Home

The Pedagogy of Web Site Design

by Sloan-C

I. INTRODUCTION

This paper concerns the design and pedagogy of a virtual course on European history. It is not a how-to guide, for there are plenty of those. Nor is it a study of various on-line history courses, for there are too few of those. Rather, it is a report from the trenches, a consideration of how static Web pages contribute to the creation of a successful online course.

A Web site is one of two essential components in most any virtual class, the other being some sort of discussion tool (listserv, MOO, etc.). The discussion aspect of virtual teaching has received a good deal of attention and rightly so, for that is where most of the teaching and learning take place. The Web site, however, is also a vital component, as a vehicle for delivering content and as a center for administrative details such as a course schedule and syllabus. The pedagogy of Web site design has received little or no attention, so I am reporting on my own experiences as a way to share with colleagues the lessons I have learned.

My first attempt at online teaching was in 1991, using a BBS as the host to teach a course on the Renaissance. While it was successful, I saw that the BBS was too limiting. In 1994 I taught the Renaissance again, this time on the Net. That course had little content online and was run rather like a seminar. Encouraged by that experience, I wanted to see if I could teach a general freshman-level survey course, with most of the content online. I first offered HY101 in spring 1995 and have taught it every semester since.

Having taught classes on the Web for six semesters now, I feel I have enough material to draw some reliable conclusions. The conclusions apply best to a fully virtual asynchronous course in the humanities. A course that has a local, physical component will have a different dynamic, as will a course that uses synchronous tools like a MOO or chat. Moreover, a class in the humanities is considerably different from one in the hard sciences or even the social sciences. Nevertheless, some of the lessons learned should apply widely.

A. About the course
HY101 consists of a physical textbook, a listserv list for class discussion, and a Web site for everything else: syllabus, readings, registration information, study questions, and 18 or so complete lectures. It has a cover page whose main function is to pre-load some graphics and to serve as a visually attractive first page. The true main page shows the main divisions of the course: the Visitor Center, the Registration area, and the Classroom. The latter is where all the content resides. In all, the site comprises 51Mb in 1,336 files. Of these, 691 files are HTML documents, about two-thirds of which are actual content pages and one-third is administrative material. The other 645 pages are graphics, sounds and text files.

I advertise the class locally in print and on the Internet. I am averaging twenty to twenty-five students at sign-up, with about a quarter of those dropping. I offer the course either for credit or with a non-credit option. Those taking it for non-credit pay about the same price, participate in the discussion, but are not required to do assignments. It is administered through the Division of Continuing Education at Boise State University.

About half the students find the course by discovering the Web site; the rest find it in the printed class listings here in Idaho. Students sign up over a long period of time - when one registration period ends, I immediately open the next one up, giving people plenty of time to find the course and get registered. Once they have registered and paid their fees, they have to wait for the previous course to end. I have only one discussion list, and I have to remove the previous class of students before adding a new one. The list is private, so no one gets put on it unless I personally add them. Once class has started, the students do the readings, post messages (three a week is the minimum), and do the assignments.

You can get a good idea of the course by visiting the Web site at www.idbsu.edu/courses/hy101. I've built a Visitor Center that should give an adequate overview, including samples of the class discussion. After every semester I re-structure the course somewhat, so you may find evidence of construction here and there, but the essential nature of the course has not changed from the beginning.

B. A Community of Scholars
Learning happens best when there is a community of scholars: a teacher and a fairly small group of students gathered to study a set body of information. I have always believed this, but for most of my career I took it for granted, unaware of it consciously. I learned it as a conscious lesson when students in my on-line Renaissance course taught it to me.

My first foray into on-line teaching was to offer HY309, a course on the Italian Renaissance. We had six books to read, plus some readings in the sources. What lessons out of all this material should be learned? Should I emphasize the snarled politics of 15th century Italy? Should I focus on philosophy? The crisis in the Catholic Church? Art? Literature? In a traditional course, I would choose the emphases, but the Electric Renaissance (as I called it) would be different. Rather than "teaching" them, I would let my students find their own way through the information; I would serve as coach and resource, not as authority figure. I took seriously the advice to become the "guide on the side" rather than the "sage on the stage," as so many articles on education theory have put it. So I provided objectives, identified the required reading, and even seeded the class with discussion questions, to help them get started, but otherwise I stood to the side, waiting to guide.

We floundered badly. About three weeks into the course, I knew it wasn't working, and thanks to private messages from a few of the students, I knew why.

