Being an online instructor affords a good amount of autonomy within the classroom. With such autonomy, however, comes decision making. We continually face decisions such as, how to manage our classrooms, how to manage our students, what material we present to augment the prescribed curricula, and how we set our priorities. Additionally, we face decisions regarding whether or not to use a universal standard in our grading or use an individualistic matrix according to a student's progress, to accept late papers or not, and how many points to deduct (beyond specified requirements). The pertinent point is that we are constantly making decisions that affect our student's performance as well as the classroom environment. Therefore, we face the task of becoming skilled decision makers, regardless of whether we want to be. Although there are different matrixes to use in the decision making process, I have found using a limitation paradigm, in which we account for our personal shortcomings, concerning our decision-making abilities useful.

Our inability to make decisions may rest on four general attributes of the decision making process.

• We have limited cognitive ability. This requires us to focus on what we do not know, why we do not know, and how we can improve in our knowledge areas. 
• We have a limited amount of time to make our decisions. Thus, we face issues of deciding if a decision is worth making time for, scheduling time for decision-making, and how much time we should devote to a decision,
• We also suffer from lack of information. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are known knowns; unknow knows; known unknows; and unknown unknows. A crucial thing to consider here is raising the level of awareness of our knowledge or lack of knowledge in a particular area.
• Moreover, we also have our explicit and latent biases based on experience and perception. Questions arise concerning: how does my worldview skew my thinking and how can I view this decision in a holistic manner.

Ultimately, the decisions we make have both short-term and long-term consequences. For short-term consequences, we should think about whether this decision is repeatable and what the immediate benefits are. Long-term consequences can focus on issues of sustainability of the decision.

Although this matrix is not intended to serve as a paradigm that one should follow with every decision, it, I hope, can be a mechanism used in your decision making process, as I have found it useful in my responsibilities as an online instructor.