3.5 WEB-BASED EDUCATION

Distance and web-based education has received increasing attention in recent years in Europe, specially United Kingdom, North America, and East Asia. Distance education potentially provides opportunities

• to educate students in remote areas without ready access to academic institutions,
• to offer continuing education courses to company employees at their sites without them having to leave the company and lose productivity due to commuting and work interruption, and
• to supplement the conventional classroom teaching.

Until recently distance education was based on exploiting the communication media such as the closed-circuit television, videotaped lectures, and audio-conferencing with extremely limited interaction between students and the instructor and peer students. The recent resurgence of the World Wide Web (WWW or the web for short) and the Internet technologies has provided fresh opportunities for effective distance learning and education. Compared with the traditional distance learning approaches of 1970’s and 1980’s the Internet provides two significant advantages. First, it provides a powerful and fast mechanism for interaction between the instructor and students. Second, students can have easy and instant access to a wealth of information through numerous on-line libraries and web sites.

The web can be used three different ways as an educational tool (Barrie and Presti, 1996). The first use of the web is to simply access information on the web itself such as the electronic academic journals available on the web. For example, the Electronic Journal Center of OhioLink (http://journals.ohiolink.edu/etext) provides a web-based service that delivers the contents of scientific and technical journals to end users via a web browser.

The second way is offering a course or a complete degree program on the web. For example, Open University in the United Kingdom (http://www.open.ac.uk) and University On-Line (http://www.online.edu) and CALCampus (http://calcampus.com) in the U.S. are providing regular university-level courses through the web. Lectures are recorded on video and then converted into special graphic files so that they can be replayed through a web browser. Current state of technology is still arguably too limited in terms of speed of transmission and bandwidth to make the total replacement of the conventional classroom viable.

The third and probably at this time the most attractive way of utilizing the web is to use it as an aid to the conventional classroom instructions. There are already a number of examples in this category such as

• http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/mcb/165_001: Developed at the University of California at Berkeley this project provides supplementary materials for the Molecular Neurobiology and Neurochemistry course.
• http://philae.sas.upenn.edu: Developed at the University of Pennsylvania this project provides a Virtual Media Language Lab on the web helping students to learn foreign languages.
• http://vizlab.beckman.uiuc.edu/chickscope: Developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana this project teaches K-12 students virtual experimentation by remote instruments such as using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to demonstrate egg-to-chick embryology (Bruce et al., 1997).
• http://www.med.umn.edu/ISAP: Developed at the University of Minnesota this project provides self-assessment in Pharmacology (Konstan et al., 1997) .
• http://www.eerc.berkeley.edu/bertero/index.html: Developed at University of California at Berkeley, this site provides slides with commentary on damage due to earthquakes that can be used to complement a course on earthquake engineering.

We submit that distance education on the web cannot fully replace the live face-to-face classroom instructions for design courses at least for the foreseeable future. But, it can be used as an effective tool to supplement classroom instructions. In that context, web-based education provides the following advantages and opportunities:

• Richer learning environment through easy access to a very large and growing number of on-line resources,
• Access to more up-to-date course materials,
• Flexible learning environment (students have more flexibility in scheduling their study time and can spend more time on the subjects they consider difficult),
• More opportunities for students with special needs such as physical impairment or language problem (for example, for students not quite fluent in English)

It must be noted that the web-based education is still limited in providing interactivity and communication.