Simply put, I wasn't educating. I had failed in the most fundamental sense of the word: "educare" means to lead out or lead toward. Without leadership, the students did not know how to proceed, and this was unfair to them. Student time is valuable and scarce. In creating a course when anything might be done at any time, I had created one where it appeared that everything needed to be done all the time. The Web site sat there, seeming to insist upon being read at once. If someone made a reference in discussion, then you felt obliged to go read that, or else not to participate. Students were either overwhelmed with work or were too intimidated to keep trying.

The unstructured, webbed nature of the class had another effect. By having no clear schedule or agenda, I had atomized the class. The students did not tell me this explicitly, but I understood it from their messages. Since everyone could read any of the material at any time, we had no common basis for discussion. And without that, we literally had no class; we were instead separate individuals who would separately earn three credits of history and who might by accident have something to say to one another.

It was terribly frustrating for them, so by the fourth week I had built a class schedule. If you visit the site now (www.idbsu.edu/courses/hy309), you will see there is a syllabus that identifies topics by week and specific readings for those weeks.

Yes, I know, it's all pretty obvious. I should never have thought to be so "disorganized" in a live class, but that is exactly my point. In a live class, we take the community of learners for granted. We assume (well, I always assumed) that because they were all physically assembled, we therefore have a class. The experience with HY309 had shown me how false that was.

Without a sense of community, of common interest and action, there is no class. And that classroom experience, whether virtual or physical, is a crucial part of the Western tradition of higher education. Moreover, it is what the students like best. Once I had understood this, I finally understood why I had become so unsatisfied with teaching HY101 live to seventy or so students. There was no community in that classroom except in a very primitive sense. No matter how good my lectures were, and no matter how much my students praised me, it wasn't what was supposed to be happening, and it was what I knew was happening in my on-line classes. I have since stopped teaching live, because it is such a pallid version of real teaching, the teaching I do on-line.

The notion of community has become the focus of my on-line work and is the fundamental theme of this report. Creating a virtual course is about creating a community of scholars among a group of people who will never see one another. The lack of a physical classroom creates some special challenges but also creates some special opportunities. Anyone who has participated on listservs (good ones, that is), knows that communities do flourish on the Net. People form bonds extremely quickly, and e-mail has a particular intimacy not found in a room full of chairs and desks.

The real teaching and learning goes on in discussion, and my listserv is the life-blood of my courses. The Web site's role is to support and foster the on-line community that forms around the discussion list. In particular, it serves to attract prospective students in the first place; it provides administrative support, including a syllabus and study guide; and of course it provides a significant amount of content in the form of on-line lectures.

II. THE ONLINE LECTURE

Nearly all my content pages are the lectures that I formerly delivered in live classes, written out in full and variously extended and edited. They are no longer really lectures, of course, not in the original sense of the word; they are more like essays, although they do not conform to the classic sense of that word, either. Given that no word seems to fit the form, I use the word "lecture" because it fits the function. After all, our live lectures are not properly named, either.

I am not irrevocably wedded to a lecture format. I chose it first out of convenience, daunted by the prospect of not only putting my course on-line but also inventing new forms for it. I have stayed with it because it seems to work well and other formats I've seen appear less satisfactory.

Each lecture focuses on a particular topic: Charlemagne or the Renaissance or the Punic Wars. In the process of taking my original lecture notes and turning them into complete Web lectures, I found the material changed in both style and format.

A. Web Rhetoric
There is a particular rhetorical style to an academic paper (which does not always have to be dreary though sometimes it seems so). On the other hand, while we strive to be formal in our academic writing, when we lecture we are more informal, following the long traditions of public speaking. A Web lecture represents a third rhetorical style. It is a style with little precedent, for we are trying to communicate content to students in writing rather than through the spoken word. This is a nice irony. Our students have long had to communicate to us in writing - the dreaded term paper or essay exam - but the medium is largely new to us.

I strive to make the tone of my on-line lectures both formal and conversational. I avoid colloquialisms, try to be precise in my language, write in complete sentences, and otherwise follow the basics of formal expository writing. At the same time, I do not shy away from the ironic remark, a bit of humor, or a personal comment. In that regard, I strive to incorporate the traditions of story telling.

All I am really trying to do is to capture in writing something of the tone I achieve in a live class. It never seems to me that I have succeeded very well, but the students like the lectures and that's all that matters.

