Online teaching vs. Online learning

I'm in the middle of grading a batch of assignments for one of my online courses. It's taking a very long time (a minimum of a half-hour per student) because of how long it takes to read and think and write comments to them. And this time is just the grading time, not the course instruction time (via discussion board, news items, emails). I'm not sure yet if it's more time than a regular classroom, but it certainly feels like it is - maybe it's the lack of variety in the mode of interaction I have with the students because everything is mediated by the technology.

I'm thinking that the right way to talk about the terms "online teaching" and "online learning" is to call it "online delivery" because the teaching and learning gets subordinated to the technology, at least in the courses I teach online (technical writing). When I first agreed to teach tech writing online, it seemed the perfect course because tech writing requires familiarity with technology and because it's about writing. Online courses are ALL about writing because every single student-instructor or student-student interaction happens via writing. Students and instructors write a LOT, so it's a natural fit in a writing course, I think, because my pedagogy relies on the premise that people learn to write better by writing. The more we do, the more we get better at doing it.

But I'm continually frustrated by the constraints of online teaching because my students are getting such a thin experience in the course, it seems. It's tough to provide substantial feedback to all of the students without getting just plain tired of writing the same thing over and over, keeping tabs on my tone and sentence structure, knowing that many students don't read it (they just look at their scores) unless they want to pick a fight with me. Thank goodness for the best students who take an online course (or any course) because they want to learn something, not just click through a bunch of modules in order to receive a score/grade that's acceptable to them (which is only an A or B).

This job I have is hard.