Should Graduate Mathematics Courses be Taught Fully Online?(Report‪)‬

1. Introduction The demographics of the Florida Panhandle present a situation where potential graduate students live in locations that are spread over large areas. The economics and the required efforts of having to drive to the main campus make it a situation where some type of distance learning becomes not just an option but in many cases a necessity. There is also a population with jobs, such as high school mathematics teachers, prohibiting many to pursue additional training in mathematics unless a program is offered to them as a distance learning program. The problem is that it is not straightforward to offer fully online graduate courses in mathematical sciences. The nature of mathematical sciences dictates that students need to hear the instructor explain the concepts and ideas. It is equally important that students are able to get immediate feedback to all their questions during the lectures. While there are numerous publications on the usefulness and the success of distance learning of lower level mathematics [3, 6, 9, 11, 12], there are few publications on distance learning at the graduate level in mathematical sciences [1, 5].