Each lecture is presented as a series of pages, rather than as one file. There are a number of good reasons for this, one of which has to do with rhetoric. The common wisdom of Web design says no document should be more than three screens long because people begin to lose interest and focus. So an online lecture certainly needs to be broken up, but where to make the breaks?

Each Web page serves to present a thought, a concept, a scene in a narrative. The link between one page and the next is a caesura, and the end of a page is a dramatic moment, rather like a dramatic pause in public speaking. The reader has to click on the mouse button and wait a moment (but not too long!) for the next screen to appear. Just as the end of a chapter in a book should propel the reader forward to the next chapter, so the words at the end of one Web page should create a little tension and lead the reader forward. Not every page lends itself equally to this, but being aware of the technique can help in the presentation.

B. Linearity
Even a casual visitor to the on-line lectures will notice that I have almost no external links within a lecture. This is an important component of Web rhetoric and of Web pedagogy. I have seen enough other teaching sites that argue for lots of hyperlinks that I want to explain my position and experience here.

The student comes to the Web site with roughly the same expectations she brings to a textbook. She expects to be able to understand quickly what the work is about, to be able to move through it readily, to have a clear idea of the boundaries of the work, and to be informed by the content. A site that is filled with hyperlinks violates almost all these expectations. While in theory we are offering the student the opportunity to explore, in practice the site consists of an unknown number of reading assignments.

Most of my lectures therefore have no links at all except to the next page, previous page, and Table of Contents. Students learn quickly that a lecture is a known quantity and can plan their time accordingly. Many of the lectures have sound file links, but these are simply to help the students pronounce names and do not take the student away from the page. I do not embed pictures in the lectures because the download time would disrupt the rhythm of the reading.

External links are all on a separate page, called Supplemental Readings. Since this is clearly not required reading, the student still can budget her time. I provide a place to explore, but I do not want students confusing exploration with formal study. Both are valuable activities, but they are different activities.

C. An Experiment
In one lecture I have deliberately violated my own guidelines. The linear nature of my lectures is appropriate in part because most of my lectures are narratives, and good story telling follows a thread. But some subjects don't lend themselves to a narrative style.

I chose to create a lecture on medieval society, a topic plainly not suited to narration and seeming to fit well with hypertext. I originally envisioned using a graphical interface, with pictures of villages, castles and so on as imagemaps. Students could click on different areas and read details about who lived there.

I dropped the graphical aspect because I could not find a set of pictures that were convincing and consistent, so the lecture is only plain text. It invites exploration from the beginning, because the student has choices from the very first page. For example, by following the link about the clergy, the student can learn about monks. And from the page about monasticism, he can learn about particular types of monasteries.

The experiment hasn't worked very well yet because I'm only now beginning to understand how it ought to work. While some students said they liked the format, others pointed out that they had to work extra hard to be sure they had read all the pages. They naturally assumed that reading all the medieval society pages was required, and with no clear sequence to follow, this could be a real challenge.

I intend to try a different approach next semester. At the front of the Medieval Society lecture will be some questions (e.g., what role did a monastery play in the life of a village?). Some might be required, others optional. The student would then enter the pages with particular questions in mind and could leave when he felt he had answered them. He would know from the start he didn't have to read every page, but he might likewise find that additional reading helped him answer the question better. The real aim is that he would learn in discussion that others reading the same material reached different conclusions.

The important lesson here is not whether linear is better than webbed. So many variables enter into the equation - the personality and tastes of the teacher, the constraints of the discipline and subject matter, the technology itself, the type of students, and so on - that one cannot reach general conclusions. The important lesson is that a form works best with a conscious pedagogy underpinning it. We are simply putting content on the Web, we are putting it there in a particular form. And, even more important, we ask the students to address that content in particular ways.

D. The basics: consistency, clarity, navigability, speed
A hundred articles are readily available, both on the Net and in print, on the basics of good Web design. Many of those articles concern the construction of a commercial site, with an emphasis on marketing and customer relations. While every page at HY101 is in a sense an advertisement, since prospective students decide whether they want to take my course in part on the quality of the content they find, the more fundamental design goal within a given lecture is to aid in comprehension.

Consider a representative lecture: the one, for example, on the Black Death. All the pages within the lecture have the same layout elements. A consistent background, standard placement of buttons, titles and content, and a page count, all let the student know that she is still "in" the lecture. This means the material she is reading is "important" in the same sense that she knows in a live class that the lecture being spoken is important.

