Rebecca: You have raised some important points. I share with you my experience in those areas for your consideration. Agreed that a well-constructed initial survey can result in more open responses in an online environment than in a face-to-face environment. However, methods of assessing students' entry level skills should yield about the same results regardless of the environment in which they are administerd. A comprehensive survey can resolve the problem of having only an hour per class. Consider yourself lucky that in an online environment, you have all the time to learn about your students. Every program I have worked on with Universities pays Instructors a fixed sum of money per course based on a fixed number of students. And these courses have a start and end date that can be of anywhere from five to seven weeks duration as students take one course at a time. It has been my experience that th emajority of Instructors ae always conscious about how much they are being paid and how many hours they believe they should exert without moving down to the minimum wage level. Satrohan