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Since the WWW reached the public domain in 1992, millions of WWW documents have been created. Since the WWW began in a research/education environment, it's not surprising that even from the start the WWW was being used for educational purposes. The use of the WWW for course distribution has become a problem however for a variety of reasons which include the perception of what the WWW is, a poor understanding of learning theory and course design and other more far reaching reasons.
Many instructors that build course for the WWW have only a passing knowledge of the medium and often bring with them unrealistic expectations. As an example, it is not unusual for an instructor to attempt to put an hour or more of video in their course for students to view. The often fail to consider the very real problems of bandwidth that the end user must deal with since the instructor typically views the video locally. In addition, many instructors often have trouble conceptualizing the WWW any differently that papers they would hand out to the students, and see no difference between a book and a WWW page that scrolls on and on.
In addition, many WWW courses fly in the face of not only instructional design principles, but basic design principles as well. It is not unusually to find horrible, garish green text on a purple background. While this may appeal to the creator, it presents problems for the end use who is frequently unable to read or navigate through the course. An additional issue that's problematic in the creation of web courses and rarely taken into account by instructors building these courses is the differences in hardware and software form user to user.
The computer literacy of end users varies widely and it is not unusual to find individuals who have trouble utilizing the most basic functions of their computer. This translates into difficulty for that user if the course has relies on high multimedia content or needs unusual browser plug-ins to function. Likewise, there is a continuing misconception by many constructing WWW course, that a multimedia presentation replaces instruction.
Many institutions however, are creating WWW development teams to assist instructions in the creation of WWW based courses. These teams normally consist of instructional designers, media specialists and graphic artists. The approach faculty members as a team and they work together to create a functional correctly executed course. While this reduces the problems inherent with technological naive faculty members creating a course, problems still continue.
Many faculty members simply aren't used to the team process. Unlike creating a standard course in which no communication with anybody is involved, creating a WWW course often involves timely responses to requests from the design team. As an example of this problem, with approximately twenty days to go until the fall semester, one of the faculty members working with the ASU development team has yet to produce any documents for the team.
The way in which WWW courses are being created however, is beginning to evolve and the technological aspects of that revolution may have profound and long lasting impacts for the end user. Generally speaking, until fairly recently WWW courses have been using static HTML to create a series of interlinked pages. Essentially, the content on those pages was fixed and making corrections to the page meant replacing the page with a new one. That paradigm is changing as the creators of courses, particularly commercial providers begin to place pieces of the course into a database and treat them as objects.
This type of design provides substantial advantages and allows the content of a single course to be re-purposed for a variety of users depending on their point of origin or native language. In addition, it often may also allow disabled users to participate; by treating a syllabus as a text object for example, instead of appearing on the screen as a document, it can be ported to a text to speech reader allow those who are vision impaired to hear the course.
Additional changes in the way WWW course are executed are on the way as well. Several organizations such as EDUCOM are working towards the establishment of technological standards that define the way in which WWW course should work. Finally, and perhaps the most important factor is that realistically, the WWW is only about six years old. Yet despite this, we are in many respects asking it to solve all the educational problems we have created over the past 200 years.
Asynchronous Learning Network
http://www.aln.org/alnweb/index.htm
Hosted by Vanderbilt University, the Asynchronous Learning Network has the state goal of being, "a focal point for information interchange among researchers and practitioners in the field of asynchronous learning networks." With academic and corporate sponsorship, ALN provides timely information, access to research and online journals about asynchronous learning.
Building Asynchronous and Synchronous Teaching-Learning Environments: Exploring a Course/Classroom Management System Solution.
http://horizon.unc.edu/projects/monograph/CD/Technological_Tools/Graziadei.asp
Graziadei, Gallagher, Brown and Sasiadek describe "a process
of evaluating products and developing an overall strategy for technology-based
course development and management in teaching-learning." The define the
context in which they use the term asynchronous learning, set parameters
for evaluation and evaluate several tools used to produce or augment WWW
courses.
Instructional Management Systems
Sponsored in part by EDUCOM, the IMS project is a consortium
of corporate software vendors and academic institutions who are trying
to create national standards for WWW base instructional tools.
Delivering Instruction on the World Wide Web
Thomas Fox McManus
http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~mcmanus/wbi.html
One thing that is clear about WWW based instruction is that
it needs to be more that the simple presentation of information. He is
a brief yet good introduction to some alternative pedagogical methods.
North Carolina State University
http://www2.ncsu.edu/ncsu/cals/template/
Academic institutions are taking a wide variety of approaches
for WWW course design. North Carolina State has taken a basic approach
and mandated a single template that all courses must fi into.
Real Education
Real Education is a for profit commercial organization making
contractual agreements with academic institutions to create an online presence.
The promise to create classes withing sixty days, but to accomplish this
rely on their own technology infrastructure. The content of a given university
then, is removed from the campus to a commercial server farm.
Teaching and Learning and the WWW
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tl/
This site which is hosted by the Maricopa Community Colleges, provides a searchable database of WWW base learning examples.
Web Course in a Box
http://www.madduck.com/index.html
Web Course in a Box typifies the fascination with WWW based learning by demonstrating how popular a tool which is totally ineffective and flies in the face of basic instructions design can be.