How long do you wait for the prof to show up?

Remember when you were in college and there were these unofficial "rules" about how long students were expected to wait if the prof didn't show up for a class? At my school, I think it was rumored to be 10 minutes for an instructor or TA, 15 for an assistant prof, and 20 for a full prof (it was never stated just how you were supposed to know the professor's rank). But what do you do when the instructor for an online course seems to be AWOL?

Since I started taking classes at the community college four years ago, I've run the gamut of instructor contact, from on-campus class meetings each week, to hybrid classes (partly online but with classroom sessions every other week), to completely online classes with no classroom sessions at all. But even the online classes had the instructor posting, on a regular weekly timetable, assignments with due dates (usually due a week later), additional material beyond the textbook, and grades for completed assignments (often with comments).

That's why I'm somewhat mystified by my experience so far with the online Systems Analysis & Design course I'm taking this semester. Classes started Thursday, August 20, and the instructor posted the syllabus and the first assignment (read Chapter 1, answer a trivial exercise from the book matching Important Terms from the chapter to their Important Definitions, and post an Introductory Message on the discussion board so we could all Get to Know Each Other). There was no due date listed for this assignment.

I emailed the instructor and asked (a) whether assignments would be posted on Thursday each week, and (b) when the assignments were due? He replied that probably he'd be posting assignments on Mondays. He didn't say when the assignments were due.

OK, so I completed and submitted my assignment and dutifully posted my Introductory Message. The next assignment was posted on Monday August 31. (Astute readers will note this was a full 11 days after the first assignment.) Another chapter, another matching exercise, plus a series of newspaper articles about a school system's woes with a poorly designed and implemented class scheduling system and an assignment to comment on various aspects of that debacle. Again, no due date. Again, I completed and submitted the assignments.

And that, my friends, is the last contact I have had with the instructor. I have checked the online course interface (a system called Blackboard) every day. No new assignments, no announcements that the course has been cancelled, no grades posted for completed work, no emails saying he's running a little behind, or his computer crashed, or he went on vacation and got stranded on the tarmac in some obscure airport. Nada. Now, I wasn't really surprised that nothing was posted on Monday last week, seeing as how it was a holiday, but I did expect a new assignment to show up on Tuesday, at least. I've never heard of an instructor blowing off a whole week just because Monday was a holiday, though I suppose it's possible.

I'll wait and check Blackboard again tomorrow night. If there's still no sign of any new assignment activity, I guess I'm going to have to email this guy and ask what's going on. I'm fine with working on my own – that's why I take online courses, after all – but there's a limit to just how much "on my own" I want to be when I'm paying over $300 in tuition and fees for a class. The college website says:

Online classes offer rich opportunities for individual participation and for collaboration in active learning activities that contribute to long-term learning and understanding.

But I think that presupposes that the instructor is going to participate, too.