Delivering Web-Based Education

A decade of hindsight allows us to examine the phenomenon of Web-based course delivery and evaluate its successes and failures. When Webdelivered courses mushroomed from campuses in the 1990s, they were embraced by students, faculty, and administrators alike. The prospect of “electronic tutelage” (Marold, 2002), which allowed students through Web interface to take college courses for credit any time, any place (ATAP), was immediately popular with students. The interruptions of job and schedule changes, relocation, childbirth, failed transportation to campus, and so forth no longer necessitated an interruption in progress toward a degree. Likewise, faculty saw online teaching as an opportunity to disseminate knowledge and assess student progress according to their personal preferences, and to communicate personally with their students, albeit virtually. Administrators saw the revenue without physical classroom allocations as an immediate cash cow. In the beginning, there was satisfaction all around. Although this state of affairs was not necessarily universal, generally it could be concluded that Web-based education was a very good thing.