This qualitative study focuses on perceptions of emerging instructional roles and performance of online teachers from Sweden, and the USA. The purpose is to explore, understand, and perhaps explain how teachers experience, create, and establish their teaching personas, but also how they perceive and perform their role online. Qualitative data from participating teachers' surveys and interviews point at significant common threads running within and across the two groups despite the fact their respective academic environments are at critically different points on the online education continuum. Teachers' perceptions are in complete alignment with the four major roles of the online instructor, pedagogical, social, managerial, and technological (Bonk et al., 2001).