The lecture title is always at the top of the page, but underneath that is a title for that particular page. This serves as a kind of gloss on the text, but it also serves to break up the content the same way that sub-heads do in print. Also at the top of the page is a "Page x of y" banner that lets the student know exactly how far into the lecture she is and how far it is to the end. That student's time is valuable; using this kind of page numbering helps her make decisions about how to spend that time.

Next comes the content. If the page goes more than three paragraphs, I will usually add some embedded sub-heads, to help break up the text a bit. If pictures or other media elements are vital to the narrative, I make an external link to them.

Below the content are navigation buttons: ToC, Previous, and Next. In some lectures, the buttons appear both at the top and the bottom, but I am migrating all to appear at the bottom only. The redundancy does not affect file transfer time, since the buttons are cached, but on many pages the surfeit of buttons gives the page a cluttered look.

Every page has a ToC button because the student should be able to get out of a lecture quickly - as readily as closing a physical book. The ToC button takes the student to the Table of Contents for that lecture, from where she is one click away either from the Classroom and its links to the syllabus and to other lectures, or from the Supplemental Readings page at the "end" of the lecture, in case she wants to explore that. This ability to navigate to almost any point with only three or four mouse clicks is one reason why students like my site. It literally makes it more comprehensible.

On the first page of the lecture, the Previous button returns the student to the Table of Contents. I keep the button there mainly for consistency of layout. On the last page of the lecture, though, I deliberately change the layout. There is no Next button there, only Previous and ToC. In place of the Next button I put the word "End." This is plain text, not hyperlinked, thus serving to notify the student that the lecture is over.

At the very bottom of every page is owner information. The mailto link lets people contact me quickly if they find a mistake or have a question about a page. The horizontal rule above reinforces visually that the material below is qualitatively different from the material above. This is the only place within the lectures where I use horizontal rules.

At the "front" of every lecture is the Table of Contents. Clicking on any lecture title brings the student not to the lecture itself but to this Table of Contents page. As with a book, the Table of Contents serves as an outline of the material. Each entry in the Table is linked to the individual lecture pages, so if a student has read only the first six pages, those will show up on her return in the visited link color - a kind of bookmark showing how far she has read. The Table of Contents is also very helpful for reviewing the material, allowing the student to move quickly to a particular section of the lecture.

Other pages at the site keep a similar layout. The navigational buttons are always top left; owner information is always at the bottom of the screen, under a horizontal rule; and the content is always between these two. I do use pictures on the Study Unit pages - this is mainly marketing, for these are pages that a prospective student will encounter fairly early in a visit and I want to make a good impression.

I use backgrounds to identify main areas of the site: one background that I use only on the splash page, one background used for all lectures, another for administrative pages, and yet another for primary sources in the Supplemental Readings. This is so students can tell when they're reading something local and when they're reading something at another site. It also gives them visual cues as they move from one type of information to another within the site.

E. How Much is Enough?
There are about eighteen lectures at HY101. Why that many? Because that's about how many lectures were in my live course. I could add more, of course, an infinite number more, but the students only get three credits and I have to keep the workload comparable. What if I were creating a course that I had never taught live? For which I had no existing lecture notes? How much material would be appropriate? This is a bit like asking how many required books is a fair workload - the answer will vary from one teacher to the next, though the answers will fall mainly in a narrow range. I regard the content pages as a kind of book. Each screen page runs around 200 words, so the typical 20-page lecture is around 4,000 words. Fifteen lectures therefore come in at about 60,000 words, which is in the same neighborhood as a 200-page book. I figure I could double the size of my content and still not have an excessive workload for the students.

I have hesitated to write more lectures, however, because I felt I had no good guide for what those lectures should be. This cuts to the very heart of pedagogy, for it brings up the question of what ought to be taught. In my discipline, especially at the introductory level, we seek to teach both content and method: content, in that any student needs a sense of the general outlines of European history, if nothing else in order to serve as a platform for further inquiry; method, in that history has a set of values and methodologies that we regard as universally important. Within those general parameters, it doesn't much matter whether I mention the Visigoths in passing or devote a whole lecture to them, and similarly for hundreds of other topics.

After having taught this course for five semesters, the students themselves have set the agenda for expansion. In the discussions I find that certain questions seem to come up over and over, and certain misunderstandings seem to be constant. Slavery in the ancient world always catches someone's attention. They frequently misunderstand Greek democracy. The whole notion of heresy is alien to them and requires much explaining. In short, the students have been compiling for me a set of FAQs, which becomes the starting point for my additional lectures. These are not topics I would have chosen myself, but they are significant topics and ones that will certainly fit well in the overall structure of the course.

