The movement toward greater availability of online education in the university setting creates challenges for design, development, and implementation of online courses, particularly those focused on the educational use of technology as content. This article is structured around a central theme of designing and implementing hybrid online courses that have a curricular focus on the use of assistive technologies (AT) to increase educational outcomes of students with disabilities, and to enhance our understanding of the role of technological transience in special education and related disciplines. Specifically, this article explores transience and intransigence as related to assistive technology itself, to technology implementation in the public school classroom, and to postsecondary distance education. "Intransigence" is used here to describe factors that work in the opposite direction of technology transience. Intransigence imparts "drag," and counters the increasing imperative to recognize and respond to technological transience. Technology will advance with its inevitable transience (Aytac & Wu, 2013; Babbitt, Kahhat, Williams, & Babbitt, 2009). Impediments (or intransigence) play a significant, often challenging, role in planning, implementing, and evaluating distance education. Transience and intransigence will be addressed in relation to several dimensions of learning and human performance that must be addressed in distance education: content knowledge, attitudes, and practices.