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In an attempt to provide educational opportunities for students who have other constraints on their time such as working, family commitments or who are located at a distance, many universities have developed wholly online distance education programs. These online courses use web technology as a distributed learning mechanism. However, online distance learning in Computer Science courses remains challenging for both teachers and students. Research has shown that there is a significant risk factor for students studying online courses in Computer Science. To develop competence, students are required to acquire complex conceptual understandings, while learning the highly technical components of a scripting language, which they then must practically implement to solve programming problems and thus produce a program that works. Hence, the final aim of a programming course is to produce a student who has a programming mindset, which enables them to ultimately program in any language. Thus for technical subjects, instructors need to interact more when teaching students and encourage them to seek new sources of information to avoid creating limitations due to nature of the subject materials. Thus, the curriculum designers and teachers need to be aware of the particular needs of Computer Science students when establishing online courses, if they wish to graduate successful and satisfied students. This paper examines some of the social barriers to the effective teaching of computer science topics in an online environment from the perspective of instructors and learners.