Most online courses are offered as "asynchronous" courses and have no real-time contact with students. The Synchronous online alternative provides normal scheduled class time and allows students to login to a virtual online classroom with the instructor. We provide an overview of two different platforms for hosting synchronous classes online and look at the benefits of the synchronous option and some of our developed best practices. We also look at comparisons of synchronous online courses with courses in a physical classroom. The use of synchronous online courses for teaching programming classes will be a special emphasis. [For the full proceedings, see ED571252.]