""There's this expectation that your No. 1 job is to pander to this exotic alien consumer," says Mr. Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. "At that point, you cease being a teacher and you are simply selling yourself to an audience that might not be interested in buying.""

says Mr. Vaidhyanathan. "Generational thinking is just a benign form of bigotry, in which you flatten out diversity. This is debilitating to the job of trying to work with young people."

"Some folks are using this as a template and a cookbook," Mr. Bonner says of Millennials descriptions. "It makes it very difficult to see and understand variations because people who don't fit the recipe may be viewed as outliers. That anesthetizes nuances." – (fyc socialpractices social_learning teaching students_as_customers )

This article explores excellence in web-based teaching. Drawing on the views of experts in the field and the perspective of their own years of experience, the authors compiled a list of 9 principles to provide direction in the search for online excellence. The principles include: the online world is a medium unto itself; sense of community and social presence are essential to online excellence; in the online world, content is a verb; great online courses are defined by teaching, not technology. The list is not intended to be an exclusive set of principles or a comprehensive guide to online teaching. Rather it is a collection of important ideas and suggestions for teaching excellence in the online world. – (DE ple vle onlinelearning OU OpenUniversity )