One challenge of teaching online distance education courses is the fact that the medium for course delivery itself–the computer–automatically creates a disparity in how students access the course. In a traditional correspondence course, each student has a book, paper, a pen or pencil; in a televised course, students all watch the same video or live feed. But an online class might reach each student in a different way–is the student using a modem from home or a T1 line from a dorm room? Does each student understand basics about email and discussion board management? When students are located throughout a multi-campus system, throughout a state, or most widely, the country or the world, what can we as instructors do to ensure at the very least a comparable classroom experience for each student, if not the equal one we'd like to see in the ideal world? The question of access to computers, ownership and use of computers, and literacy is an important one; when considerations of race, class, and gender enter into the equation, however, it becomes even more vexed. While the Internet has been touted as having the potential to provide equal access to knowledge to all people, Cynthia Selfe notes in Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century, that "computers continue to be distributed differentially along the related axes of race and socioeconomic status" (6). I discuss the political, pedagogical, and personal issues involved in teaching an Internet-based class with the knowledge that students have unequal access on multiple levels; I hope to raise awareness of this crucial issue as online distance education becomes more prevalent, to offer some solutions; and to pose a series of questions to consider for the future of the growing field of online learning and teaching.