First of all, creating a relationship with your students is the primary consideration. If your connection with the class is robotic and impersonal I think kids just get turned off. The great feature of online learning is that personalization, and differentiation is required. You're dealing with kids one on one for every assessment and through email, blogs and discussion posts. Through in some face to face interactions and I think online learning can be every bit as fun and engaging as the physical classroom. That being said, if you're a bad teacher going online won't by itself work miracles. After all you can't make chicken soup out of chicken....OK, I'm not going there.
I also think online learning loses credibility if it's a freaking joke. If kids just copy and paste from wikipedia or ask.com into electronic worksheets no learning takes place. The class needs to be challenging as well as fun and rewarding. Again, that's up to the teacher and course design.
Finally--the cheating thing. We must find ways to not only identify cheating, plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty, but we also must engage kids in ways that they won't feel the need to do that. How can we trigger their motivation to honestly engage in challenging work?
