Hi!

What do you here mean with "modular approach"? Some online courses, especially asynchronous courses (no times, no places) use modules a lot, content modules or just weekly packages of content for progression in the course. An example is most MOOC courses. Some other flexible, ICT-enabled education does not use modules much, they build more on synchronous meeting regularity and support and a designed shift between the synchronous and the asynchronous activities, which can be digital online or not (book reading as example). (Not much different from regularly schooling - shift classroom lessons and homework).

In asynchronous courses, student loneliness and feeling of lacking support and social context can be a big problem, especially for new students. Some of this can be solved by course design, but still - MOOC courses lose a lot of their students from start to finish.

However, there are many possibilities with a well-designed shift pattern between synchronous and asynchronous events. Then every course also demands an engaged teacher, and a good social climate between learners. Nothing happens automatically just by putting it online. A common complaint from teachers has been that online courses causes too many individual although similar questions from students, that takes a long time to reply to. One solution can be to direct a lot of this to a student forum where students can help one another. A solution can also be for the teacher to declare that I answer all questions, but in a collected format, every Thursday (or so), same to all students. A podcast can be very well suited for this - just go through questions and comment with voice recording.

I completely agree with Anders Norberg Sir. May be teacher can collect all the questions using a mechanism, may be google form and disucss the same in a specific schedule. This method require a cut-off time for question submission time. Once, questions are available, techer can go through the same and give answeres to the students.

It is difficult under these circumstances to provide quality education via distance learning