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On-Line Courseware Tools and Hosting

All of these sites encourage the development and delivery of courses on the Internet...

All of these sites encourage the development and delivery of courses on the Internet. Each has particular features such as the incorporation of multimedia documents or classroom management or discussion groups. Teachers may wish to experiment with mounting new courses or include a strong research component with content from remote sites or develop mini-courses for parents or independent study students.

The site, comparing these sites, reviews administrative functions, like pricing and system control, instructional features, like customization and synchronous/asynchronous, and development capacities like authoring.

Blackboard enables instructors to add an online component to their classes, or even host an entire course on the Web. Without knowing any HTML, you can quickly create a Web site that brings your learning materials, class discussions, and even tests online.

Adobe (formerly Macromedia) provides ideas and examples of how to use their products, like Flash and Shockwave, to develop concepts more interactively and graphically than in other systems.

Conferencing Software can also be used to provide "real time" sharing of courseware in a variety of formats. Wiki's can let you share the tasks of creating and maintaining a rich courseware environment.

Web sites like this allows non-technical types to create sophisticated courseware. But, technical problems remain. For example, many still rely on e-mail or Yahoo Group chat exchanges for interaction between "teacher" and "student". Many courses would be more dynamic if inline computations, like simulations, could be accomplished over the web.

The integration of courseware with conferencing functions, such as those included in the Whitepine version of CUSeeMe, has not yet been developed. Wiki's offer a low-cost potential solution where two teachers at different schools, remote from each other, want to collaborate on course development or share delivery to their respective students.

These sites represent a significant improvement over past decades, because teachers can develop their own offerings easily rather than using pre-canned content.