Correspondence courses into WWW

Dirk Herr-Hoyman (hoymand@joe.uwex.edu)
Thu, 3 Mar 94 19:59:43 -0600


Kevin's note jars me into action, so here I go!

I'm in the process of moving some print based correspondence courses into
Internet distribution. These are currently in Gopher and Almanac (yet
another e-mail document server) and Real Soon Now :-) into html/www. If
you want to look at this, check out
<gopher://wissago.uwex.edu/11/uwex/course> or e-mail to
almanac@wissago.uwex.edu "send course landfill catalog" and "send course
disaster catalog".

I think some very interesting material could be created within the WWW
realm, but merely transcribing these course from print to html doesn't
quite hack it for me. To really exploit the potential here we need to both
look at the available online resources in the Web (for hyperlinking) and to
redesign these course (with content experts, not just a bithead like me).

I feel like this is a whole new ballgame for hypertext based instruction.
Never before has so much material been available for hyperlinks. CD-ROM,
video disks, these just aren't in the same order of magnitude (or perhaps
several orders of magnitude). I know that there are problems with
stability of resources in the Web, but I think that certain KEY resources
will stand up and be known as stable ones, this will work itself out.

So, my question is whether anyone is engaging in the type of full-bore, Web
based, curriculum, complete with content experts redesigning (or designing
for the first time) the courses.