Guest editorial
Learning with the World Wide Web

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Problems with Current Online Learning

Online learning generally refers to learning segments available over the Internet through World Wide Web sites. Mostly, these sites try to imitate what happens in formal institutions today, so they have all the flaws of current courses. Typically, the development begins with an existing course, taught in a lecture format at a university. Little in the way of support for developing a course is available, except possibly some part-time help for creating the Web page. Or the university runs

A New Learning System

We need to look at new methods for learning that will allow us to solve these problems at a reasonable cost. I believe that modern interactive technology provides such methods. This section concerns this possibility. Recent articles have discussed these methods. The article in the EDUCAUSE Review issue of January/February 2000 about this is at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~bork.

We first discuss a new paradigm for learning. Most learning, including the examples mentioned so far, is based on seeing

Tutorial Learning on the World Wide Web

I know of no Web-based course that follows the tutorial learning paradigm. But such approaches seem possible. Two steps are needed.

First, such courses must be designed. This is a much more detailed procedure than the “one instructor plus help” mentioned above. So it will be more expensive and time-consuming. I do not believe that effective well-evaluated tutorial courses can be developed for less than a million dollars. This figure is derived from examining curriculum development costs, with

Costs

As indicated, development cost for computer-based tutorial distance learning courses will be much higher than most universities are accustomed to. But the critical cost is cost for a student's hour of learning. This depends on costs for development, costs for delivery, costs for administration (if any), and the number of students using the units. This brings us back to our original quote from Kofi Annan. We have a very large number of students who need to learn. So, the cost per student could

Questions

We are left with many questions. Here are some of them.

  • 1.

    Who will fund the development of several extensive experiments in tutorial computer-based learning, and the careful evaluation of these units?

  • 2.

    How will we fund the full development to follow if the experiments are successful?

  • 3.

    What new organizational structures are needed to support tutorial learning?

  • 4.

    How can we reach very poor people with learning? How can we reach underprivileged people?

  • 5.

    How can we use learning to address major world problems,

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