The ten lessons in this mastery learning self-paced course build both the skills and the important concepts associated with ongoing purposeful, affordable use of telecomputing, particularly for isolated rural teachers limited to use of long distance phone calls.The key skills to learn are to capture text for offline reading, and to compose responses offline for economical high-speed transfer, lasting only a few minutes per session. The tone of the course, and online interaction in general, is far more friendly and social than one might expect. Perhaps this is an example of a high-touch response to implementation of a high-tech innovation.

Once the course ends, students have at their fingertips everything they need to continue learning, interacting, and accessing resources on an ongoing basis. The course is actually a community building device, linking teachers with a community of peers, resource persons, and limitless new educational possibilities.

Based upon the experience of teaching this course for six years, a new course has been created regarding the subtleties of how to successfully create and teach an online course. The pilot teaching of this new online course was completed during the summer of 1993.

"Distance Learning Online: How to Create and Teach an Online Course" resulted in 12 lessons, and 450 messages from 12 students over a three month period. Students learn to teach as they are taught, and must reflect on their own subjective reactions to learning in a markedly different style of learning, different from anything most of us have ever experienced.

The students were practicing K-12 teachers, university faculty, and interested citizens. The class conference was echoed asynchronously on Big Sky Telegraph and multiple local bulletin board systems. Students participated in the course from home or school through the following four connectivity models:

1. via direct Internet access
2. via long distance dialup access
3. via local dialup access to a local bulletin board
4. via autodial, automailer "point disks."