Recently, business education has experienced an expansion of online education programs. In this paper, we propose a framework to improve the effectiveness of student learning in an online lecture format. In particular, we focus on business courses, which tend to be hard to replicate online as they rely on team work and applied logical thinking in addition to the learning of facts and theory. We identify two main areas that are vital to online business education: competition and community building among students. We argue these are an additional task for the instructor to deliberately perform in an online setting, compared to what often occurs organically in a traditional in-class setting.