most people generally speak their thoughts faster than they type. Care must also be given to fostering a community of learners in order to overcome the isolation that students may feel when they cannot be in a physical class together. Keeping in touch with students, providing feedback, and creating ways in which they have opportunities to communicate with one another will help alleviate that feeling of seperation and hopefully keep students from dropping out of sight or out of the course.

Depending on the tools used, most course management systems, including WebCT, have set-ups that allow automatic grading of quizzes and tests. This reduces the time you might have otherwise spent manually grading multiple choice and short answer quizzes or tests. So you gain some time there if you use that feature.

Lastly, there are many good sources of materials, demonstrations, simulations on the Web that can be used in your online classroom. Some are free, some are commercial products. One of the best places to check for things to use in your classroom is MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning Online and Teaching).