A course Web page can be whatever you want, from the very simple to the highly complex. A course Web page could be a fairly static document, similar to the syllabus or schedule typically distributed at the first class meeting. It could be a respository for the learning materials used in the course: simulations, readings, interactive quizzes, and so on. The following may help you develop some ideas on what you might like your page to become. The links to examples take you to actual MIT course Web pages.
The Web is an easy way to make class materials available to students; for example, course handouts, syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, promotional or recruitment information. This also makes it easy for students considering a class to get an idea of what the course covers before they enroll. It is not, however, necessarily a way to save trees.
Forget the paperless society (or classroom): students want tangible paper copies of important class materials - even as they use the Web! Long documents that you put on your Web pages you should also make available on paper; otherwise, students go ahead and print them out. In the Athena clusters, this means longer waits (as students trying to print term papers must wait on colleagues printing out book chapters), and increased costs due to wear and tear on the printers (more expensive than photocopiers). Do not think that Web publishing is going to eliminate your copying costs. You should still distribute paper copies of any substantive reading material that you consider vital for your students to have. (The MIT Copy Technology Centers can help with your printing needs.)
Examples:
Introduction to Aerospace
Engineering and Design
Experimental
Physics I (Junior Lab)
Most faculty have difficulty finding the "perfect" textbook that covers exactly what they want to teach. Faculty will often select chapters from different books, requiring students to purchase them all, even though only a chapter or two is used in class. Some faculty get around this by using the Web to customize a regular textbook: they create Web pages to complement or expand upon chapters or ideas in the book. This is referred to as creating "wrapper material" for the book.
Try not to create Web materials of the same length and density as a textbook. Reading lengthy primary material on a computer screen becomes tiresome. Present the related Web material in short pages and paragraphs, and your students will find it more useful.
A related approach is an interactive textbook. This combines the normal text and illustrations with more specialized items such as animations, self-test quizzes, and mechanisms for feedback. Not only can this enliven course material, but it can also increase early contact with your students. Many faculty report that shy or over-scheduled students are more likely to seek assistance by clicking the "Mail the prof" link on a page than by coming to office hours. Those same students tend to increase their in-person dealings with the instructor, once the ice is broken electronically.
Examples:
The MIT
Biology Hypertextbook
World Web Math
One of the best features of the Web is the ability to use multimedia to present concepts that are difficult or impossible to teach without demonstration or experience. For example, a physics or chemistry course might spend the majority of class time on mathematical formulae, but students may not grasp exactly what a particular equation means. Web pages with links to animations of field lines or simulations of reactions can help students understand the point being made in class.
Examples:
Biological Signal
and Image Processing
Introduction to Solid State
Chemistry
Another strong suit of Web multimedia is to present simulations of what might otherwise be too dangerous, awkward, or expensive to do in a classroom. The networked, hypertext capabilities of the Web provide an ideal way to develop and distribute such material on a large scale.
Can't afford to take your class to Peru to research Inca antiquities? Put a series of Quicktime VR (Virtual Reality) movies on a Web page so the students can gain an appreciation of the temples and Andean terrain. Do students procrastinate about going to the library to view the slide collection you've put on reserve? Scan the slides and make them available from your Web page (thus invalidating the excuse that the library was closed or someone else was hogging the materials). You can even restrict access to the materials so that only MIT users can view them.
Examples:
A virtual tour of the MIT
campus
Italian
Renaissance Architecture (restricted to MIT campus
users)
The Faculty Liaisons in Academic Computing Support (ACS) (x3-0115, f_l@mit.edu) are here to assist you. You can also look at what your colleagues have done, either through the above examples or through the ACS inventory of educational Web sites at MIT. Note that the inventory page lists only those sites whose owners have requested inclusion.