WebMath: costs of online math ed

[June Lester]

Many have been saying that, despite the hopes of educational
administrators, the costs for online education will actually be higher that
those for classroom education.  The factors cited include, among other
things, managing and facilitating student-student interaction through
online discussion, etc.  Question: how much of this reasoning is likely to
apply to online mathematics education?

It seems to me that a web-based mathematics course, as opposed to something
like a political science course, say, or many arts or professional
subjects, would tend to require more online student-content interactivity
that student-student interactivity. The major costs of doing math ed online
will be in providing that student-content interactivity - graphers,
simulations, online algebra, whatever - and these will be "initial" costs.
So once the student-content interactivity mechanisms are in place, the
average cost per student should decrease as the number of students
increases. The costs of facilitating student-student discussions, OTOH,
would increase with the number of students - more of them to manage - but
this would seem to be more of an issue in subjects where "in-class"
(synchronous?) discussion is a more integral part of the learning process.

(Not that I'm not saying that there shouldn't/won't be student-student
discussion in online mathematics courses: we all know that math students
learn much better when they work collaboratively, and they should be
provided with a mechanism for doing so, and a mechanism for getting online
help from a tutor.  But these are more of an adjunct to math learning
rather than an integral part of it, or at least, not integral in the same
sense that discussions are integral to political science.)

I'm talking off the top of my head here, so please contradict me if you've
had any experience that suggests the contrary. I'm trying to get some
realistic idea of the actual costs involved in running an online math
course.
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