Web-Based Education Experiences

he World Wide Web has the potential to revolutionize instruction and increase educational opportunities across corporate, government, and educational sectors. Not only will the Web enable distance learning and peer-to-peer con-nectivity, but it will also enhance student feedback and let instructors understand whether and how long students have studied a particular lesson. It also has the potential to reduce training costs. Some analysts argue that it will be a while yet before the Web can realize its potential, but there is evidence that the Web is already being used as a strong educational technology. The concept of computer-based training (CBT) dates back to the late 1960s and early 1970s and the world of net-worked mainframe terminals. But the desktop PC revolution of the early 1980s quickly led to a proliferation of CBT, delivered first on floppy disk, then CD-ROM, and now the Web. It is now clear that education is becoming a primary use of the Internet. A recent Infoseek search returned almost 3.5 million Web pages containing the keywords " online courses. " Other terms that turn up interesting CBT and WBT content include " virtual universities , " " distance education, " and " instructional technology. " Today, CBT goes by many different names, including Web-based training (WBT) and distance education. There are at least three approaches to WBT: real-time WBT, non-real-time WBT, and a combination of the two. Real-time WBT projects attempt to create virtual classrooms in that they preserve the traditional roles of a teacher and a group of students meeting at the same time. Non-real-time WBT is simply an adapted version of CBT delivered over the Web. That is, non-real-time WBT is created in a traditional CBT authoring system, and then the student downloads the course from the Web to a hard drive and takes the instruction at his or her leisure. The combination approach might include course material delivered on CD-ROM with real-time data streaming from the Internet. Many of today's WBT courses do not take advantage of the full power of the Internet. For example, many contain just skeletal materials—a syllabus, assignments , or instructor notes. Even in these cases, however, student-instructor communication can be handled by e-mail, and classroom discussions by news-group. But for the most part, these types of courses are still held in the traditional setting—a physical classroom—and the Web becomes a way for students and teachers to communicate out …