you will have to make a greater effort to accomplish that learning.

 The online environment is text-based

Believe it or not, you will spend more time studying and completing assignments in the online environment than you will in an on-campus course. How can that be? The online environment is text-based. To communicate with your instructor and other students, you must type messages, post responses and otherwise communicate using your fingers (i.e., through typing). As you can probably guess, typing is slower than speaking. (Try reading each word as you type it and compare the difference if you had spoken the same thing.) In the same sense, reading your lecture materials can take more time than listening to an instructor deliver them, although spoken lectures have a distinct disadvantage. If you are sitting in a classroom, it's likely that you'll miss a good percentage of what the instructor says, no matter how focused you are. It's human nature to zone out for brief periods of time. When you are reading, you will have a tendency to go back over the notes if you miss something and that takes more time. The point is that you will likely learn more in an online environment, but you will have to make a greater effort to accomplish that learning.