16.26 web use is an experiment in use of the web as an efficient supplemental resource. Browsing the material here, you will see problem sets, solved problems, supplemental notes, schedules... the stuff of an entirely traditional engineering course. This sort of use is considered by some to be lame, but here is entirely intentional - for an advanced graduate course the traditional format is entirely appropriate and desirable.

The web, along with email, increases our reach quite a bit, however. We find the instant availability of a complete (well, not quite, we missed the earliest problem sets) resource set from any computer in the institute to be a minor convenience for the graduate students; it is more significant (saving a hour or so...) for our off-campus guest students, an audience that is small but a current target. At least conceptually, the use of this format along with videotaped or cable broadcast lectures gives us worldwide reach in a traditional style.

The other key to the experiment is the ease of use for the staff. The time invested in these pages was not efficiently spent; a typical problem set took 30 min- hour more work to format for the web (mostly on mundane tasks such as formatting, ftp-ing the files to our server, etc..). Long answer sets were worse, with a few minutes per page for scanning, and several hours setting up the pages, copying in various material and setting up the links. Some minor savings were realized-less copier time, less time answering repeated questions on days between classes, and somewhat less time spent spiffing up the material- copier material would have to have been hand cut-and-pasted, or reworked, in cases where these pages were fixed up using image editing software. Still, in a sense the experiment failed- this is not the best way, right now, to distribute material for an on-campus course.

We are encouraged nevertheless. The time spent setting up a typical answer sheet page seems to be roughly halving every year, due mostly to improved software- we use Adobe Pagemill for the pages, and Photoshop to scan and clean up handwritten material- a huge improvement over battling HTML by hand. Plots and drawings are cut-and-paste importable from every drawing or graphing program we have tried, without difficulty. There is also a learning curve effect- it gets easier fast. Another generation of software and the copier/web time difference may well disappear, allowing us to justify this style even on-campus; the exciting thing about it is that it potentially frees the course from the physical constraints of campus without changing the (entirely desirable, in our humble opinion) content or feel of it.

Everything here is open to your inspection and scholarly use, but it is all copyright MIT and Hugh L. McManus, 1997; any commercial use (including non-trivial use in a tuition-charging course) requires permission, and any material copied or transmitted from here by any means must have this notice attached.