F. Possibilities
All that having been said, I remain fascinated by other possibilities. I have already discussed one, my lecture on medieval society, but this is a very limited attempt.

In the future, I see potential in computer games - not in the game format itself, but in the underlying design principles. A good computer game needs no manual. The player learns what is expected and how to achieve it through the process of playing the game itself; that is, the game teaches the player about itself, and certain types of games even have multiple things to teach, depending on decisions made by the player. This feels close to certain kinds of educational objectives.

The chief difference is in the treatment of time. The whole logic behind the game interface is to add hours, to prolong the game, whereas a student wants to move through the information as quickly as possible. Still, that motive stems mainly from the semester-driven structure of accredited universities. Teaching to other types of populations might permit a more leisurely approach.

I envision some sort of information space (I think immediately of VRML, but the information can be in flat space just as well) into which students would venture with a common set of questions. Each student would find his own path to his own answers, then would share his findings with the other students. Yes, I know, this is called going to the library and writing a paper, but the information space would be crafted by a single hand--the teacher's hand. And the students would not write a formal paper, but would simply talk it over. The dynamic would center on discussion and debate, not around presentation. I have separate assignments for formal exposition.

Besides the game interface, I have not seen models that seem appropriate to my field. Tutorials and other mastery-oriented designs will not work. We master skills (e.g., a foreign language) in order to begin to do history. Nor do I find use in simulations or role-playing, because these focus the student not on what did happen but on what never happened, which seems a peculiar agenda for a historian.

In summary, I have found the on-line lecture format (or, if you prefer, on-line essay) to be effective and adaptable. It has been well suited to my students, to me as a teacher, and to the medium of the Web. Most importantly, the conciseness of the form, its ability to focus one's attention on a particular topic, serves well the overall goal of helping to create a community of learners.

III. THE STUDY UNIT

The study unit is a higher level of abstraction. At various points through the course, you are going to administer exams. These form the natural divisions for the course and correspond to the basic unit of student time: when is the next assignment due? We want to give an exam over some body of information that is logically related. By creating a page that links the lectures, study questions, exams, and so on, we let the student know about this larger structure.

A history course often will use chronology to make these divisions, and mine follows that tradition. I have three study units--the Ancient World, the Middle Ages, and Early Modern Europe. One paper and one exam coincide with each unit.

When the student clicks on the Classroom link, the first thing she sees is a page that clearly shows these three sections. Entering any of the three, she will find the lectures, study questions and other material related to that unit. Everything she needs to consider is plainly put in one place, so she doesn't have to guess at what's expected.

Notice that the emphasis here is on the material itself. In my live courses, I see now, the syllabus always focused on the physicality of the course, on class meetings and the progress of the weeks. My study units, on the other hand, could readily adapt to a different time frame, as I hope some day to be able to do (fifteen weeks is not enough time!).

A second effect of this structure is that it is easy to maintain. Adding or removing information is a simple matter of adding or removing links.

Structure and consistency: these are characteristic of my content pages. This makes my pages navigable, so students concentrate on the content and not on the interface. The pages are pleasing to the eye and unobtrusive, so students have a pleasurable experience. The hierarchy reassures students by making it clear when they are entering and leaving areas. This all helps create a sense of a place the students enjoy visiting and find rewarding, and they bring that sentiment into the discussion, the life-blood of the course. Were the pages confusing or annoying, the students would instead bring those sentiments to the discussion!

Finally, a structured, linear and documented set of lectures benefits the community in another way, one that I find particularly gratifying. Students frequently cite my Web pages in the course of their discussion. They do this not to impress me, nor to impress one another, but because my pages lend themselves to citation. The students quickly discover that they must cite page numbers if they are going to talk to one another about content. Thus they learn from very early on why scholars cite their sources. Because all my pages are numbered, it is very easy for them to reference a particular remark. They certainly could cite the full URL, but it's clumsier. By making my lectures easy to cite, I make it easy for the students to talk over a common experience, reinforcing the sense of common activity.

The content pages are by far the most interesting aspect of creating a teaching Web site. The interplay between the material, the technology, the teacher, and the students, provides a rich ground for reflection. Each of us, I believe, will have to come to our own conclusions and reach our own style. That style will still reflect us and our disciplines, but it will also be different from the way we teach in a live classroom.

