context in online learners

I am going to discuss context and concerns I have thought about in a online learning environment. To narrow that down even further I would like to ponder external context in particular. Context being the environment in which learning takes place. An example of this could be a baseball game. The large cheering crowd, the yelling, smells of hotdogs and peanuts in the air, the hard benches that we place our rumps upon. Those things are the context in which I am speaking of.
In a online learning environment the contexts can be limited to: the desktop, the source of learning (chatroom, cbt, interactive classroom, etc), the screen size, the location of the computer that is being used or other variables that one acclimates to when the learning occurs. My concern, or question develops when recall comes into play. Is it more likely that one will be able to recall more effectively only when in front of the learning media? One could argue the same thing in a classroom environment, but I believe there is a significant difference in real life interaction of a classroom and the learning that takes place in a digital format.
In a class room setting, the context can and do change. The professor moves, the students move, there is more contextual change over the learning period. Whereas with computer based learning, I believe, there is less of a chance for contextual change and that may lead to less recall at a later point in time. Due to state dependent retention. One of the ways I have pondered to compensate for this is change of location every time one sits down to learn. This way there is always a change of context and the student may be more apt to encode and recall the information presented to them more effectively. This would be an easy task to the person who uses a laptop for their main means of learning but it may offer some difficulties to a person that is limited to a desktop computer. There are things that a person with a desktop unit can do to change the context of the learning environment, such as changing the time of day learning takes place, moving items daily on the desk, even positioning of the monitor. Laptop users would have a major advantage with this hurdle more than a stationary user. I wonder if there has been studies done to see a difference in active recall of laptop vs. desktop learners.