IV. ADMINISTRATIVE PAGES

Administrative pages are more important than might first appear. Students who come to my virtual class don't have the benefit of all the cues that aid students in a live class. This is really evident in the few students I get who are Net veterans. Already familiar with the peculiar rhetoric of asynchronous discussion, and comfortable with turning to the Net for answers to questions, they need only learn the local rules. Most students, however, are pretty new to it all and need lots of guidance and plenty of reassurance. They exhibit many of the same anxieties as the student who returns to campus after twenty years to pursue a degree. They don't know what's expected, how to act, or whether they are going to be able to manage it all. It is amazingly easy to spook these students.

Once students decide they might want to take my course, their focus moves from the lectures to the syllabus and to the registration information. They are intrigued and interested, but now they start asking the hard questions: what's expected of me, how is all this actually going to work and will I be able to manage, and what do I do next?

The registration area must be procedure oriented. Students need a step-by-step checklist so they know when they have actually registered. It is also important that they feel they can talk to a specific person if they have problems or questions. The process might be highly automated or, as it is at my campus, it might be nothing more than some on-line guides to what is still a manual process of registration.

Along with registration information, students look to the syllabus to answer their fundamental questions. The syllabi for my physical classes were simple affairs that listed assignments, grading, required texts, and not much more. My on-line syllabus is more ambitious because I can take far less for granted.

As with the lecture, I found it useful to realize that "the syllabus" doesn't need to be a single document, and to think about it in terms of what functions it served. I need to communicate how the students will be graded. They are taking the class for credit and this is a primary question, so they need to see the assignments themselves, the weight each assignment carries, due dates, and some indication of evaluation criteria. Closely related is information on any required physical books or on-line resources they must have.

Students need to know the rules of the classroom and university policies that relate to those rules (e.g., plagiarism). Many need to be told how an on-line discussion works and the common rules of netiquette that apply. I also have found they appreciate tips on searching the Net. All these topics I have lumped into something called the Study Guide. The Guide also contains technical information: what computer resources the student will need, how they will submit assignments and in what format, and so on.

A new addition to the Study Guide is samples of student work. Enough students have asked for examples of an A paper or an A exam that I finally provided one last semester, and a number of them expressed appreciation. This is the sort of thing that is logistically difficult to provide in a physical course, but is trivial to add to a Web site.

Good design and structure here serve the same purpose as good design and structure over in the content area: students come to the class with a common understanding of how the course will work, so the class gets off to a good start. Without this, it can literally be weeks before the class settles down, and whole topics get lost or poorly studied. We need not only to create a community; we need to try as best we can to make sure that community is happy and productive.

V. CONCLUSION

It cannot be repeated too many times: a university education is centered on the community of scholars. There are other forms of learning, true enough, but they are not academic learning, and that particular form has proved valuable and valued. Any attempt to teach on-line needs to create that sense of community.

Although a Web site is relatively static, it plays an important part in creating and sustaining the community of a given class. This is because the Web site does more than deliver content, it delivers content in a particular way, the sub-text of which communicates powerfully with the student. The site is an expression of the individual teacher, is uniquely personal and unreproducable.

Content can take many forms on a Web site; indeed, the nature of hypertext invites non-linear presentations, but the old-fashioned lecture format is still viable. In fact, a linear narrative that is well-designed actually fits the Web well and is welcomed by the students, and so is sufficiently strong to serve as the foundation for an entire course.

The best way to have your Web site help create a community of scholars--that is, an on-line classroom--is to start with the content. There is simply no substitute for providing a rich body of information for the students to work. But don't stop there. The format, design and presentation of the content are too important to neglect.

Putting a course online is both exhausting and exhilarating. Translating an existing course to the Web is as much work as developing a course from scratch (including all the research time) and another half again. An estimate I saw from a teacher in Utah said seven hundred hours, to which I say: yes, at least that much. But nothing in fifteen years of teaching has been so rewarding, and given how much I've enjoyed those years of teaching, that's a considerable amount of reward.

As a final comment, I offer a dictum I've developed as I have watched the Web grow: those enterprises succeed on the Net which best conform to the Net. Since the Net is generally open, I have made my course material public. Following the odd marketing logic of the Net, by giving away the content, I attract paying customers who want the added value I offer. Put another way: the information is free, but the teaching costs money. Not only does this approach fit in with the spirit of the Internet, it fits in with the best traditions of Western education.